“Doesn’t look like you get past these traps without the Pillar in your possession.”
“Not without great difficulty,” Wizard agreed.
Down the stairs they climbed, winding back and forth.
At every landing, the wheel-like symbol for the Machine opened but then closed again when it sensed the Pillar in West’s hand.
Down and down.
Wizard counted the stairs as they went, until at last they came to the bottom, where the stairs stopped at a great stone archway—tall and imposing, twenty feet high. It opened onto dense blackness.
Wizard finished his count—“267.”
Jack stepped into the archway, staring out into the blackness beyond it. A light breeze struck his face, cool and crisp.
He sensed a large space before him, so he pulled out his flare gun and fired it into the black.
Fifteen flares later, he just stood there in the archway, his mouth open in wonderment.
“Now that’s a sight you’ll remember for a long time,” he breathed.
THE HALL OF THE MACHINE
The twenty-foot-high archway in which Jack stood looked microscopic compared to the space that opened up below it.
The archway stood at the summit of an immense mountain of stone steps—five hundred of them, maybe more—steps that descended to a flat-floored hall that was easily four hundred feet tall and five hundred wide. The colossal collection of stairs stretched for the entire width of the hall, from wall to wall, an enormous mountainside of perfectly square-cut steps.
The ceiling of this mighty subterranean hall was upheld by a forest of glorious columns, all of which were carved in the colorful Egyptian fashion, with brilliant red-blue-and-green lotus leaves at their tops. There must have been forty such pillars, all in regular rows.
“Just like the temple of Rameses II at Karnak…” Wizard breathed.
“Maybe the temple of Rameses was a replica built in honor of this,” Zoe said.
Standing at the top of the great flight of stairs, Jack felt like he was standing in the topmost row of a modern football stadium, gazing down upon the field far below.
And there was one other thing.
Down in the hall,there was no fourth wall opposite the stair-mountain.
Indeed directly opposite the huge staircase, past the forest of ornate columns, was nothing at all: the polished floor of the hall simply ended abruptly at a sharp edge, a railless balcony five hundred feet wide, essentially a great viewing platform that looked out over an even larger space of more darkness.
But from their vantage point at the top of the staircase, Jack and the others couldn’t see what lay inside this larger space, so they descended the stairs, looking like ants against the gargantuan hall.
They were halfway down the stairs when Jack saw what lay in the larger space.
He stopped dead.
“We’re gonna need more flares,” he breathed.
THE VERTEX AT ABU SIMBEL
THE FIRST VERTEX OF THE MACHINE
JACK, WIZARD, AND ZOE crossed the vast floor of the Hall, passing through the forest of superhigh columns, before they came to the edge of the hall, the point where it looked out over a larger underground void.
A gargantuan abyss dropped away before them. Deep and black and at least a thousand feet wide, it plummeted to unfathomable depths, into the densest darkness Jack had ever seen.
And mounted over it, suspended from the flat stone ceiling above the abyss, was a colossal pyramid— hanging inverted, upside down—perfectly cut and, by the look of it, of exactly the same dimensions as the Great Pyramid at Giza. It looked beyond ancient, beyond anything mankind could hope to build. Its flanks blazed with a lustrous bronze sheen.
Jack was reminded of the Pyramid Inverse at the Louvre in Paris—the beautiful upside-down glass pyramid that hung over a smaller one. Made famous in the blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code, its construction was shrouded in both Masonic and neo-pagan myth.
He also thought of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built as they were into a giant natural stalactite in a great cavern in southern Iraq, and it struck him that perhaps the Gardens were built in homage to this.
Either way, the incredible size of the pyramid dwarfed the hall in which Jack, Wizard, and Zoe stood, the hall that until now had seemed so gigantic.
“Jack. Zoe. Meet the Machine,” Wizard said.
Jack checked his watch.
It was 6:02 A.M. The Jovian equinox would be at 6:12.
They’d made good time.
His radio squawked.
