Seven Ancient Wonders (16 page)

Inside it, West’s multinational team was still recovering from their disastrous mission in the Sudan.

In the main cabin of the jumbo, West, Wizard, Lily and Pooh Bear all sat in contemplative silence. The cabin was fitted with couches, some tables, and wall-consoles for radio and communications gear.

Wizard stood. ‘I’d better call the Spanish Army attaché. Tell them about Noddy . . .’

He went to a nearby wall-console, grabbed the secure sat-phone there, started dialling.

West just stared into space, replaying in his mind everything that had gone wrong in the Sudan.

Lily sat with Pooh Bear, gazing at the team’s original copy of the Callimachus Text.

As for the others, Fuzzy and Big Ears were in the infirmary in the rear of the plane, being treated by Zoe; and Sky Monster was up in the cockpit, flying the plane, with Stretch keeping him company.

In the main cabin, Lily scanned another entry of the Callimachus Text. The symbols on the page were ancient, alien.

Then suddenly she squealed, ‘Hey!’

West snapped up. Wizard also spun.

‘This entry here. I couldn’t understand it before, but for some reason, I can now. It’s more complex than the last one. Uses new symbols. But I can read it now.’

‘What’s it say?’ West leapt to her side.

Lily read it aloud:

‘The Pharos.
Look for the base that was once the peak of the Great Tower
In the deepest crypt of Iskender’s Highest Temple,
Soter’s illustrious House to the Muses,
Among the works of Eratosthenes the measurer, Hipparchus the stargazer,
And Archimedes and Heron the machine makers,
There you will find
it
EUCLID’S INSTRUCTIONS
Surrounded by Death
.’

Lily frowned. ‘The word “it” has been crossed out and replaced with “Euclid’s instructions”. I don’t know what they are.’

‘I do,’ Wizard said, reaching for a high-tech stainless-steel trunk behind him. It opened with a vacuum-sealed
hiss
. The trunk was fitted with many pigeonholes, each pigeonhole containing an ancient scroll. Wizard’s collection was huge—there were at least 200 tightly rolled scrolls.

‘Now where is that index? Ah, here it is.’ Wizard pulled a computer printout from a sleeve in the trunk’s lid. On it was a very long typewritten list. ‘Now, Euclid’s Instructions . . . Euclid’s Instructions. I’m sure I saw that title once before. Ah, good, there we are. Just a moment.’

Wizard proceeded to rummage through his scrolls. As he did so, West typed out Lily’s translation of the Text.

Stretch entered the main cabin, noticed the activity immediately. ‘What’s going on?’

‘We may have had a development,’ West said. He read one line
from the translation. ‘“Soter’s illustrious House to the Muses”. A House to the Muses is a “museion” or “museum”. Soter was Ptolemy I.
Soter’s House to the Muses
is the Library at Alexandria, otherwise known as the Museion.’

‘So,’ Pooh Bear said, ‘in the deepest crypt of the Alexandria Library, among those works mentioned, we’ll find “the base that was once the peak of the Lighthouse”, whatever that is. I thought the Library was destroyed in antiquity.’

‘It was,’ Zoe said, coming into the main cabin. ‘By the Romans in 48 BC. The Biblioteca Alexandrina was the centre of all learning in the ancient world, possessed of over 700,000 scrolls and the writings of some of the greatest thinkers in human history, and the Romans
razed it to the ground
.’

She saw West’s translation. ‘God. Look at those names. It’s like a Who’s Who of history’s greatest minds. Eratosthenes: he calculated the circumference of the Earth. Hipparchus mapped the constellations. Archimedes figured out volume and was a prolific inventor. And Heron. Well. Heron invented geared cogwheels and a primitive steam engine
2,000 years
before James Watt was even born.’

Pooh Bear asked, ‘And now?’

Zoe sighed. ‘The Library is gone. Long since buried underneath modern-day Alexandria. They know where it stood—and the Egyptian Government recently built a new library not far from the old site—but the Romans did their work well. Just as they had done with Carthage a hundred years previously, the Library was removed from existence. Not a single brick, text or crypt remains.’

‘So all its scrolls were destroyed, then?’

‘Many were, but a large portion of them was spirited away from the Library in the days before the Roman invasion. The scrolls were reputedly taken to a secret location, deep in the Atlas Mountains— and to date, have never been officially found.’

When Zoe said this last sentence, she threw West and Wizard a sideways look.

‘Not everyone announces it to the world when they find something important,’ West said.

‘
What
—?’ Pooh Bear said, whirling to face the scrolls Wizard was rummaging through. ‘Are you telling me that those scrolls are—’

‘Ah-ha! Here it is!’ Wizard exclaimed.

He extracted an ancient scroll from a pigeonhole. It was beautifully made, with ornate rollers at each end and thick cream-coloured parchment.

Wizard unrolled it, read it.

‘Hmmm. Greek text. Handwriting matches that of other known Euclidian texts. One of the greatest mathematicians in history, Euclid. He created plane geometry, you know, a grid with an
x
and
y
axis, which we now call Euclidian Geometry. This scroll is undoubtedly written by him, and its title is simply “Instructions”. Which makes it Euclid’s Instructions, I suppose.’

‘What does it say?’ Pooh Bear asked.

Wizard scanned the scroll. ‘It just seems to restate some of Euclid’s more mundane discoveries. No reference to any ancient wonder or Golden Capstone.’

‘Damn,’ West said.

‘Bugger,’ Zoe said.

‘Wait a second . . .’ Wizard held up his hand. ‘Look at this.’

He had unfurled the scroll to its edges, revealing a small handwritten notation at the extreme bottom of the parchment, right where it met the lower roller.

Written across the bottom of the scroll were a few lines of text, not in classical Greek, but in another language: the cuneiform-like strokes of the Word of Thoth. It read:

‘Lily?’ Wizard said.

Lily scanned the ancient document for a moment, then read it aloud:

‘Base removed before the Roman invasion,
Taken to Hamilcar’s Forgotten Refuge.
Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians
To the inlet of the two tridents,
Where you will behold the easier entrance to
The sixth Great Architect’s masterwork.
The Seventh has lain there ever since
.’

‘There’s that word again,’ Pooh Bear said, ‘base. Why do they call it a base?’

But West wasn’t listening. He turned to Wizard, his face alive with excitement. ‘The Callimachus Text doesn’t give the location of the Pharos Piece . . .’

‘No,’ Wizard said. ‘This scroll does. And this is the only copy. Which means—’

‘—neither the Europeans nor the Americans can possibly know where this Piece rests. Max, we’ve got a clear run at this one.’

They stared at each other in amazement.

‘Holy shit,’ West said, smiling. ‘We might just have a chance in this race.’

The
Halicarnassus
zoomed through the dawn, arriving at the northern coast of Libya, soaring over the frothy white line where the waters of the Mediterranean met the shores of the North African desert.

Inside it, West, Wizard and Zoe were making swift progress on Euclid’s Instructions.

‘“The Phoenicians” was another name for the people of Carthage—the trading state annihilated by Rome in the Third and last Punic War. The state of Carthage approximated modern-day Tunisia, directly south of Italy, across the Mediterranean,’ Wizard said.

‘And Hamilcar is Hamilcar Barca,’ West said, ‘father of Hannibal and commander of the Carthaginian forces in the First Punic War. I didn’t know he had a refuge, let alone a forgotten one.’

Zoe commented, ‘Hamilcar died in Spain in 228 BC, between the First and Second Punic Wars. He must have ordered the construction of a faraway fortress and never lived to see it.’

Wizard was on his computer: ‘I’m checking my database for any references to “Hamilcar’s Refuge”. But I’ve already found this: the “Deadly Coast” was a name used by Alexandrian sailors to describe the coast of modern-day Tunisia. For 100 miles the shore is all cliffs—400 feet high and plunging vertically into the sea. Major shipwreck area even in the 20th century. Oh dear. If your ship goes down close to the shore, you can’t climb out of the water because of the cliffs. People have been known to die within an arm’s length of dry land. No wonder the ancient sailors feared it.’

West added, ‘And the sixth Great Architect is Imhotep VI. He lived
about 100 years after Imhotep V. Clever trap-builder—fortified the island-temple of Philae near Aswan. Known for his predilection for concealed underwater entrances. There are
six
at Philae alone.’

Stretch said, ‘Wait a moment. I thought the Egyptian civilisation was finished by the time of the Punic Wars.’

‘A common misconception,’ Wizard said. ‘People tend to think that the ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian civilisations existed separately, one after the other, but that’s not true, not at all. They
coexisted
. While Rome was fighting Carthage in the Punic Wars, Egypt was still flourishing under the Ptolemies. In fact, an independent Egypt would continue to exist right up until Cleopatra VII, the famous one, was defeated by the Romans in 30 BC.’

‘So what are these two tridents?’ Pooh Bear asked.

‘My guess is they are rock formations just out from the coastal cliffs,’ Wizard said. ‘Markers. Triple-pointed rock formations that look like tridents, marking the location of the Refuge.’

‘One hundred miles of sheer-cliffed coast,’ Pooh Bear groaned. ‘It could take
days
to patrol that kind of terrain by boat. And we don’t have days.’

‘No,’ West said. ‘We don’t. But I’m not planning on using a
boat
to scan that coastline.’

An hour later, the
Halicarnassus
was soaring high above the Tunisian coast, travelling parallel to it, heading westward, when suddenly its rear loading ramp opened and a tiny winged figure leapt out of the plane and plummeted down through the sky.

It was a man.

West.

Shooming head-first down through the air, his face covered by a wickedly aerodynamic oxygen-supplying full-face helmet.

But it was the object on his back that demanded attention.

A pair of lightweight carbon composite
wings
.

They had a span of 2.6 metres, upturned wingtips, and in their bulky centre (which covered a parachute), they possessed six
compressed-air thrusters that could be used to sustain a gliding pattern when natural glide failed.

West rocketed down through the sky at a 45-degree angle, his bullet-shaped winged body slicing through the air.

The Deadly Coast came into view.

Towering yellow cliffs fronted onto the flat blue sea. Giant, immovable. Waves crashed against them relentlessly, exploding in gigantic showers of spray.

West zoomed lower, hitting 180 km/h, before at around 800 feet . . .

. . . he swooped upwards and entered a slower, more serene glide pattern.

Now he soared, three hundred feet above the waves of the Mediterranean, parallel to the massive coastal cliffs.

He was flying near the Tunisian–Libyan border, a particularly desolate stretch of the North African coastline. Broad flat sand-plains stretched away from the sheer cliffs of the coast. About a klick inland, those plains rammed up against a mountain range made up of a few extinct volcanoes that ran parallel to the shore.

It was a land devoid of life. Desolate. Depressing. A place where nothing grows.

As he flew, West scanned the cliffs, searching for any rock formations on them that resembled a pair of tridents.

After ten minutes of gliding, he lost his natural glide pattern, so he ignited a compressed-air thruster. With a sharp
hiss-wapp
, it lifted him to a higher altitude, allowing him to glide for longer.

Then after about forty minutes—and three more compressed-air assists—he saw them.

Two rock-islands positioned about fifty metres out from the coastal cliff-face, their rocky shapes each resembling a three-fingered human hand pointing toward the sky.

Or a trident.

Two tridents.

The section of cliff immediately behind the two tridents looked particularly forbidding—vertical and rough, with the upper section of the great cliff partially overhanging its base. Very difficult to scale.

‘Wizard! Come in!’ West called into his radio mike. ‘I’ve found them!’

An hour later, the
Halicarnassus
had landed on the flat sandy plain, dropped off a Land Rover four-wheel drive from its belly, and then lifted off to take up a holding pattern a hundred miles to the south.

Bouncing along in the Land Rover, the team joined West—now standing on the windswept cliff overlooking the two tridents. The team numbered seven, since the injured Fuzzy had stayed in the
Halicarnassus
with Sky Monster, along with Horus. Big Ears, however, was there and still mobile, thanks to a cocktail of painkillers.