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“Perhaps if I just… swung my leg up here…” Neil offered helpfully.
Chips of stone from the edge of the hole broke away as he moved, pinging down into the black abyss.
“No!” Adam and Sayyid shouted simultaneously.
Zeinab skidded back to them with a coil of rope in her hands. “Apologies, habibi,” she said, and then clambered unceremoniously across Sayyid’s back.
He let out anoofof protest as she leaned over him and whipped the rope around Neil’s body.
She scrambled back, digging a knee into Adam’s thigh, and threw the other end of the rope to Ellie.
“Pull!” Zeinab ordered, and the two women hauled at their lines. Constance rushed to join them, the heels of her kid boots digging against the ground. The tension in Sayyid’s body started to shift—and suddenly everything was moving.
Neil spilled across Adam and Sayyid, the three of them tumbling into a tangled mess of limbs. Adam found himself staring up at the ceiling with somebody’s ankle propped on his shoulder.
Constance’s face appeared above him, eyes bright with excitement. “That was splendid!”
Ellie appeared beside her, lines of worry creasing her brow. “Are you all right?”
“I would be,” Neil gasped thinly in reply, “if Sayyid would take his elbow out of my diaphragm!”
“Think that might be my elbow,” Adam replied, shifting the limb in question.
Neil groaned with relief.
A sturdy hand clasped Adam’s arm, helping to lever him to his feet. He rose to face Sayyid’s wife and cocked an impressed eyebrow.
“I’ll haul Stuffy out,” Constance announced, hooking her hands under Neil’s shoulders.
He popped free and flopped over while Sayyid staggered upright.
“Was it a bottomless pit, then?” Constance asked hopefully.
“Ancient Egyptians did not build bottomless pits!” Neil’s spectacles had gone a bit sideways. He adjusted them, which resulted in them skewing wrong the other way. His brown hair was glazed with dust.
“Tell that to the one that just tried to swallow you,” Constance countered. “But how shall we get past it?”
Adam moved over to the doorway, peering down at the collapse. “Anybody got a light?”
Ellie pushed a lantern into his hand. He extended it over the opening, and the glow spilled down into a pit.
“Not bottomless,” Adam declared. “Looks about twenty-five feet deep.”
“I think I would rather not have known that,” Neil returned queasily.
Adam was feeling a little queasy himself. Twenty-five feet might not be bottomless, but it was just far enough to make his head spin.
He forced himself to stick around for another breath as he examined the interior of the hole. “It’s all just rock,” he reported. “Walls look oddly regular for a cave, though.”
He pulled back as another wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm him. “The edge of it lines up with the left half of the stairs. Should be able to go along all right if we stick to that side.”
Adam tried not to think about how much his suggestion sounded like walking along an ancient tightrope.
“I’ll lead the way,” Constance happily offered, hopping over the gap.
?
They descended the stairs without falling into any more deadly pits. The passage was close and low enough that Adam had to duck to navigate it. There were no paintings on the walls, only roughly carved stone that seemed to grow thicker and heavier as they moved deeper into the heart of the ridge.
