Seven Ancient Wonders

And at the far end of the chamber, West saw his goal: a squat trapezoidal doorway, raised several feet off the watery floor.

The eerie yellow glow of the flare also revealed one other important feature of the atrium—its ceiling.

Embedded in the ceiling was a line of handrungs, leading to the far raised doorway. Each rung, however, was lodged in a dark square hole that disappeared up into the ceiling itself.

'Wizard,' West said, 'I've got handrungs.'

'According to the inscription in Imhotep's tomb, we have to avoid the third and the eighth rungs,' Wizard's voice said. 'Drop-cages above them. The rest are okay.'

'Gotcha.'

The Eight traversed the atrium quickly, swinging hand-overhand down the length of the chamber, avoiding the two suspect handrungs, their feet dangling just a few feet above the crocs.

The little girl—Lily—moved in the middle of the group, clinging to the biggest trooper of the Nine, her hands clasped around his neck, while he swung from rung to rung.

The Low Tunnel

A long low tunnel led away from the atrium, heading into the mountain.

West and his team ran down it, all bent forwards. Horus had been set free and she flew out in front of West, gliding down the passageway. Lily ran fully upright.

Water dripped from the low stone ceiling, but it hit their firemen's helmets and rolled off their curved backs, away from their eyes.

The tunnel was perfectly square—1.3 metres wide, 1.3 metres high. Curiously, these were exactly the same dimensions as the passageways inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Like the entry shaft earlier, this horizontal tunnel was intersected by three cross-shafts: only these were vertical and they spanned the entire width of the tunnel, cutting across it via matching holes in the ceiling and floor.

At one point, Lily's guardian, the large trooper named Big Ears, mis-stepped—landing on a trigger stone just before he leapt across one of the cross-shafts.

He knew his mistake immediately and stopped abruptly at the edge of the shaft—

—just as a gushing waterfall of swampwater came blasting out of the upper hole, forming a curtain of water in front of him, before disappearing into the matching hole in the floor.

Had he jumped, the rush of water would have taken him and Lily down into the unknown depths of the lower hole.

'Careful, brother dearest,' the team member in front of him said after the water had passed. She was the only woman in the group and a member of the crack Irish commando unit, the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm. Old call- sign: Bloody Mary. New one: Princess Zoe. Her brother, Big Ears, was also a member of the SFA.

She reached out and caught his hand and with her help he leapt over the cross-shaft and, with Lily between them, they took off after the others.

The Water Chamber (The First Gate)

The low tunnel opened onto a chamber the size of a small chapel. Incongruously, the floor of this chamber seemed to be made up of a lush carpet of green grass.

Only it wasn't grass.

It was algae. And beneath the algae, water—a rectangular pool of perfectly flat, undisturbed water.

And no crocs. Not a single one.

At the far end of the chamber—beyond the long placid pool, just above the waterline—were three low rectangular holes, burrowing into the far wall, each roughly the size of a coffin.

An object floated in the pool near the entrance. West recognised it instantly.

A human body. Dead.

The third and last Sudanese man.

Breathless, Wizard came up alongside West. 'Ah-ha, the First Gate. Ooh my, how clever. It's a false-floor chamber, just like we saw beneath the volcano in Uganda. Ah, Imhotep V. He always respected the classic traps . . .'

'Max . . .' West said.

'Ooh, and it's connected to a Solomon's Choice of spike holes: three holes, but only one is safe. This is some gate. I bet the ceiling is on rollers—'

'Max. You can write a book about it later. The state of the water?'

'Yes, sorry, ahem . . .' Wizard pulled a dipstick from a water

testing kit on his belt and dipped it into the algae-covered pool. Its tip quickly turned a vivid red.

Wizard frowned. 'Extremely high levels of the bloodworm Schistosoma mansoni. Be careful, my friend, this water is beyond septic. It's teeming with S. mansoni.''

'What's that?' Big Ears asked from behind them.

'It's a microscopic bloodworm that penetrates the body through the skin or any exposed orifice, and then lays eggs in the bloodstream,' West answered.

Wizard added, 'Infection leads to spinal cord inflammation, lower-body paralysis and, ultimately, a cerebral aneurism and death. Ancient grave robbers went mad after entering places like this. They blamed angry gods and mystical curses, but in all likelihood it was the S. mansoni. But at these levels, gosh, this water will kill you in minutes. Whatever you do, Jack, don't fall in.'

'Okay then,' West said, 'the jump-stone configuration.'

'Right, right . . .' The older man hurriedly pulled a notebook from his jacket pocket, started flipping pages.

A 'false-floor chamber' was a fairly common booby trap in the ancient Egyptian world—mainly because it was very simple to built and exceedingly effective. It worked by concealing a safe pathway of stepping-stones beneath a false layer of liquid—which could be anything really: quicksand, boiling mud, tar, or, most commonly, bacteria- infected water.

You defeated a false-floor chamber by knowing the location of the stepping-stones in it.

Wizard found the page he was after. 'Okay. Here it is. Soter's Mine. Nubia. First Gate. Water chamber. Ah-ha. Five by five grid: the sequence of the jump-stones is 1-3-4-1-3.'

'1-3-4-1-3,' West repeated. 'And which spike hole? I'm going to have to choose quickly.'

'Key of life,' Wizard said, consulting his notebook.

'Thanks. Horus, chest.' On command, the falcon immediately whizzed to West's chest and nestled in a pouch there.

West then turned to the assembled group behind him: 'Okay,

folks, listen up. Everyone is to follow me closely. If our friend Imhotep V follows his usual modus operandi, as soon as I step on the first stepping-stone, things are gonna get frantic. Stay close because we won't have much time.'

West turned and contemplated the placid pool of algae-covered water. He bit his lip for a second. Then he took a deep breath.

Then he jumped out into the chamber, out over the surface of the pool, angling his leap way out to the left.

It was a long jump—he couldn't have just stepped that far.

Watching, Wizard gasped.

But rather than plunging into the deadly water, West landed lightly on the surface of the flat green pool— looking like he was walking on water.

His thick-soled boots stood an inch deep. He was standing on some kind of stepping-stone hidden underneath the algae-covered surface.

Wizard exhaled the breath he'd been holding.

Less obviously, West did, too.

But their relief was shortlived, for at that moment the trap mechanism of the water chamber came loudly and spectacularly to life.