Seven Ancient Wonders Read Free

sizzled down the drop-rope, shooting past three steeply slanted cross-shafts that intersected with the main shaft.
    His falcon sat snugly in a pouch on his chest, while on his head he wore a weathered and worn
fireman
’s helmet, bearing the badge ‘FDNY Precinct 17’. The battered helmet was fitted with a wraparound protective eye visor and on the left side, a powerful pen-sized flashlight. The rest of his team wore similar helmets, variously modified with flashlights, visors and cameras.
    West eyed the cross-shafts as he slid down the rope. He knew what perils lay within them. ‘Everyone. Stay sharp. Do not, I repeat, do not make any contact with the walls of this shaft.’
    He didn’t and they didn’t.
    Safely, he came to the bottom of the rope.
    The Atrium
     
    West emerged from the ceiling at one end of a long stone-walled room, hanging from his drop-rope.
    He did not lower himself all the way to the floor, just kept hanging about 8 feet above it.
    By the eerie yellow light of his original glowstick, he beheld a rectangular room about thirty metres long. The room’s floor was covered by a shallow layer of swampwater, water that was absolutely
crawling
with Nile crocodiles—not an inch of floorspace was crocodile-free.
    And directly beneath West, protruding half out of the water, were the waterlogged, half-eaten bodies of two twentysomething Sudanese men. The bodies lolled lifelessly as three big crocs took great crunching bites out of them.
    ‘Big Ears,’ West said into his throat microphone, ‘there’s a sight down here that’s not PG-13. Tell Lily not to look down when you two reach the bottom of the rope.’
    ‘
Righto to to that, boss
,’ came an Irish-accented reply over his earpiece.
    West fired a luminescent amber flare down the length of the atrium.
    It was as if the chamber came alive.
    Deeply cut lines of hieroglyphs covered the walls,
thousands
of them.
    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. ‘
Dropcages 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 forward. 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