What does "negotiating the crush" mean???

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1

I don’t understand this sentence:

“His long, gangling frame seemed to be held together by molasses; he moved deliberately, negotiating the crush while humming a tricky passage from Schumann, sailing above the mob.”

2

I imagine this means “negotiating the crush of people” i.e., working his way through a big crowd.

3

So can’t crush mean the pressure of the bodies of the crowd, though??

4

The clue in the paragraph is the word “mob.”

5

So, metaphorically, what does “sailing above the mob” mean? I’m really bad at idioms.

6

With a “long, gangling frame”, it most likely means that his head was higher than the mob as he worked his way through.

However, because of the reference to “metaphorical”, it may also mean that humming Schumann put him in a higher plane than the mob.

7

Yep. It means that though he’s in the middle of a bustling crowd, he’s somehow aloof from it, unaffected by the haste that surrounds him.