Seven Ancient Wonders (40 page)

At that moment, he remembered a reference from the Nazi Hessler’s diary. He pulled the diary from his jacket pocket and found the page:

1ST INSCRI PTION FROM THE TOMB OF IMHOTEP III:

WHAT AN INCREDIBLE STRUCTURE IT WAS,
CONSTRUCTED AS A MIRROR IMAGE,
WHERE BOTH ENTRANCE AND EXIT WERE ALIKE.
IT PAINED ME THAT MY TASK—WHAT WOULD BE MY LIFE’S
MASTERWORK—WAS TO CONCEAL SO MAGNIFICENT A STRUCTURE.
BUT I DID MY DUTY.
WE SEALED THE GREAT ARCHWAY WITH A LANDSLIDE.
AS INSTRUCTED, THE PRIESTS’ ENTRANCE REMAINS OPEN SO THEY
MAY TEND THE SHRINES INSIDE—THE PRIESTS HAVE BEEN
INFORMED OF THE ORDER OF THE SNARES.

‘“
We sealed the great archway with a landslide
”,’ West read aloud. ‘Imhotep bricked up the archway and then triggered a landslide to cover it. But he wasn’t done.
Then
he diverts a river outside to cover the whole thing. My God, he was good. . . ’

‘The Third Great Architect was indeed a master,’ Zaeed said, coming alongside West.

Beside them, the others were arriving and taking in the awesome sight.

Lily’s mouth hung open.

Stretch’s eyes were wide.

Even Avenger was impressed enough to fall silent.

It was Pooh Bear who summed up their mood: ‘So this is why they call them
Wonders
.’

But they weren’t there yet.

The wide lake of quicksand still lay between them and the ziggurat—the only means of getting up to the Hanging Gardens.

Halfway between them and the ziggurat, seemingly floating on the surface of the sand-lake, there stood a small roofed structure that looked like a gazebo. Made of stone, it was hexagonal in shape and roughly the size of a single-car garage, but it had no walls, just six pillars holding up a heavy-looking stone roof.

A dead-straight path barely an inch above the surface of the lake stretched out from their position directly toward this hexagonal gazebo—only to end abruptly thirty metres short of the structure.

The path re-emerged nearer to the gazebo, its submerged centre section presumably consumed by the quicksand sometime in the distant past.

As West looked more closely, he saw more paths.

Radiating out from the hexagonal sides of the gazebo, creating a star-shaped pattern, were six stone paths that were also virtually level with the surface of the lake.

Each of these paths also ended abruptly about fifteen metres out from the gazebo.

‘How do we get across?’ Pooh Bear asked. ‘The paths have long been swallowed by the quicksand lake.’

‘Can’t we just follow the straight path?’ Avenger said. ‘Surely it continues just beneath the surface.’

‘Yes. Let’s do exactly that and why don’t you lead the way, you stupid fool Israeli,’ Zaeed said.

Avenger frowned.

‘He means, walk that way if you want to die,’ West said. ‘It’s a trap for the unwary and uninformed. This looks to me like a false-floor trap—the biggest false-floor trap I’ve ever seen. There must be a safe route just underneath the surface of the lake, but you have to know the route to use it and we don’t.’

‘I think we do,’ a quiet voice said from behind him.

Lily.

Everybody turned to face her.

‘We do?’ Pooh Bear said.

‘Yes,’ Lily said. ‘It’s the second “safe route” that the German man wrote down. The first was the safe pathway up the waterfall. This is the second. That’s why he put them together.’

She took Hessler’s diary from West and flipped back a couple of pages, to reveal the page they had looked at only half an hour before, entitled ‘Safe Routes’:

But whereas before they had been looking at the
right
-hand image, now it was the left-hand one that concerned them.

Sure enough, it matched the view before them exactly.

Only it revealed a path hidden beneath the quicksand lake—a circuitous path that skirted the walls of the cavern, crossed through the hexagonal gazebo, and ended at the top of the page, at the base of the ziggurat.

West nodded at Lily, very impressed.

‘Nice work, kiddo. Glad we’ve got someone here who’s got their head screwed on right.’

Lily beamed.

Suddenly Avenger’s earpiece burst to life and he spun around to see his two rear-guards enter the Giant Stairway cave behind and below them.

‘
Sir!
’ one of them said over the radio. ‘
The Americans are crossing the first cavern! There are just too many of them! Under cover of sniper fire, they brought in pontoons and extendable ladders to cross the cavern at its base! They just had too much firepower for
us! We had to retreat! Now they’re coming!’

Avenger said, ‘Okay. I’ll send Weitz back to guide you up the Stairway. Once you’re up, set up another rear-guard position at the top. We still need every second we can get.’

Avenger turned to West. ‘It’s time for you to test your little girl’s theory, Captain. I hope for your sake she’s right. Move.’

And so following the map, West took a hesitant step off the main path, heading
left
, out over what appeared to be pure quicksand and. . . 

. . . his boot landed on solid ground, on an unseen pathway hidden a couple of inches below the oozing surface of the lake.

Lily exhaled in relief.

West tested the lake on either side of the path—and found only inky quicksand of uncertain depth.

‘Looks like we found the pathway,’ he said.

After a quickly-sketched copy of the safe route was made and left for the rear-guards, the group ventured gingerly out across the sand-lake, led by West.

They followed the map, seemingly walking on water, on nothing but the flat surface of the wide quicksand lake, heading way out to the left, then stepping along the left-hand wall, before cutting back toward the centre of the lake and arriving at the central gazebo.

The Gazebo

The ‘gazebo’ structure surprised them all.

For, unlike the hidden path, its floor was
not
level with the surface of the lake. It was sunken twelve feet
below
the level of the lake, a stone rim holding back the sea of quicksand around it.

It was also solid as hell—thick-walled and sturdy.

A short and narrow flight of stone steps led down into this pit— which like the gazebo itself was also six-sided, with doors cut into every one of its sides. The structure’s thick stone roof loomed over it all, a few feet above the rim, resting on its pillars, like a dark thundercloud just waiting to do its worst.

Curiously, just
inside
the walls of the hexagonal pit, forming a kind of inner wall to the structure, was a cylindrical bronze cage— also twelve feet high, made of imposing vertical bars, and criss-crossing bars across its top.

But while the pit had six doors, the circular cage had only one: which currently opened onto West’s entry steps, allowing entry to the pit.

‘Ah, a rotating cage. . . ’ Zaeed said. ‘Once you enter the pit, the cage rotates, and you have to pick the correct exit door. But entering the pit will trigger the trap—hence you must survive the trap in order to cross.’

‘Like that drowning cage in Tunisia,’ Pooh Bear observed.

Last of all, in the exact centre of the pit, mounted on an ornate podium, stood a magnificent statue carved out of black limestone.

It was a statue of a winged lion, depicted on its hind legs in
mid-spring, both forepaws raised high, it wings flared out behind it. It stood five feet tall, and its angry eyes were made of dazzling red rubies.

‘The Well of the Winged Lion. . . ’ Zaeed said to West. ‘The Nazi knew of this, too.’

They found the applicable page in Hessler’s notes:

2ND INSCRIPTION FROM THE TOMB OF IMHOTEP III:

ONLY THE BRAVEST OF SOULS
SHALL PASS THE WELLS OF THE WINGED LIONS.
BUT BEWARE THE PIT OF NINGIZZIDA
TO THOSE WHO ENTER THE SERPENT-LORD’SPIT,
I OFFER NO ADVICE BUT THIS:
ABANDON ALL HOPE,
FOR THERE IS NO ESCAPE FROM IT.

WINGED LIONS.
COMMON ASSYRIAN STATUE FOUND IN
PERSIA/MESOPOTAMIA.
NINGIZZIDA:
ASSYRIAN GOD OF SERPENTS & SNAKES.
POSSIBLE REF TO THE HG OF BABYLON???

‘The Nazi was right,’ Zaeed said, ‘it
was
a reference to the Hanging Gardens—’

Suddenly, a burst of gunfire rang out from the Giant Stairway Cavern behind them.

‘
Sir! The first American squad has reached the Stairway!
’ the rear-guards reported. ‘
Holding them off but more are on the way— and we can’t hold them back forever.
’

‘Delay them as long as you can, Shamburg,’ Avenger said. ‘We still need the time.’

He turned to West. ‘What is this trap?’

West hesitated. ‘I think Zaeed is right. The cage moves in a rotating circle, bringing its gate into alignment with the correct exit door of the pit, which according to the map, is that one directly opposite us—’

‘Find out,’ Avenger said, shoving West forward. ‘Schaefer, go with him. Cover him.’

Covered at gunpoint by the Israeli trooper named Schaefer, West stepped cautiously out from his steps, through the cage’s gate and onto the sunken floor of the gazebo’s pit.

Imhotep’s ancient warning about the well repeated over and over in his head:
only the bravest of souls shall pass.

And then suddenly, four steps in, just as West and his companion stepped out into the centre of the pit beside the statue of the lion, the well’s lethal mechanism sprang into action.

What happened next happened very, very fast.

Screeeeech!
—with an ear-piercing shriek of metal on metal, the circular cage suddenly started
turning,
revolving laterally within the larger hexagonal pit, thus exposing its lone gate—for brief moments—to all six of the stone doorways surrounding the pit.

But then came the worst part.

Shhhhh!
—thick gushing waterfalls of quicksand started
pouring
into the pit from above! Channels in the pit’s rim had opened, allowing the quicksand lake above it to invade the pit. The pit began to flood, the quicksand level quickly rising to West’s knees . . . and continuing to rise!

And instantly, with the turning of the cage and the influx of quicksand from every side, West lost his bearings.

Which, he realised, was precisely the intent of the trap.

You were
meant
to panic, you were
meant
to be disoriented . . . and so exit via the wrong doorway, where presumably worse things awaited—

His Israeli companion panicked.

As one of the revolving cage’s gates came into alignment with one of the pit’s stone doorways, the frightened Corporal Schaefer raced through it—

—into a narrow stairway similar to the one they had descended to get into the pit.

Only this narrow stairway went nowhere. It had no stairway.

It was just a tiny space, barely bigger than a coffin standing vertically.

Then, with shocking suddenness, an eight-foot-high bronze plate, fitted with a barred grille at head-height, slid across
into
the doorway behind Schaefer, sealing him inside the narrow space . . . and suddenly a special waterfall of quicksand began to flood into his tight vertical coffin.

As the sand rained down on his head, Schaefer screamed. It only took seconds for his little space to fill, and West watched in horror through the little face-grille as the sand consumed Schaefer, filled his screaming mouth and swallowed him whole.

The screaming stopped.

Now completely alone, West breathed, ‘
Fuck
me . . .’

The wider pit continued to fill with sticky quicksand—rising past his waist.

And seeing Schaefer die had made him completely lose his bearings. He didn’t know which was the right exit door. He was starting to panic himself.

Only the bravest souls
. . .

Only the bravest
. . .

Don’t panic, Jack. For God’s sake, don’t panic
—

And then he heard Lily scream.

He spun, saw her behind the bars of the moving cage—Avenger and the others had retreated back up their entry steps, but Lily was crouched on the stairs, peering through the doorway, trying to see West.