“I was teasing before, but you really are what every woman dreams about whether they admit it or not: a knight in shining armor. Someone to lean on when … you know.”

“Like Antar and the maiden Abla,” the Scorpion breathed.

“Who?”

“It’s just an old story; something from long ago,” he murmured.

Kelly bit her lip hesitantly. Then she brought it out. “I lied when I said I never doubted you for a second.”

“So did I,” he replied.

For a long time that might have been seconds or minutes or hours, they lay together in silent exhaustion. Finally, he became conscious of her weight heavy on him. She lay face down, her head on his shoulder, her breasts flattened against his chest, her body molded tightly into his. He felt his manhood begin to stir, feeling her pelvis pressed against him.

“How tired are you?” she teased.

“Too tired,” he grunted and half-struggled to ease part of her weight off him. The clock was still ticking, he thought.

“Well, now that we’re here, what do we do? It takes at least two men to move that big rock,” Kelly said.

“That’s where the broken spear comes in,” the Scorpion said.

While Kelly held the lamp the Scorpion used the chisel to cut a small notch in the end of the wooden shaft. Then he wrapped cloth around the butt end of the chisel and jammed it into the notch, tying it to the staff with a piece of the cloth rope. He soon had a functional spear about five feet long.

The Scorpion wiped his sweating brow on his forearm and longed for a cool drink. If they didn’t get water soon they would begin to die.

Kelly looked at him anxiously. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her eyes were huge and luminous. They seemed to dominate her face. It reminded him of the faces of starving children back in Asia. He looked away, not wanting her to know what he was thinking.

“Cramped up here,” he muttered.

“Yeah, now I know how a sardine feels,” she sighed, wedging her body against the hard rock to give him a few extra millimeters of space.

He showed her how he wanted her to hold the lamp so that the light shone dimly on the opposite side of the well at the junction of the top stone and the lip.

“I’m going to chip away at the far side. When the underpinning rock is gone, the stone will tilt or fall that way and we’ll be able to get out.”

“What makes you so sure it won’t fall this way, on top of us?” she asked.

“Because they haven’t repealed the laws of physics yet.”

“With my luck, they’re probably working on it right now,” she wisecracked.