An evil king locked a wizard in a dungeon with nothing but a chair and a shovel. There is a window in the room, but the wizard can't reach it using the chair. The dungeon is surrounded by a cement parking lot that stretches 100 feet in every direction.

The wizard uses the shovel to dig a 50 feet long tunnel and still manages to escape.

How?

Our wizard understands that cement 'cures', sets with time. On the belief that curing is faster with exposure to air the wizard chooses to excavate so as to dig upwards and so carve out cement bricks to make himself his "stairway to heaven". 

In the meantime he builds a "molehill" of earth on the opposite side of the cell from his project!

Now, if you believe all of that, you'll believe anything (though ... i have stretched an element of true in my proposition).

[Lateral thinking is an issue on this site.  Consider Dej Mar's submission prior to this comment. In this case we have all that we need, we just need the application.  I understand why our director, levik, has a somewhat aversion to this type of problem.  Perplexus cannot offer the interactivity of a "chatroom", or "over the phone" one-to-one scenario on which this type of 'riddle' would generally depend.  This doesn't, but there is a fine line.
Mmm! Where is that Forum about such things?]

Posted by brianjn on 2007-12-03 08:35:18