solstices and eclipses, but never with Jupiter. If Wizard’s hypothesis is correct and this Firestone is the real deal, then we’re going to see something that hasn’t been seen for over 4,500 years.”
Julius said, “Can I add that the good folk at English Heritage don’t look kindly on people who step over the rope at Stonehenge and walk among the stones, let alone lunatics like us wanting to perform ancient occult rituals. There’ll be security guards.”
“Leave the guards to me,” Zoe said. “You just handle the occult ritual.”
The twins pulled out Wizard’s notes again, gazed at the diagram of Stonehenge:
“In his notes, Wizard says that the Ramesean Stone at Stonehenge is the Altar Stone,” Julius said. “But what about the Grand Trilithon? It’s the signature element of Stonehenge.”
“No, I’d go with the Altar Stone, too,” Lachlan said. “It’s the focal point of the structure. It’s also made of bluestone, laid at the same time as the original ring of bluestones, so it’s older than the trilithons. And fortunately for us, it’s still there.”
Over four-and-a-half millennia, Stonehenge had been pilfered by locals searching for stones to use as walls or as millstones. Nearly all the bluestones of the henge were gone. The bigger trilithons had survived—at over eighteen feet tall (twenty-one in the case of the Grand Trilithon) they had just been too big for the local peasants to move.
Lachlan turned to Alby: “What do you reckon, kid?”
Alby looked up, surprised to be asked his opinion. He had thought that, as kids, he and Lily were just being brought along for the ride, assigned to Zoe to be kept safe.
“Well?” Lachlan said expectantly. “Jack West thinks you’re a clever one and Jack’s a notoriously hard judge. And Zoe here doesn’t hang out with losers—I mean, hey, look at us.”
Lily raised an eyebrow at that.
Julius added, “And weren’t you the one who figured out the connection between the Titanic Rising and Stonehenge?”
Alby swallowed. Lily smiled at him reassuringly. She had long ago become used to this kind of adult treatment.
“I, well,” Alby stammered. “The stone we’re after has to fit some way with the Firestone. I can’t see the Firestone fitting onto the Grand Trilithon in any practical way. But the Altar Stone, if reerected, would be at the very heart of the structure. The other thing to remember is the rising of Titan to the northeast—”
“Ah, yes, yes. Good point,” Julius said.
They had gone through this earlier.
As Alby had explained briefly at the meeting in Dubai, the Titanic Rising and Sinking occurred only when the Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn were in alignment, something that occurred approximately once every 400 years, and which—clearly by no coincidence—was happening right now.
The “rising” of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, actually preceded the passage of Saturn itself, rising from behind the great hulking mass of Jupiter. Soon after this rising, Saturn would sink again behind Jupiter. Due to each planet’s angled orbit around the Sun—its ecliptic—this upward-downward motion occurred eight times in the month that the planets remained aligned.
Seen from Stonehenge, first Jupiter would appear on the northeastern horizon, then Titan, then Saturn.
“So why is this Titanic Rising so important?” Zoe asked. “What does Titan or Jupiter or Saturn have to do with the Sa-Benben and the Dark Star?”
“The connection with the Sa-Benben is straightforward,” Julius said. “It’s the connection between Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid that people have been searching for for centuries. Our theory is simple: the Pyramid is a temple to our Sun. Stonehenge is a temple to the Dark Sun.”
“And the two are most certainly linked geographically,” Lachlan added. “You know how the bluestones were brought to the Salisbury Plain from the Preseli Hills in Wales?”
“Yes, Lachlan,” Zoe said patiently. “I do have two degrees in archaeology. I just didn’t do the subjects on Crazy British Neolithic Cosmology that you obviously majored in.”
“Then you know about the rectangle formed by the four original Station Stones that once surrounded Stonehenge?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t,” Lily said.
To illustrate, Lachlan opened a book, showing Lily a picture of Stonehenge’s layout. Arrayed around the circular henge in a perfect rectangle were four stones known as the “Station Stones.” They formed a 5:12 rectangle.
Lachlan said, “Now, if you draw a diagonal across that rectangle, simple Pythagorean math tells us that the resulting right-angle triangle is a 5:12:13 triangle.”
He drew a triangle on the picture with a pencil.
“Following me?” he said.
“So far,” Lily said.
“Nice triangle, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
Lachlan then pulled out a map of the United Kingdom. He indicated Stonehenge at the bottom of the map, and then drew the same 5:12:13 triangle on the map using Stonehenge as the tip of the triangle and keeping the triangle’s baseline parallel to the equator.
