These bars were set one above another about three feet apart, and formed a perfect ladder as far above me as I could see.
For fully five hundred feet I continued to climb, until at length I reached the opening in the stem which admitted the light.
Tars Tarkas went in advance and as I reached the first of the horizontal bars I drew the ladder up after me and, handing it to him, he carried it a hundred feet further aloft, where he wedged it safely between one of the bars and the side of the shaft.
"My knapsack brought my head down first, and I pitched into some rocks about a dozen feet below; they caught something, and tumbled me off the edge, head over heels, into the gully; the baton was dashed from my hands, and I whirled downward in a series of bounds, each longer than the last; now over ice, now into rocks, striking my head four or five times, each time with increased force.
The sun was setting when consciousness returned, and it was pitch-dark before the Great Staircase was descended; but by a combination of luck and care, the whole four thousand seven hundred feet of descent to Breil was accomplished without a slip, or once missing the way."
This is as clear as summer lightning," Mowgli answered; and they fell into the quick, choppy trail-trot in and out through the checkers of the moonlight, following the marks of those two bare feet.
Now I hide me behind a rock and stand still," not daring to shift my feet. Cry thy trail, Little Brother."
The man himself, for such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height and, on Earth, would have weighed some four hundred pounds.
It towered ten feet at the shoulder; had four legs on either side; a broad flat tail, larger at the tip than at the root, and which it held straight out behind while running; a gaping mouth which split its head from its snout to its long, massive neck.
Remember that I am not speaking of an oblong, but of a figure equal every way, and twice the size of this--that is to say of eight feet; and I want to know whether you still say that a double square comes from double line?
SOCRATES: And four such lines will make a space containing eight feet?
"Precisely, Ned: so that at 32
feet beneath the surface of the sea you would undergo a pressure of 97,500 lb.; at 320
feet, ten times that pressure; at 3,200
feet, a hundred times that pressure; lastly, at 32,000
feet, a thousand times that pressure would be 97,500,000 lb.--that is to say, that you would be flattened as if you had been drawn from the plates of a hydraulic machine!"