"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon, staring up at
a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
"I don't think there's a loft there; and I don't know what else it
could lead to." Long before he had finished his sentence the man
with the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling,
swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after
a struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two
symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across
it like a whole county upside down.

"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here;
and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the spot
for a picnic."

With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
bottles of wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger.
The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture,
like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them
off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out of the window.
They were both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was
not quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman.
Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when
the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky,
and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.