'I mean the sea. The ocean. You know. Waves.'
'I've heard about it. Is anyone chasing us?'
Teppic turned in the saddle. 'Not that I can make out,' he said. 'It looks as-'
From here he could see past the long, low bulk of the palace and across the river to the Great Pyramid itself. It was almost hidden in dark clouds, but what he could see of it was definitely wrong. He knew it had four sides, and he could see all eight of them.
It seemed to be moving in and out of focus, which he felt instinctively was a dangerous thing for several million tons of rock to do. He felt a pressing urge to be a long way away from it. Even a dumb creature like the camel seemed to have the same idea.
You Bastard was thinking: . . Delta squared. Thus, dimensional pressure k will result in a ninety-degree transformation in Chi(16/x/pu)t for a K-bundle of any three invariables. Or four minutes, plus or minus ten seconds
The camel looked down at the great pads of his feet.
Let speed equal gallop.
'How did you make it do that?' said Teppic.
'I didn't! It's doing it by itself! Hang on!'
This wasn't easy. Teppic had saddled the camel but neglected the harness. Ptraci had handfuls of camel hair to hang on to. All he had was handfuls of Ptraci. No matter where he tried to put his hands, they encountered warm, yielding flesh. Nothing in his long education had prepared him for this, whereas everything in Ptraci's obviously had. Her long hair whipped his face and smelled beguilingly of rare perfume.[23]
'Are you all right?' he shouted above the wind.
'I'm hanging on with my knees!'
'That must be very hard!'
'You get special training!'
Camels gallop by throwing their feet as far away from them as possible and then running to keep up. Knee joints clicking like chilly castanets, You Bastard thrashed up the sloping road out of the valley and windmilled along the narrow gorge that led, under towering limestone cliffs, to the high desert beyond.
And behind them, tormented beyond measure by the inexorable tide of geometry, unable to discharge its burden of Time, the Great Pyramid screamed, lifted itself off its base and, its bulk swishing through the air as unstoppably as something completely unstoppable, ground around precisely ninety degrees and did something perverted to the fabric of time and space.
You Bastard sped along the gorge, his neck stretched out to its full extent, his mighty nostrils flaring like jet intakes.
'It's terrified!' Ptraci yelled. 'Animals always know about this sort of thing!'
'What sort of thing!'
'Forest fires and things!'
'We haven't got any trees!'
'Well, floods and - and things! They've got some strange natural instinct!'
. . . Phi* 1700[u/v]. Lateral e/v. Equals a tranche of seven to twelve . . .
The sound hit them. It was as silent as a dandelion clock striking midnight, but it had pressure. It rolled over them, suffocating as velvet, nauseating as a battered saveloy.
And was gone.
You Bastard slowed to a walk, a complicated procedure that involved precise instructions to each leg in turn.
There was a feeling of release, a sense of stress withdrawn. You Bastard stopped. In the pre-dawn glow he'd spotted a clump of thorned syphacia bushes growing in the rocks by the track.
. . angle left. x equals 37. y equals 19. z equals 43. Bite . . .
Peace descended. There was no sound except for the eructations of the camel's digestive tract and the distant warbling of a desert owl.