See … 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. (Pratchett, The Colour of Magic, p.7)
The 'disc of the World' is of course the Discworld a flat planet that is home to a series of comic fantasy bookswritten by the English author Terry Pratchett. The series began in 1983 with The Colour of Magic and continued until the final novel The Shepherd's Crown, published in 2015 following Pratchett's death. A total of 41 Discworld novels were published and you can find them all here in our on-line store.
