Seven Ancient Wonders

A radio transmission that had been intercepted an hour before revealed that this pan-European force—French troops, German engineers and an Italian project leader—had just arrived at the final entry trap on their side of the mine. Once they breached that, they would be inside the Grand Cavern itself.

They were progressing quickly.

Which meant they were also well versed in the difficulties found inside the mine.

Fatal difficulties.

Traps.

But the Europeans' progress hadn't been entirely without loss: three members of their point team had died gruesome deaths in a snare on the first day. But the leader of the European expedition— a Vatican-based Jesuit priest named Francisco del Piero—had not let their deaths slow him down.

Single-minded, unstoppable and completely devoid of sympathy, del Piero urged his people onward. Considering what was at stake, the deaths were an acceptable loss.

The Nine kept charging through the swamp on the south side of the mountain, heads bent into the rain, feet pounding through the mud.

They ran like soldiers—low and fast, with balance and purpose, ducking under branches, hurdling bogs, always staying in single file.

In their hands, they held guns: MP-7s, M-16s, Steyr-AUGs. In their thigh holsters were pistols of every kind.

On their backs: packs of various sizes, all bristling with ropes, climbing gear and odd-looking steel struts.

And above them, soaring gracefully over the treetops, was a small shape, a bird of some sort.

Seven of the Nine were indeed soldiers.

Crack troops. Special forces. All from different countries.

The remaining two members were civilians, the elder of whom was a long-bearded 65-year-old professor named Maximilian T. Epper, call-sign: Wizard.

The seven military members of the team had somewhat fiercer nicknames: Huntsman, Witch Doctor, Archer, Bloody Mary, Saladin, Matador and Gunman.

Oddly, however, on this mission they had all acquired new call-signs: Woodsman, Fuzzy, Stretch, Princess Zoe, Pooh Bear, Noddy and Big Ears.

These revised call-signs were the result of the ninth member of the team:

A little girl of ten.

The mountain they were approaching was the last in a long spur of peaks that ended near the Sudanese- Ethiopian border.

Down through these mountains, flowing out of Ethiopia and into the Sudan, poured the Angereb River. Its waters paused briefly in this swamp before continuing on into the Sudan where they would ultimately join the Nile.

The chief resident of the swamp was Crocodylus niloticus, the notorious Nile crocodile. Reaching sizes of up to 6 metres, the Nile crocodile is known for its great size, its brazen cunning, and its ferocity of attack. It is the most man-eating crocodilian in the world, killing upwards of 300 people every year.

While the Nine were approaching the mountain from the south, their EU rivals had set up a base of operations on the northern side, a base that looked like a veritable floating city.

Command boats, mess boats, barracks-boats and gunboats, the small fleet was connected by a network of floating bridges and all were facing toward the focal point of their operation: the massive coffer dam that they had built against the northern flank of the mountain.

It was, one had to admit, an engineering masterpiece: a 100-metre-long, 40-foot-high curved retaining dam that held back the waters of the swamp to reveal a square stone doorway carved into the base of the mountain 40 feet below the waterline.

The artistry on the stone doorway was extraordinary.

Egyptian hieroglyphs covered every square inch of its frame—

but taking pride of place in the very centre of the lintel stone that surmounted the doorway was a glyph often found in pharaonic tombs in Egypt:

Two figures, bound to a staff bearing the jackal head of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the Underworld.

This was what the afterlife had in store for grave-robbers—eternal bondage to Anubis. Not a nice way to spend eternity.

The message was clear: do not enter.

The structure inside the mountain was an ancient mine delved during the reign of Ptolemy I, around the year 300 BC.

During the great age of Egypt, the Sudan was known as 'Nubia', a word derived from the Egyptian word for gold: nub.

Nubia: the Land of Gold.

And indeed it was. It was from Nubia that the ancient Egyptians sourced the gold for their many temples and treasures.

Records unearthed in Alexandria revealed that this mine had run out of gold 70 years after its founding, after which it gained a second life as a quarry for the rare hardstone, diorite. Once it was exhausted of diorite—around the year 226 BC—Pharaoh Ptolemy III decided to use the mine for a very special purpose.

To this end, he dispatched his best architect—Imhotep V—and a force of 2,000 men.

They would work on the project in absolute secrecy for three whole years.

The northern entrance to the mine had been the main entrance.

Originally, it had been level with the waterline of the swamp, and through its doors a wide canal bored horizontally into the mountain. Bargeloads of gold and diorite would be brought out of the mine via this canal.

But then Imhotep V had come and reconfigured it.

Using a temporary dam not unlike the one the European force was using today, his men had held back the waters of the swamp while his engineers had lowered the level of the doorway, dropping it 40 feet. The original door was bricked in and covered over with soil.

Imhotep had then disassembled the dam and allowed the swampwaters to flood back over the new doorway, concealing it for over 2,000 years.

Until today.

But there was a second entrance to the mine, a lesser-known one, on the south side of the mountain.

It was a back door, the endpoint of a slipway that had been used to dispose of waste during the original digging of the mine. It too had been reconfigured.

It was this entrance that the Nine were seeking.

Guided by the tall white-bearded Wizard—who held in one hand a very ancient papyrus scroll, and in the other a very modern sonic-resonance imager—they stopped abruptly on a mud-mound about 80 metres from the base of the mountain. It was shaded by four bending lotus trees.

'Here!' the old fellow called, seeing something on the mound. 'Oh dear. The village boys did find it.'

In the middle of the muddy dome, sunken into it, was a tiny square hole, barely wide enough for a man to fit into. Stinking brown mud lined its edges.

You'd never see it if you weren't looking for it, but it just so happened that this hole was exactly what Professor Max T. Epper was searching for.

He read quickly from his papyrus scroll:

'In the Nubian swamp to the south of Soter's mine, Among Sobek s minions, Find the four symbols of the Lower Kingdom. Therein lies the portal to the harder route.'

Epper looked up at his companions. 'Four lotus trees: the lotus was the symbol of the Lower Kingdom. Sobek's minions are crocodiles, since Sobek was the Egyptian crocodile god. In a swamp to the south of Soter's mine—Soter being the other name for Ptolemy I. This is it.'

A small wicker basket lay askew next to the muddy hole—the kind of basket used by rural Sudanese.