“Huntsman, you still alive down there?”Pooh Bear asked anxiously.
“We’re in. We’ve found the Machine.”
“Sky Monster just called. He’s picked up a large force of land vehicles heading this way from Aswan. Over a hundred vehicles coming in behind the tourist coaches.”
“ETA?” Jack asked.
“An hour, maybe less.”
Jack did some calculations in his head. “We can be gone by then. Just.”
As Jack spoke into the radio, Zoe and Wizard examined the walls of the hall.
They were literally covered in images—thousands and thousands of beautiful and intricate carvings.
Some they recognized, like the Mystery of the Circles, the circular symbol for the Machine, and even the layout of Stonehenge was there. But others were completely new:
Zoe quickly pulled out a high-res Canon digital camera and started clicking away, trying to capture as many of the images as she could.
“That’s Ur,” Wizard exclaimed, pointing at the second to last image.
“It is?” Zoe said.
“It’s the layout of the ancient city of Ur, in Mesopotamia. Ur famously had two walled harbors, one to the west, the other to the north—you can see both of them clearly in the carving. Until the Great Pyramid was built, the Ziggurat at Ur was the tallest building in the world. And do you know what the word ‘Ur’ means?”
“Tell me.”
“Light. The City of Light.”
Taking pride of place in the center of the wall was a huge polished obsidian plaque. Every carving in it was edged with gold and its ornate frame also appeared to be cut from a single square piece of gold:
“Oh my God, the six vertices…” Wizard breathed. “That symbol repeated on the left, an inverted triangle surmounting a rectangle, is Thoth for ‘vertex.’ This carving is a description of all six vertices. I’ll have to get Lily to decipher it.”
Zoe snapped several photos of the plaque, then stared at the incredible hall around them and the gravity- defying pyramid suspended above the abyss.
“Wizard, who could build a place like this?” she asked. “Not ancient man. Not even modern man could do something like this.”
“This is true,” Wizard said. “So who could? Extraterrestrial visitors? Some think so—over 70 percent of people believe that the Earth has been visited by aliens at some point in history. And if they exist, perhaps aliens did visit our planet and build these structures. But I don’t subscribe to that view.”
“What do you think?”
“He thinks men built them,” Jack said, joining them, scanning the walls as he did so. “Hey, it’s Ur.”
“Men?” Zoe frowned. “But I thought you agreed that neither modern nor ancient man could have—”
“I did agree. But I didn’t rule out a race of super ancient men,” Wizard said.
“The past civilization theory,” Jack said.
“Yes,” Wizard said. “The theory that ours is not the first advanced civilization to flourish on this planet. That over the eons, in between asteroid impacts, comet strikes, and deadly Dark Stars, human-type beings have on numerous occasions risen above their animal neighbors, thrived, and then died out, only to rise again millions of years later.”
“You think a previous civilization of people built all this?” Zoe asked.
“Yes. A highly advanced human civilization, far more advanced than we are today. Why, did you notice how all the doors and steps we have passed through to get here have all been suited to our size and stature? This is not coincidence. That an alien culture would build human -sized steps would be an astronomical coincidence. No, this structure—this wonderful structure—was built by human hands a long,long time ago.”
“Humans who despite their advancements couldn’t save themselves from extinction,” Zoe pointed out.
“Maybe something else killed them,” Jack said. “While they were building this, a rogue asteroid might have wiped them out.”
Wizard nodded. “A lot can happen in a hundred million years. Entire species can emerge, evolve, thrive, and become extinct in that time. By contrast, modern Homo sapiens is only a hundred thousand years old. And hey, at least the people who built this Machine were trying to save themselves from the future return of the Dark Star.”
“Wizard, sorry to interrupt, but would you mind taking a look at this.” Jack had moved to the edge of the balcony and was gazing at the colossal inverted pyramid through a pair of binoculars.
The peak of the upside-down pyramid hovered level with their balcony, but it was still three hundred feet— about ninety yards—away.
“The peak isn’t pointed,” he said, handing the binoculars to Wizard. “It’s flat at the summit.”
“Like the Great Pyramid was?” Zoe said.
“Sort of, but smaller. Much smaller,” Wizard said. “About the size of”—he looked at the Pillar in Jack’s hands “—that.”
“So how do we get over there to place it?” Zoe asked.
