She looked into his eyes and was jolted by what she saw. His eyes were underlined with dark circles. They looked old as the rock itself.

“You look awful,” she said quietly. He shook his head.

“If the warranty hadn’t expired, I’d trade this body in for a new model,” he said.

He wrapped the soiled and torn rags around his hand again. Then he rewrapped the cloth around the broken chisel, put it between his teeth, and turned to face the wall once more. It seemed more forbidding, even hostile this time, the dark shadows gathering like demons in the faint flickering light. The Scorpion took a breath and suddenly he was scrambling back up.

“Go with God,” Kelly murmured softly. She wasn’t sure if he heard her.

The Scorpion moved quickly, agilely, from notch to notch, like a great awkward monkey. He cursed each time his fingers took the weight, but never stopped moving upwards. Groaning and climbing and not stopping as if he knew that if he stopped he might never start again. By the time a minute had gone by he had managed to climb back to where he had fallen from. He paused at last to catch his breath, clinging to the wall by all fours like a spider to a shaky web.

Now the battle for the last few feet began in earnest, inching his way up in near darkness while clinging to the rock only with his bruised fingers and toes. The air was stale and lifeless. He wondered if they were running short of oxygen or was it just his imagination running rampant. “Cowardice is the inability to control your imagination,” Koenig once said. Don’t think, he told himself. Move! His strength was going fast.

He could feel his fingers slipping in the darkness. He had no strength to stop it any more. The scraping sound of fingernails on stone and tiny pebbles told him he was losing it. The Scorpion screamed in frustration and struck again with the stone blade, but this time he missed the rock wall entirely. He balanced for a desperate instant on the toes of his right foot, flailing at the air while his numbed and bewildered brain tried to understand what was happening.

As he began to fall again, an electrifying thought flashed through his mind. He had reached the ledge! Thrusting out both arms in the darkness, he dug his battered fingers into the ledge and with a final desperate effort, heaved himself up so that he was balancing on his palms. He kicked his right leg over the ledge and threw his body into the niche.