Category Archives: Book

Title: Wyrd Sisters
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1988
Publisher: Victor Gollancz

Why in Database: In the sixth book of the Discworld, turtles appear three times, each time in the form of a different reference. The first is the most standard, about A’Tuin:

Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.

Second mention is a turtle which Magrat took/bought as her pet:

“That makes fifteen this year,” said Granny. “Not counting the horse. What’s this one?”
“It’s a rock,” chuckled Nanny Ogg.
“Well, at least it should last,” said Granny.
The rock extended a head and gave her a look of mild amusement.
“It’s a tortoise,” said Magrat. “I bought it down in Sheep-ridge market. It’s incredibly old and knows many secrets, the man said.”
“I know that man,” said Granny. “He’s the one who sells goldfish that tarnish after a day or two.”
“Anyway, I shall call him Lightfoot,” said Magrat, her voice warm with defiance. “I can if I want.”

The third and last reference is a scenic one, a turtle appears in a military-combat context when staging a theater play:

“Thou babblest, man. See how I dodge thy tortoise spear. I said, see how I dodge thy tortoise spear. Thy spear, man. You’re holding it in thy bloody hand, for goodness’ sake.”

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Sourcery
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1988
Publisher: Victor Gollancz in association with Colin Smythe

Why in Database: Typically, in Sourcery, as in the previous four volumes of Discworld, we have several turtle elements, all of them we describes below. At the beginning we have some informaton about how discworld looks like, and of course a description of A’Tuin:

There was no analogy for the way in which Great A’Tuin the world turtle moved against the galactic night. When you are ten thousand miles long, your shell pocked with meteor craters and frosted with comet ice, there is absolutely nothing you can realistically be like except yourself.
So Great A’Tuin swam slowly through the interstellar deeps like the largest turtle there has ever been, carrying on its carapace the four huge elephants that bore on their backs the vast, glittering waterfall-fringed circle of the Discworld, which exists either because of some impossible blip on the curve of probability or because the gods enjoy a joke as much as anyone.

Later, A’Tuin is also mentioned as a possible cause of Discworld trembling:

“I’m sure I felt the building shaking, too,” said Rincewind, a shade uncertainly. Here in this quiet room, with the fire crackling in the grate, it didn’t seem quite so real.
“A passing tremor. Great A’Tuin hiccuping, um, possibly.”

In one of the footnotes (in which Pratchett’s books are rich) there is an unusual description of the Chimera:

It hath thee legges of a mermade, the hair of a tortoyse, thee teethe of a fowle, and the wings of a snake. Of course I have only my worde for it, thee beast having the breathe of a furnace and the temperament of a rubber balloon in a hurricane.

The Discworld is not all about A’Tuin, we also have here a mention of ordinary turtles, escaping from luggage:

Down below the panic on the roads the Luggage paddled slowly up one of the reed-lined drainage ditches. A little way ahead of it a moving wave of small alligators, rats and snapping turtles was pouring out of the water and scrambling frantically up the bank, propelled by some vague but absolutely accurate animal instinct.

Towards the end, a single mention of A’Tuin appears again:

He jerked to his feet again and strode to the simulacrum of the world. The image was perfect in every detail, down to a ghost of Great A’Tuin paddling slowly through the interstellar deeps a few inches above the floor.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Mort
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1987
Publisher: Victor Gollancz in association with Colin Smythe

Why in Database: In the fourth book of the Discworld series, the turtle motif appears six times, once in the form of a reference to ordinary turtles and five times in the form of references to A’Tuin.
The first two references are at the very beginning, during describing the key character of this book, Death:

But not any Death. This is the Death whose particular sphere of operations is, well, not a sphere at all, but the Discworld, which is flat and rides on the back of four giant elephants who stand on the shell of the enormous star turtle Great A’Tuin, and which is bounded by a waterfall that cascades endlessly into space.

The steady gaze from those twinkling eye sockets encompasses the world turtle, sculling through the deeps of space, carapace scarred by comets and pitted by meteors. One day even Great A’Tuin will die, Death knows; now, that would be a challenge.

Next turtle reference is non-A’Tuin, it is in the description of Princess Keli’s actions:

She took a chicken leg from the table in the biggest kitchen, a cavern lined with so many pots that by the light of its fires it looked like an armory for tortoises, and felt the unfamiliar thrill of theft.

In the next reference, Mort is compared to A’Tuin by the narrator:

Mort didn’t return it. Instead he turned and plodded towards the door, at a general speed and gait that made Great A’Tuin look like a spring lamb.

The last two turtles are also about the Mort, in the first he explains to Albert what he knows about the construction of the discworld, in the second he visits Death’s office:

“I know the Disc is carried through space on the backs of four elephants that stand on the shell of Great A’Tuin,” said Mort.

He turned on his heel and stalked back into Death’s study. There was a large disc of the world in one corner, complete down to solid silver elephants standing on the back of a Great A’Tuin cast in bronze and more than a meter long.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Equal Rites
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1987
Publisher: Victor Gollancz in association with Colin Smythe

Why in Database: As will be the case many times with the discworld books, A’tuin appears right at the beginning, with an interesting reference to Star Wars:

Then it comes into view overhead, bigger than the biggest, most unpleasantly armed starcruiser in the imagination of a three-ring filmmaker: a turtle, ten thousand miles long. It is Great A’Tuin, one of the rare astrochelonians from a universe where things are less as they are and more like people imagine them to be, and it carries on its meteor-pocked shell four giant elephants who bear on their enormous shoulders the great round wheel of the Discworld.

Another mention of A’Tuin:

That wasn’t poetic imagery but plain fact, since the world was quite definitely flat and was, furthermore, known to be carried through space on the backs of four elephants that in turn stood on the shell of Great A’Tuin, the Great Sky Turtle.

For a change, turtle mention is more neutral – it is about fact, that the quilt does not look like a quilt:

(…) since he wasn’t much good at sewing either, the result was a rather strange lumpy thing more like a flat tortoise than a quilt (…)

Later, A’tuin appears again, in the form of an illumination/projection that is created by one of the heroes, at the university:

That was quite clear, although the glitter and rush of the little lights blurred some of the detail. But there was Great A’Tuin the sky turtle, with the four Elephants on its back, and on them the Disc itself. There was the sparkle of the great waterfall around the edge of the world, and there at the very hub a tiny needle of rock that was the great mountain Cori Celesti, where the gods lived.

Once again, A’tuin is mentioned when Esk wanders out of her body and wonders whether or not to borrow a great turtle’s mind (Granny Weatherwax taught her the ability to borrow animal minds), but she decides, that it’s a bad idea:

It also lit up Great A’Tuin the World Turtle. Esk had often wondered if the Turtle was really a myth. It seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to move a world. But there It was, almost as big as the Disc It carried, frosted with stardust and pocked with meteor craters.
Its head passed in front of her and she looked directly into an eye big enough to float all the fleets in the world. She had heard it said that if you could look far enough into the direction that Great A’Tuin was staring, you would see the end of the universe. Maybe it was just the set of Its beak, but Great A’Tuin looked vaguely hopeful, even optimistic. Perhaps the end of everything wasn’t as bad as all that.
Dreamlike, she reached out and tried to Borrow the biggest mind in the universe.
She stopped herself just in time, like a child with a toy toboggan who expected a little gentle slope and suddenly looks out of the magnificent mountains, snow-covered, stretching into the icefields of infinity. No one would ever Borrow that mind, it would be like trying to drink all the sea. The thoughts that moved through it were as big and as slow as glaciers.

The last mention is when the main character is in other dimension than the discworld, and there she sees the entire discworld with A’Tuin, etc., locked in a glass pyramid:

He was holding a small glass pyramid. There were stars in it, and occasionally he would give it a little shake so that the stars swirled up like snow in the wind, and then settled back in their places. Then he would giggle.
And beyond the stars…
It was the Discworld. A Great A’Tuin no bigger than a small saucer toiled along under a world that looked like the work of an obsessive jeweler.

Jak widać, jest parę wzmianek o żółwiu, choć mniej niż w poprzednich tomach, gdzie jego natura była bardziej przybliżona.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Light Fantastic
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1986
Publisher: Colin Smythe

Why in Database: In the second Discworld book, we have even more fragments with A’Tuin that in first one! At the very beginning we have some info about A’Tuin:

Of course, no other world was carried through the starry infinity on the backs of four giant elephants, who were themselves perched on the shell of a giant turtle. His name—or Her name, according to another school of thought—was Great A’Tuin; he—or, as it might be, she—will not take a central role in what follows but it is vital to an understanding of the Disc that he—or she—is there, down below the mines and sea ooze and fake fossil bones put there by a Creator with nothing better to do than upset archaeologists and give them silly ideas.
Great A’Tuin the star turtle, shell frosted with frozen methane, pitted with meteor craters, and scoured with asteroidal dust. Great A’Tuin, with eyes like ancient seas and a brain the size of a continent through which thoughts moved like little glittering glaciers. Great A’Tuin of the great slow sad flippers and star-polished carapace, laboring through the galactic night under the weight of the Disc. As large as worlds. As old as Time. As patient as a brick.
Actually, the philosophers have got it all wrong. Great A’Tuin is in fact having a great time.
Great A’Tuin is the only creature in the entire universe that knows exactly where it is going.
Of course, philosophers have debated for years about where Great A’Tuin might be going, and have often said how worried they are that they might never find out.
They’re due to find out in about two months. And then they’re really going to worry…
Something else that has long worried the more imaginative philosopher on the Disc is the question of Great A’Tuin’s sex, and quite a lot of time and trouble has been spent in trying to establish it once and for all.
In fact, as the great dark shape drifts past like an endless tortoiseshell hairbrush, the results of the latest effort are just coming into view.

Later, Caroc cards appear in the text (this is one of two appearances of them in this book with mentioning of the turtle):

She turned up the Importance of Washing the Hands, the Eight of Octograms, the Dome of the Sky, the Pool of Night, the Four of Elephants, the Ace of Turtles, and—Rincewind had been expecting it—Death.

Luggage, one of the heroes of the book, was at some point compared to an ordinary (though dissatisfied) turtle:

As it twisted to snap at him he gritted his teeth and heaved, jerking the Luggage onto its curved lid where it rocked angrily like a maddened tortoise.

In another fragment, we learn about the “relationships” of people of discworld (mages) and A’Tuin:

“Couldn’t somebody tell Great A’Tuin to avoid it?” he said. “Sort of go around it?”
“That sort of thing has been tried before,” said Rincewind. “Wizards tried to tune in to Great A’Tuin’s mind.”
“It didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked all right,” said Rincewind. “Only…”
Only there had been certain unforeseen risks in reading a mind as great as the World Turtle’s, he explained. The wizards had trained up on tortoises and giant sea turtles first, to get the hang of the chelonian frame of mind, but although they knew that Great A’Tuin’s mind would be big they hadn’t realized that it would be slow.
“There’s a bunch of wizards that have been reading it in shifts for thirty years,” said Rincewind. “All they’ve found out is that Great A’Tuin is looking forward to something.”

Another interesting fragment:

But this shape blotting out the sky like the footfall o God isn’t a planet.
It is a turtle, ten thousand miles long from its crater-pocked head to its armored tail.
And Great A’Tuin is huge.
Great flippers rise and fall ponderously, warping space into strange shapes. The Discworld slides across the sky like a royal barge. But evenGreat A’Tuin is struggling now as it leaves the free depths of space and must fight the tormenting pressures of the solar shallows. Magic is weaker here, on the littoral of light. Many more days of this and the Discworld will be stripped away by the pressures of reality.
Great A’Tuin knows this, but Great A’Tuin can recall doing all this before, many thousands of years ago.
The astrochelonian’s eyes, glowing red in the light of the dwarf star, are not focused on it but at a little patch of space nearby…

Fragment in which tiny turtles hatch, with elephants and tiny discs on them:

Down in the geological depths of Great A’Tuin’s huge brain new thoughts surged along neural pathways the size of arterial roads. It was impossible for a sky turtle to change its expression, but in some indefinable way its scaly, meteor-pocked face looked quite expectant.
It was staring fixedly at the eight spheres endlessly orbiting around the star, on the very beaches of space.
The spheres were cracking.
Huge segments of rock broke away and began the long spiral down to the star. The sky filled with glittering shards.
From the wreakage of one hollow shell a very small sky turtle paddled its way into the red light. It was barely bigger than an asteroid, its shell still shiny with molten yolk.
There were four small world-elephant calves on there, too. And on their backs was a Discworld, tiny as yet, covered in smoke and volcanoes.
Great A’Tuin waited until all eight baby turtles had freed themselves from their shells and were treading space and looking bewildered. Then, carefully, so as not to dislodge anything, the old turtle turned and with considerable relief set out on the long swim to the blessedly cool, bottomless depths of space.
The young turtles followed, orbiting their parent.

The last fragment quoted by us (there are more fragments in total, A’Tuin is extremely important for the plot) is about how the turtle’s mood radiates on the inhabitants of the disc:

It should be pointed out that currently Great A’Tuin was very pleased and contented, and feelings like that in a brain the size of several large cities are bound to radiate out. In fact most people on the Disc were currently in a state of mind normally achievable only by a lifetime of dedicated meditation or about thirty seconds of illegal herbage.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: The Colour of Magic
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1983
Publisher: Colin Smythe

Why in Database: The first book in the series about the discworld, and since this world is very turtle (in a fundamental sense), the introduction also included turtle motifs. Anyway, if we count A’Tuin as a character (why not?), then he is the first character described in the book, he appears in the prologue:

Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A’Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.
For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex? This vital question, said the astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.
An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.

Not all turtle elements are about A’Tuin, , there are also two other mentions of turtles, the first in the context of “sea stories”:

Of course, they returned either empty-handed or not at all. Probably eaten by giant turtles, in the opinion of more serious mariners.

There is too many mentions and references to A’Tuin in the book, we do not include all of them, only the more interesting ones, such as the following two fragments:

Although the Disc’s sun is but an orbiting moonlet, its prominences hardly bigger than croquet hoops, this slight drawback must be set against the tremendous sight of Great A’Tuin the Turtle, upon Whose ancient and meteor riddled shell the Disc ultimately rests. Sometimes, in His slow journey across the shores of Infinity, He moves His country-sized head to snap at a passing comet.
But perhaps the most impressive sight of all—if only because most brains, when faced with the sheer galactic enormity of A’Tuin, refuse to believe it—is the endless Rimfall, where the seas of the Disc boil ceaselessly over the Edge into space.

“The Krullians intend to launch a bronze vessel over the edge of the Disc. Their prime purpose is to learn the sex of A’Tuin the World Turtle.”
“Seems rather pointless,” said Rincewind.
“No. Consider. One day Great A’Tuin may encounter another member of the species chelys galactica, somewhere in the vast night in which we move. Will they fight? Will they mate? A little imagination will show you that the sex of Great A’Tuin could be very important to us. At least, so the Krullians say.”
Rincewind tried not to think of World Turtles mating. It wasn’t completely easy.

In another fragment, Rincewind observes the turtles enjoying the sun:

Rincewind skidded around a corner and found himself on a balcony that ran around the four sides of a courtyard. Below them, most of the floor of the yard was taken up by an ornamental pond in which a few terrapins sunbathed among the lily leaves.

There was even an equivalent of an Earth astronaut on the disk, since their target is a turtle, they have a slightly different name:

The second chelonaut—for such was the profession of the men whose fate it would shortly be to voyage to Great A’Tuin—looked up from the chart table and watched this in puzzlement. His big heroic brow wrinkled with the effort of speech.

Author: XYuriTT

Title: Small Gods
Author(s): Terry Pratchett
Release year: 1992
Publisher: Victor Gollancz

Why in Database: In the Discworld, this book is the most turtle – A`Tuin is only mentioned a few times here (though still, more than in some of the other entries), the main “atraction” is the god Om, who resides in the bodily form of a turtle for most of the book. A lot of interesting quotes appear, below we show many of them, but there are only a small part of all “interesting turtle things”.

At the very beginning, there is an interesting description of turtles, their perspective and relationship with eagles (this will return several times in the book):

Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap…
And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.
And then the eagle lets go.
And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.
But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.
One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.

One of the “factions” in the book has turtle-related “slogan”:

– “Truth is surcease from pain, Sasho. Tell me.”
“…truth…”
Vorbis sighed. And then he saw one of Sasho’s fingers curling and uncurling under the manacles. Beckoning.
“Yes?”
He leaned closer over the body.
Sasho opened his one remaining eye. “…truth…”
“Yes?”
“…The Turtle Moves…”

The first conversation between the two main characters of the book:

He picked up his hoe and turned back, in relief, to the vines.
The hoe’s blade was about to hit the ground when Brutha saw the tortoise.
It was small and basically yellow and covered with dust. Its shell was badly chipped. It had one beady eye—the other had fallen to one of the thousands of dangers that attend any slow-moving creature which lives an inch from the ground.
He looked around. The gardens were well inside the temple complex, and surrounded by high walls.
“How did you get in here, little creature?” he said. “Did you fly?”
The tortoise stared monoptically at him. Brutha felt a bit homesick. There had been plenty of tortoises in the sandy hills back home.
“I could give you some lettuce,” said Brutha. “But I don’t think tortoises are allowed in the gardens. Aren’t you vermin?”
The tortoise continued to stare. Practically nothing can stare like a tortoise.
Brutha felt obliged to do something.
“There’s grapes,” he said. “Probably it’s not sinful to give you one grape. How would you like a grape, little tortoise?”
“How would you like to be an abomination in the nethermost pit of chaos?” said the tortoise.

More details about how Om communicates:

Brutha hesitated. It dawned on him, very slowly, that demons and succubi didn’t turn up looking like small old tortoises. There wouldn’t be much point. Even Brother Nhumrod would have to agree that when it came to rampant eroticism, you could do a lot better than a one-eyed tortoise.
“I didn’t know tortoises could talk,” he said.
“They can’t,” said the tortoise. “Read my lips.”
Brutha looked closer.
“You haven’t got lips,” he said.
“No, nor proper vocal cords,” agreed the tortoise. “I’m doing it straight into your head, do you understand?”
“Gosh!”
“You do understand, don’t you?”
“No.”
The tortoise rolled its eye.
“I should have known. Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have to waste time on gardeners. Go and fetch the top man, right now.”

Interesting reflection on whether turtles can talk:

“Turn into a mud leech and wither in the fires of retribution!” screamed the tortoise.
“There’s no need to curse,” said Brutha.
The tortoise bounced up and down furiously.
“That wasn’t a curse! That was an order! I am the Great God Om!”
Brutha blinked.
Then he said, “No you’re not. I’ve seen the Great God Om,” he waved a hand making the shape of the holy horns, conscientiously, “and he isn’t tortoise-shaped. He comes as an eagle, or a lion, or a mighty bull. There’s a statue in the Great Temple. It’s seven cubits high. It’s got bronze on it and everything. It’s trampling infidels. You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look. It’s got horns of real gold. Where I used to live there was a statue one cubit high in the next village and that was a bull too. So that’s how I know you’re not the Great God”—holy horns—“Om.”
The tortoise subsided.
“How many talking tortoises have you met?” it said sarcastically.
“I don’t know,” said Brutha.
“What d’you mean, you don’t know?”
“Well, they might all talk,” said Brutha conscientiously, demonstrating the very personal kind of logic that got him Extra Melons. “They just might not say anything when I’m there.

Standard for discworld books, some info about A’Tuin (non-standard is the fact, that this information is considered heresy):

Drunah broke the silence.
“De Chelonian Mobile,” he said aloud. “‘The Turtle Moves.’ What does that mean?”
“Even telling you could put your soul at risk of a thousand years in hell,” said Vorbis. His eyes had not left Fri’it, who was now staring fixedly at the wall.
“I think it is a risk we might carefully take,” said Drunah.
Vorbis shrugged. “The writer claims that the world…travels through the void on the back of four huge elephants,” he said.
Drunah’s mouth dropped open.
“On the back?” he said.
“It is claimed,” said Vorbis, still watching Fri’it.
“What do they stand on?”
“The writer says they stand on the shell of an enormous turtle,” said Vorbis.
Drunah grinned nervously.
“And what does that stand on?” he said.
“I see no point in speculating as to what it stands on,” snapped Vorbis, “since it does not exist!”
“Of course, of course,” said Drunah quickly. “It was only idle curiosity.”

Earlier, the identification slogan was mentioned, and now the drawing:

On one wall of the cave there was a drawing. It was vaguely oval, with three little extensions at the top—the middle one slightly the largest of the three—and three at the bottom, the middle one of these slightly longer and more pointed. A child’s drawing of a turtle.

Description of how turtles see people:

Besides, from a tortoise-eye viewpoint even the most handsome human is only a pair of feet, a distant pointy head, and, somewhere up there, the wrong end of a pair of nostrils.

A small sample of the common in this book “swearing” of Om’s (and also a culinary mention about the of turtles, also a recurring theme):

The tortoise bounced up and down.
“Smite you with thunderbolts!” it screamed.
“I find healthy exercise is the thing,” said Nhumrod. “And plenty of cold water.”
“Writhe on the spikes of damnation!”
Nhumrod reached down and picked up the tortoise, turning it over. Its legs waggled angrily.
“How did it get here, mmm?”
“I don’t know, Brother Nhumrod,” said Brutha dutifully.
“Your hand to wither and drop off!” screamed the voice in his head.
“There’s very good eating on one of these, you know,” said the master of novices. He saw the expression on Brutha’s face.
“Look at it like this,” he said. “Would the Great God Om”—holy horns—“ever manifest Himself in such a lowly creature as this? A bull, yes, of course, an eagle, certainly, and I think on one occasion a swan…but a tortoise?”
“Your sexual organs to sprout wings and fly away!”
“After all,” Nhumrod went on, oblivious to the secret chorus in Brutha’s head, “what kind of miracles could a tortoise do? Mmm?”
“Your ankles to be crushed in the jaws of giants!”
“Turn lettuce into gold, perhaps?” said Brother Nhumrod, in the jovial tones of those blessed with no sense of humor. “Crush ants underfoot? Ahaha.”
“Haha,” said Brutha dutifully.
“I shall take it along to the kitchen, out of your way,” said the master of novices. “They make excellent soup. And then you’ll hear no more voices, depend upon it. Fire cures all Follies, yes?”
“Soup?”
“Er…” said Brutha.
“Your intestines to be wound around a tree until you are sorry!”

Another piece, about unlucky turtles:

The Great God Om was upside down in a basket in one of the kitchens, half-buried under a bunch of herbs and some carrots.
An upturned tortoise will try to right itself firstly by sticking out its neck to its fullest extent and trying to use its head as a lever. If this doesn’t work it will wave its legs frantically, in case this will rock it upright.
An upturned tortoise is the ninth most pathetic thing in the entire multiverse.
An upturned tortoise who knows what’s going to happen to it next is, well, at least up there at number four.

A piece where Brutha reflects about the… symbolic meaning of the turtle:

He hoed the bean rows for the look of the thing. The Great God Om, although currently the small god Om, ate a lettuce leaf.
All my life, Brutha thought, I’ve known that the Great God Om—he made the holy horns sign in a fairly halfhearted way—was a…a…great big beard in the sky, or sometimes, when He comes down into the world, as a huge bull or a lion or…something big, anyway. Something you could look up to.
Somehow a tortoise isn’t the same. I’m trying hard…but it isn’t the same.

Interesting description of… “body language” in turtles:

Brutha stared at it. It looked embarrassed, insofar as that’s possible for a tortoise.

Om’s first encounter with another key (negative) character of the book:

“How very strange,” said Vorbis.
A hissing noise made him look around.
There was a small tortoise near his foot. As he glared, it tried to back away, and all the time it was staring at him and hissing like a kettle.
He picked it up and examined it carefully, turning it over and over in his hands. Then he looked around the walled garden until he found a spot in full sunshine, and put the reptile down, on its back. After a moment’s thought he took a couple of pebbles from one of the vegetable beds and wedged them under the shell so that the creature’s movement wouldn’t tip it over.
Vorbis believed that no opportunity to acquire esoteric knowledge should ever be lost, and made a mental note to come back again in a few hours to see how it was getting on, if work permitted.

Another interesting description of the turtle characteristics:

Om stumped along a sandy corridor.
He’d hung around a while after Brutha’s disappearance. Hanging around is another thing tortoises are very good at. They’re practically world champions.

A piece of human conversation about eagles, commented from the turtle’s perspective:

“Very noble bird, the eagle. Intelligent, too,” said the elderly man. “Interesting fact: eagles are the only birds to work out how to eat tortoises. You know? They pick them up, flying up very high, and drop them on to the rocks. Smashes them right open. Amazing.”
“One day,” said a dull voice from down below, “I’m going to be back on form again and you’re going to be very sorry you said that. For a very long time. I might even go so far as to make even more Time just for you to be sorry in. Or…no, I’ll make you a tortoise. See how you like it, eh? That rushing wind around y’shell, the ground getting bigger the whole time. That’d be an interesting fact!”
“That sounds dreadful,” said the woman, looking up at the eagle’s glare. “I wonder what passes through the poor little creature’s head when he’s dropped?”
“His shell, madam,” said the Great God Om, trying to squeeze himself even further under the bronze overhang.

Again, a description of… turtle behavior.

It wasn’t just the seasickness. He didn’t know where he was. And Brutha had always known where he was. Where he was, and the existence of Om, had been the only two certainties in his life.
It was something he shared with tortoises. Watch any tortoise walking, and periodically it will stop while it files away the memories of the journey so far. Not for nothing, elsewhere in the multiverse, are the little traveling devices controlled by electric thinking-engines called “turtles.”

And here is an interesting reflection about the approach to animals:

“But being cruel to animals doesn’t mean he’s a…bad person,” he ventured, the harmonics of his tone suggesting that even he didn’t believe this. It had been quite a small porpoise.
“He turned me on to my back,” said Om.
“Yes, but humans are more important than animals,” said Brutha.
“This is a point of view often expressed by humans,” said Om.
“Chapter IX, verse 16 of the book of—” Brutha began.
“Who cares what any book says?” screamed the tortoise.
Brutha was shaken.
“But you never told any of the prophets that people should be kind to animals,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about that. Not when you were…bigger. You don’t want people to be kind to animals because they’re animals, you just want people to be kind to animals because one of them might be you.”
“That’s not a bad idea!”

Fragment about the differences in the shapes of turtles:

Om wondered if tortoises could swim. Turtles could, he was pretty sure. But those buggers had the shell for it.
It would be too much to ask (even if a god had anyone to ask) that a body designed for trundling around a dry wilderness had any hydrodynamic properties other than those necessary to sink to the bottom.

More thoughts about A’Tuin:

“Om?”
“What?”
“The captain just said something odd. He said the world is flat and has an edge.”
“Yes? So what?”
“But, I mean, we know the world is a ball, because…”
The tortoise blinked.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “Who said it’s a ball?”
“You did,” said Brutha. Then he added: “According to Book One of the Septateuch, anyway.”
I’ve never thought like this before, he thought. I’d never have said “anyway.”
“Why’d the captain tell me something like that?” he said. “It’s not normal conversation.”
“I told you, I never made the world,” said Om. “Why should I make the world? It was here already. And if I did make a world, I wouldn’t make it a ball. People’d fall off. All the sea’d run off the bottom.”
“Not if you told it to stay on.”
“Hah! Will you hark at the man!”
“Besides, the sphere is a perfect shape,” said Brutha. “Because in the Book of—”
“Nothing amazing about a sphere,” said the tortoise. “Come to that, a turtle is a perfect shape.”
“A perfect shape for what?”
“Well, the perfect shape for a turtle, to start with,” said Om. “If it was shaped like a ball, it’d be bobbing to the surface the whole time.”
“But it’s a heresy to say the world is flat,” said Brutha.
“Maybe, but it’s true.”
“And it’s really on the back of a giant turtle?”
“That’s right.”
“In that case,” said Brutha triumphantly, “what does the turtle stand on?”
The tortoise gave him a blank stare.
“It doesn’t stand on anything,” it said. “It’s a turtle, for heaven’s sake. It swims. That’s what turtles are for.”

Reflection about how turtles think:

“That doesn’t sound like god talk,” he hazarded.
“It’s this tortoise brain.”
“What?”
“Don’t you know anything? Bodies aren’t just handy things for storing your mind in. Your shape affects how you think. It’s all this morphology that’s all over the place.”
“What?”
Om sighed. “If I don’t concentrate, I think like a tortoise!”
“What? You mean slowly?”
“No! Tortoises are cynics. They always expect the worst.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because it often happens to them, I suppose.”

A reference to another book by Pratchett, Pyramids, where philosophers very literally searching/testing for turtles faster that arrows:

“Evening, sir,” he said. “What’ll it be?”
“I’d like a drink of water, please,” said Brutha, very deliberately.
“And something for the tortoise?”
“Wine!” said the voice of Om.
“I don’t know,” said Brutha. “What do tortoises usually drink?”
“The ones we have in here normally have a drop of milk with some bread in it,” said the barman.
“You get a lot of tortoises?” said Brutha loudly, trying to drown out Om’s outraged screams.
“Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races…very handy.”

Explanation of the genesis of the slogan used by “conspirators”:

“The Turtle Moves,” said Urn thoughtfully.
“What?” said Brutha.
“Master did a book,” said Urn.
“Not really a book,” said Didactylos modestly. “More a scroll. Just a little thing I knocked off.”
“Saying that the world is flat and goes through space on the back of a giant turtle?” said Brutha.
“Have you read it?” Didactylos’s gaze was unmoving. “Are you a slave?

Some joke(s) about the turtle(s):

Then he said, “You aren’t going to say they’re a relic of an outmoded belief system?”
Didactylos, still running his fingers over Om’s shell, shook his head.
“Nope. I like my thunderstorms a long way off.”
“Oh. Could you stop turning him over and over? He’s just told me he doesn’t like it.”
“You can tell how old they are by cutting them in half and counting the rings,” said Didactylos.
“Um. He hasn’t got much of a sense of humor, either.”

Another fragment about the nature of the discworld /A’Tuin:

“And this is the book Didactylos wrote,” said Urn.
Brutha looked down at a picture of a turtle. There were…elephants, they’re elephants, his memory supplied, from the fresh memories of the bestiary sinking indelibly into his mind…elephants on its back, and on them something with mountains and a waterfall of an ocean around its edge…
“How can this be?” said Brutha. “A world on the back of a tortoise? Why does everyone tell me this? This can’t be true!”
“Tell that to the mariners,” said Didactylos. “Everyone who’s ever sailed the Rim Ocean knows it. Why deny the obvious?”
“But surely the world is a perfect sphere, spinning about the sphere of the sun, just as the Septateuch tells us,” said Brutha. “That seems so…logical. That’s how things ought to be.”
“Ought?” said Didactylos. “Well, I don’t know about ought. That’s not a philosophical word.”
“And…what is this…” Brutha murmured, pointing to a circle under the drawing of the turtle.
“That’s a plan view,” said Urn.
“Map of the world,” said Didactylos.

A very important life wisdom:

“Getting plenty of sleep is vital,” said Om. “It builds a healthy shell.”

Nice fragment about turtles:

“Oh, I know you exist,” said Brutha. He felt Om relax a little. “There’s something about tortoises. Tortoises I can believe in. They seem to have a lot of existence in one place. It’s gods in general I’m having difficulty with.”

Another description-interpretation of turtle behavior:

Om’s head darted into his shell for a moment, the nearest he was capable of to a shrug.

More about A’Tuin:

You can’t believe in Great A’Tuin,” he said. “Great A’Tuin exists. There’s no point in believing in things that exist.”
“Someone’s put up their hand,” said Urn.
“Yes?”
“Sir, surely only things that exist are worth believing in?” said the enquirer, who was wearing a uniform of a sergeant of the Holy Guard.
“If they exist, you don’t have to believe in them,” said Didactylos. “They just are.” He sighed. “What can I tell you? What do you want to hear? I just wrote down what people know. Mountains rise and fall, and under them the Turtle swims onward. Men live and die, and the Turtle Moves. Empires grow and crumble, and the Turtle Moves. Gods come and go, and still the Turtle Moves. The Turtle Moves.”
From the darkness came a voice, “And that is really true?”
Didactylos shrugged. “The Turtle exists. The world is a flat disc. The sun turns around it once every day, dragging its light behind it. And this will go on happening, whether you believe it is true or not. It is real. I don’t know about truth. Truth is a lot more complicated than that. I don’t think the Turtle gives a bugger whether it’s true or not, to tell you the truth.”

Another interesting reflection on how turtles perceive the world:

He crawled through the bushes, their thorns scraping harmlessly along his shell. He passed another tortoise, which wasn’t inhabited by a god and gave him that vague stare that tortoises employ when they’re deciding whether something is there to be eaten or made love to, which are the only things on a normal tortoise mind. He avoided it, and found a couple of leaves it had missed.

Again about turtle behavior:

Om fought to stop his head and legs retracting automatically into his shell, a tortoise’s instinctive panic reaction.

Turtle, exceptionally, in a different meaning than previously spoted, i.e. a defensive/combat formation:

“Do you know what a tortoise is?”
Urn scratched his head. “Okay. The answer isn’t a little reptile in a shell, is it? Because you know I know that.”
“I mean a shield tortoise. When you’re attacking a fortress or a wall, and the enemy is dropping everything he’s got on you, every man holds his shield overhead so that it…kind of…slots into all the shields around it. Can take a lot of weight.”
“Overlapping,” murmured Urn.
“Like scales,” said Simony.
Urn looked reflectively at the cart.
“A tortoise,” he said.

Again, a nice quote:

No one saw the tiny speck, tumbling down from the sky.
Don’t put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles.

The last turtle fragment that we quote:

“I know him—” said Borvorius. “Vorbis! Someone killed him at last, eh? And will you stop trying to sell me fish? Does anyone know who this man is?” he added, indicating Fasta Benj.
“It was a tortoise,” said Brutha.
“Was it? Not surprised. Never did trust them, always creeping around.

Author: XYuriTT