Seven Wonders Read Free Page B

helmet focused in the direction he’d seen the opening. The seconds passed in silence, broken only by the soft creak of the leather straps of the harness.
    “Christ,” Jack whispered as the opening suddenly came into view. “Stop!”
    The aluminum rope jerked tight. Jack trained the flashlight directly ahead of him.
    He’d been right. There was an opening in the rock, and it was even bigger than he’d thought. Arched, taller than him at its peak, with a floor that looked like it was sloping downward. It appeared to be the entrance tosome sort of cave. Even more fascinating, it looked man-made. Not only were the edges smooth and the dimensions precise and symmetrical, in each corner of the opening, standing about a foot and a half tall, was a matching carved statue.
    “You’re not going to believe what I’m looking at,” Jack said.
    “Is it Artemis?” Andy joked. “She down there waiting to take you up to Mt. Olympus, introduce you to the family?”
    Not a bad guess , Jack thought to himself as he shined the flashlight over the twin statues. They were both decidedly female. But where the Greek goddess Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was usually depicted holding a spear or bow and arrow, sometimes on a horse, these statues were thematically different. The two carved women were naked from the waist up and appeared to be covered in dozens of chiseled stone eggs. Furthermore, both of the statues had only a single breast; it appeared that on each one, the right breast had been removed.
    “You’re off by about three thousand years,” Jack said, half to himself. His heart was beating hard, and there was a familiar feeling moving up through his spine.
    It was the feeling he got when he was about to do something really stupid.
    He began shifting his weight back and forth against the harness, causing his body to swing forward and back—inches at first, but steadily gaining in speed, his body arcing through the air like the metal weight at the end of a pendulum.
    “It’s a natural assumption,” he said, reflexively shifting into teaching mode as he swung, rocking himself faster and faster, “that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was built by the Greeks to worship Artemis. And at least three of the iterations of the great Wonder—which was destroyed four times—were indeed built for the goddess of the hunt.”
    Certainly the version of the Temple described in most textbooks wasdedicated to Artemis. It had once been twice as long as the Parthenon, the first building ever constructed entirely of marble, and had taken a hundred and twenty years to build. If the Goths hadn’t burned most of it down in 268 AD, it might very well have remained one of the most impressive buildings in the world.
    “The Temple before that was nearly as grand,” Jack continued, breathing hard now as he rocked through the air, tilting his body so that he was facing the opening dead on, “but was much better known for how it had been destroyed. A local narcissist named Herostratus wanted to be famous and figured the way to fame was to burn the building to the ground. For his efforts, he was tortured to death; then the town leaders made a law that anyone who even mentioned his name would also be put to death.”
    It was that iteration of the Temple that the British Museum team had been studying when they had discovered the limestone mantle thirty feet beneath the base of the column that had been built from fragments of all four sets of ancient ruins—a memorial to the incredible feat of architecture that had once stood in this place.
    “And even before that, the Temple was decidedly a Greek monument; there are writings from all over the Ionic empire lauding the people of Ephesus, who were diligent in their Artemis worship. But go back another few thousand years and that’s where this place gets really interesting.”
    Jack took a deep breath of the cool, musty air that was now whipping against his cheeks. This seemingly bottomless pit,