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Originally Posted by issybird
There was a reference to horses being cheap to make that I thought was explicit. I did enjoy the exploration of the horse's thoughts, as all paradise in the horse sense lay before him, once he got ride of the monk(ey) on his back. Stay away from that tree!
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It's the monk that was cheaper to make with two legs, or that's the way I read it:
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So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three;
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This was also where I got the impression that monk and horse came together as a sort of package deal.
When I got to the end I assumed this monk was the same one that aided our ancient ghost engineer, but it seems not. In the second chapter he says of the horse:
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No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution has produced in many of the places that life is to be found.
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So "convergent evolution" suggests it is a different world, so it can't be the same monk.