ceiling of the corridor below, and already the Emperor was seventeen feet highup here. There was thirty-eight feet in total of pure, natural, dribbledcandle. It made Smeems proud. He was keeper of the candle that never went out.It was an example to everyone, a light that never failed, a flame in the dark,a beacon of tradition. And Unseen University took tradition very seriously, atleast when it remembered to.

As now, in fact…

From somewhere in the distance came a sound like a large duck being trodden on,followed by a cry of ‘Ho, the Megapode!’ And then all hell eventuated.

A… creature plunged out of the gloom.

There is a phrase ‘neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring’. This thing wasall of them, plus some other bits of beasts unknown to science or nightmare oreven kebab. There was certainly some red, and a lot of flapping, and Nutt wassure he caught a glimpse of an enormous sandal, but there were the mad,rolling, bouncing eyes, the huge yellow and red beak and then the thingdisappeared down another gloomy corridor, incessantly making that flat honkingnoise of the sort duck hunters make just before they are shot by other duckhunters.

‘Aho! The Megapode!’ It wasn’t clear where the cry came from. It seemed to becoming from everywhere. ‘There she bumps! Ho, the Megapode!’

The cry was taken up on every side, and from the dark shadows of everycorridor, bar the one down which the beast had fled, galloped curious shapes,which turned out to be, by the flickering light of the Emperor, the seniorfaculty of the university. Each wizard was being carried piggy-back by a stoutbowler-hatted university porter, whom he was urging onward by means of a bottleof beer on a string held, as tradition demanded, ahead of the porter’s grasp ona long stick.

The doleful quack rang out again, some distance away, and a wizard waved hisstaff in the air and yelled: ‘Bird is Flown! Ho, the Megapode!’