Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [101]
‘Allah have mercy,’ Pooh Bear said, gazing up at the falls. At 300 feet, they were the size of a thirty-storey building.
‘There!’ West called.
A narrow stone path in the rockface led behind the lowest tier of the waterfall.
West hurried along it. The others followed. But when they arrived behind the curtain of falling water, they were confronted by something they hadn’t expected.
On every tier of the falls, the water was thrown quite a way out from the cliff-wall, propelled by its rapid speed. This meant that the actual face of each tier was largely water-free—except for a layer of moss and a constant trickle of dribbling water. It alsomeant that each cliff-face was concealed by the falls themselves.
And behind the curtains of water was a most curious feature.
Cut into the face of each rockwall was a dizzying network of ultra-narrow paths that criss-crossed up them. There were maybe six paths in total, but they wound and intersected in so many ways that the number of permutations they created was huge.
Gazing at the twisting array of pathways on the first cliff-face, West saw with dismay the alarming number of wall-holes and blade-holes that opened onto the paths.
Booby traps.
Zaeed was awed. ‘Imhotep III. A genius, he was, but a sinister genius. This is a very rare type of trap system but typical of his flair. There are many paths with deadly snares, but only one of the pathways is safe.’
‘How do we know which route is the safe one?’ Stretch asked. ‘They all seem to intertwine.’
Beside West, Lily was gazing intently at the path system behind the waterfall.
As she looked at it, something clicked in her mind.
‘I’ve seen this before . . .’ she said.
She reached into West’s backpack and extracted a printout.
It was titled: ‘Waterfall Entrance—Refortification by Imhotep III in the time of Ptolemy Soter’.
‘Well, would you look at that. . . ’ Stretch said.
The lines on the printed image exactly matched the layout of the pathways on the waterfall.
‘But which path is the safe route?’ Pooh Bear asked anxiously.
‘That I don’t know,’ Lily said, deflating.
‘Wait a second,’ West said. ‘Maybe you do. . . ’
Now he rifled through his pack for a few moments, before he said, ‘Got it!’
He pulled from the backpack a tattered brown leatherbound notebook.
The diary of the Nazi archaeologist, Hessler.
‘Hessler knew the safe path,’ West said, flicking the pages of the diary until he found what he was looking for.
‘Here!’ He held the diary open, revealing a page they had seen before:
Its title was ‘Safe Routes’.
West smiled.
He brought the right-hand image from this page alongside the picture of the waterfall’s paths, and everyone else saw it—the right-hand ‘Safe Route’ matched one of the twisting paths on the waterfall diagram perfectly:
‘You know, Captain West,’ Zaeed said, ‘you’re a lot cleverer than I give you credit for. I shall have to watch you.’
‘Thanks,’ West said dryly.
As he spoke, he stole a glance at the plain behind them. In the far distance, a high dustcloud stretched across the sandplain, from horizon to horizon—a sandstorm, or perhaps something else. . .
The dustcloud of two massive convoys.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
Up the vertical cliff-wall they went, following the safe path, with the roaring curtain of water falling behind their backs. Diffused sunlight lanced in through falling water, lighting the way.
West climbed in the lead, with Horus in his chest pouch.
Their path twisted and turned, doubling back and forth as it rose up the cliff-face. It was so narrow that the team could only climb it in single-file, and it was covered in slippery moss, so their progress was slow. That said, without the map, they could never have figured out the safe route up the falls.
At both of the middle ledges in the waterfall, the path burrowed into the rockface as a tunnel—a tunnel that emerged above the ledge, giving access to the next level.
And so after twenty minutes of careful climbing, they reached the top of the third rockface.