"Hey," she said. "What was that?" But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out. They were in a section of the passage now that corresponded roughly to the statue's radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trap door, and found themselves standing high in the temple. Below them the great room spread, vastly deep, and still empty. Beside them, the stems of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist and spired another fifty feet before breaking into clusters of golden grain and leaves. Across from them, over the dark curve of Gargantuan chest, in the statue's other hand, the shaft of the scythe leaned away into shadow. "Look," she said. "You follow me now." She started back along the top of the forearm and then began the tedious climb over the rippling biceps, till at last they reached the broad shoulder. They walked across the hollow above the collar bone until they stood just below the great scooping shell of the ear. She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck, and then, holding the other, she heaved the bag up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug. "I hope this works," she said. "I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me." She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around into the hollow, using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the hollow trumpet, she looked down at Snake. "Come up," she said. "Hurry up." Snake joined her a moment later. The ear was hollow, too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber which went up through the head of the god. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the god's lid flipped. They climbed the ladder and emerged amid the tangle of pipes which represented the hair of the god. They made their way forward through the mass of pipes to where the forehead sloped dangerously forward. They could see the foreshortened nose and the rim of the statue's middle eye above that. There wasn't much of anything after that for the next thousand feet until the base of the altar. "Now you can really be some help," she told him. "Hold on to my wrist and let me down. I'll get the jewel." They grabbed wrists, and Snake's three other hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them. Slowly she slid forward, until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue's nose. The eye opened in front of her. The lid arced above her, and the white of either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.