They can't climb all surfaces. They especially can't climb on dirty and dusty surfaces or crumbling paint.
But more than that, they fell into the hole without leaving a pheromone trail to follow back to the nest. Without that, they have no way of navigating. Only random exploration could get them back out, and that would only help one ant at a time.
I read many old books and the long s slightly annoys me, because it frequently is very difficult to distinguish from an f, when the document was scanned with insufficient resolution or the original document was already degraded by time. Guessing the letter from the context can also be difficult in old books, where some obsolete words may be used or which were spelled differently at that time.
I think the extended period is a point that needs consideration. I don't know how long it takes a salamander to regrow a limb, but given the sheer size of any given limb in an adult human, it would take quite some time to regrow it to anywhere near its former state.
Also, it's not illegal to travel when covered in nitrate dust. Maybe you really were working with explosives or fertilizers earlier in the day. So it really should be just a flag to check that you don't still have the explosives with you.
My favourite story is of an elderly coworker with no AI experience who innocuously asked GPT-5-mini (at the time his framework's default model) to translate a 50 page engineering spec, and it kept him at arm's length for about a week about how that task would take just another 24-36 hours more. He kept asking like, you finished yet? and it just made up excuses, "so sorry, I got distracted, give me one more day", and he went "please finish, I need this", and 5-mini came back "I totally understand -- let me get to work immediately, I'll report back ASAP", end of conversation. He got annoyed but never even suspected anything wrong, because this is the kind of conversation he's used to. I wonder how long this would have continued, if I hadn't intervened by chance.
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