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fires with. The last thing I need is to lug six litres of useless liquid up the cliff face with me. If we hadn’t had the raft, I would have emptied it last night.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Right. Now you can take it back. Give me the jack, Nawal.’
    Abi launched himself out of the water and rammed the pyramid jack into the crack at the base of the cleft. Then he reached up and screwed it open with the tyre iron. The tyre iron was equipped with two protuberances at the distaff end, specifically designed to slip into the winding mechanism of the jack. When the jack was comfortably embedded in the cleft, Abi launched himself out of the water again, this time with Rudra’s help, and clambered onto the protruding end, until he was standing with both feet tight to the face of the cliff, maybe a yard and a half above the surface of the cenote.
    ‘So far so good. Hand me the other tyre iron and the extinguisher.’
    ‘Jesus, Abi. This is impossible. You’re never going to make it.’
    ‘Hand me the climbing kit, Rudi, or I’ll abandon you here to drown.’
    Rudra handed him the extinguisher and the tyre iron.
    Abi reached above himself and positioned the tyre iron in the cleft. Then he took the hand extinguisher by the trigger mechanism, and hammered the tyre iron home. ‘If I can make it as far as that cleft up there, I might be able to belay across to that little outcrop. If I can traverse as far as that, I can rest up a bit and get my bearings. That’s the plan, anyway.’
    ‘How are you going to free the tyre iron? After you’ve released the jack, I mean?’
    ‘I’m going to tie the tow rope to it, Rudi. Then, when I’m safely on the outcrop, I can yank it a few times and it should come free. The art is not to ram it in too far.’
    Rudra looked at the girls, who were treading water beside him. He was tempted to comment further, but he could tell by the way they were staring hopefully up at Abi that any observations he might make would fall very flat indeed. ‘Good luck, Abi.’
    ‘That’s the understatement of the year.’

 
    13
     

    It took Abi more than an hour, and six near falls, to inch his way the forty feet up to the final ledge. The ledge was situated just ten feet below the upper lip of the cenote, but those ten feet might as well have measured ten miles as far as Abi was concerned, for the rock face was as smooth as Plexiglas.
    Abi squatted on the ledge, with his back against the cliff face, and stared down at his brothers and sisters. His clothes, which had begun to dry off during the ascent, were wringing wet with sweat.
    The sun had reached its zenith over the cenote. Abi could feel it beating against the top of his head. The unholy mixture of semi-starvation, thirst, and unrelenting heat were threatening to give him hallucinations. Twice, early on in the climb, he had fumbled and lost one of the tyre irons, but each time Rudra had either caught it on the wing, or snatched it from the water before it had time to sink. Then he had thrown it back up to Abi again, with the girls acting like the backstops of a volleyball team in case he muffed the throw.
    About forty minutes into the climb, Abi had jammed both feet and his one free arm inside the cleft, fearing that he might be about to lose consciousness. He had managed to snatch a five-minute breather, after tying the tow rope to the pyramid jack and making a belay of it via a Munter hitch. The thought that he might unexpectedly black out had filled Abi with existential dread. He knew for a certainty that once he fell back into the cenote, that would be it – he’d never make it up the cliff face again.
    Abi twisted on the spot and squinted at the area above his head. There was no sign of a handhold. There was no whisper of a striation. There wasn’t even the faint beginnings of a crack that he could take advantage of and extend. Just the limestone equivalent of an opaque, marginally convex, sheet of glass.
    ‘Any suggestions anyone?’
    Rudra cleared