Pilgrim made himself very small and scrambled up inside her throat. He was about to come out when it struck him that she might be unreasonable enough to bite, so he brought out his iron rod, blew a magic breath on it and cried, "Change!"

This one sentence carries a character so rare that many fonts will not show it. 𧿼 is guā, and it is a genuine oddity — a character the great dictionaries record with a meaning that has nothing to do with what it is doing here. The rime books gloss it as the creases of the foot; the novel uses it as a verb, to scramble or clamber, and uses it that way seven times across four chapters. It is built from the foot radical with a melon beside it, and that melon is the sound — which is how we know the character is guā at all. 得 is de, the join between a verb and how far it went: shrank, and shrank small.