Seven Ancient Wonders

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.

Technically, they were in Tunisia. The landscape was empty and dry. There wasn't a village or human settlement for fifty miles in any direction.

In fact, the landscape could better be described as a moonscape: the flat sandplain, the occasional meteorite crater, and of course the chain of mountains guarding the landward approach about a kilometre inland.

'You know,' Big Ears said, 'they filmed Star Wars in Tunisia. The Tatooine