The woman's husband calmly ate thistles beside the house, while the woman herself continued weaving baskets, and the itinerant Mullah sat watching until long past sunset. When their fire had burned down to coals, the woman stopped weaving and prepared porridge for herself and the traveler, as is the custom in that part of the world. Several satellites, which foreigners had placed in polar orbit, passed overhead along the meridian.
After he had eaten porridge with the Circassian woman, the Mullah inquired if she happened to know how long it took one of the satellites to go around the earth. And she replied that she thought it must be 94 minutes. To check this she measured out 4 armspreads of hemp cord (4 thousandths of a mile) and bade the Mullah climb up and tie one end in a rhododendron tree. Then she fastened a weight at the other end to make a pendulum which was a millionth of the earth's radius in length. The Mullah, who had an extremely accurate wristwatch sent to him by his brother in Chicago, discovered that the pendulum took 94 thousandths of a Circassian minute to swing back and forth. So he agreed that the satellites they were watching would take 94 minutes to circle the earth, at least if they were at the same altitude as the pendulum and only a bit longer as they were farther out.
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note: The period of a pendulum whose length is one millionth of a planet's radius is equal to one thousandth of the period of a satellite in circular orbit at the same altitude as the pendulum—and the lowest satellites are "almost" at ground level, so the pendulum can predict their orbit time.
The woman measured rope in what a french seaman would call a brasse (Larousse gives the metric equivalent as about 1.62 meters) by stretching it out with arms fully extended right and left. When Circassians pace off distance they manage to make two-step paces conform to this armspread distance as well— their mile of 1000 paces is equal as well to 1000 of this armspread measure.
Although she measured out 4 armspreads of cord, some was used to tie one end to the treebranch and fasten a weight at the other. So the length of the pendulum turned out to be 3.94 paces, which made it a millionth of the earth's 3940 mile equatorial radius. In average sealevel gravity the period of such a pendulum actually is around 94 thousandths of a Circassian minute.
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