"Perry," I confided to the old man, "if I have to search every
inch of this diminutive world I am going to find Dian the Beautiful
and right the wrong I unintentionally did her." That was the excuse
I made for Perry's benefit.

"Diminutive world!" he scoffed. "You don't know what you are
talking about, my boy," and then he showed me a map of Pellucidar
which he had recently discovered among the manuscript he was
arranging.

"Look," he cried, pointing to it, "this is evidently water, and
all this land. Do you notice the general configuration of the two
areas? Where the oceans are upon the outer crust, is land here.
These relatively small areas of ocean follow the general lines of
the continents of the outer world.

"We know that the crust of the globe is 500 miles in thickness;
then the inside diameter of Pellucidar must be 7,000 miles, and the
superficial area 165,480,000 square miles. Three-fourths of this
is land. Think of it! A land area of 124,110,000 square miles!
Our own world contains but 53,000,000 square miles of land, the
balance of its surface being covered by water. Just as we often
compare nations by their relative land areas, so if we compare
these two worlds in the same way we have the strange anomaly of a
larger world within a smaller one!

"Where within vast Pellucidar would you search for your Dian?
Without stars, or moon, or changing sun how could you find her even
though you knew where she might be found?"