Grounds and Buildings
The University is a large walled-off complex on the turnwise side of the Ankh, somewhat hubwards of the Isle of Gods. Aside from the Tower of Art, the geography of the UU is somewhat fluid, with rooms shifting and disappearing on a regular basis. It is much larger on the inside than on the outside..
Forming much of the border is the main building, which contains the garden known as the Main Octangle and the Clock Tower housing Old Tom, the University's tongueless octiron bell whose strikes silence everything briefly. Turnwise of the main building lies the Library, housing the largest collection of magical texts known on the Disc. Further hubwards of this is the High Energy Magic Building (a play on high energy physics; the more boffinish of the students and young wizards, such as Ponder Stibbons, work here, breaking magic down into smaller particles). The spot between this building and the Library is the workspace of the University gardener, Modo, a genteel dwarf who was nearly eaten by his own compost pile.
The University holds rowing contests, but because of the normal state of the Ankh, these usually amount to a jogging/sprinting race on the crusted surface. Entering the gardens over the Ankh is the Bridge of Size, which connects to the Wizard's Pleasaunce, another small garden on the Ankh's turnwise side walled off from Hen & Chickens Field. At one point, in the novel Sourcery the Pleasaunce contained a temporary new headquarters for the University staff.
Entrance and exit into the complex is by one of the gates. These gates close in the evening, and students who like to get out after this have created an alternate opening known as Scholar's Entry. This is a place in the wall where bricks can be slid out to form a usable ladder, and has always been known only to students. However, many students forget that all the staff were, in their time, students themselves.
Read more about this topic: Unseen University
Famous quotes containing the words grounds and, grounds and/or buildings:
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
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“And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
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“Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.”
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