Seven Ancient Wonders

West grabbed Zaeed's sketch from his pocket—the drawing of the great stalactite (shrouded in scaffolding) visible from outside the mountain through a window-like trapezoidal archway:

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 INSCRIPTION 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 zig-gurat—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.