Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [106]
The Israeli major nodded, turned to two of his men. ‘Shamburg. Riel. Make a rear-guard post here. Hold them off for as long as you can, then catch up.’
‘Sir!’
‘Yes, sir!’
Avenger then grabbed Lily from West, held her roughly by the collar. ‘Lead the way, Captain.’
They hadn’t taken ten steps down the next tunnel before they heard gunfire from the two rear-guards.
Sustained gunfire.
More Americans had arrived at the sand cavern—having probably completely disabled the sliding stone mechanism by now.
Two men wouldn’t hold them off for long.
The Giant Stairway
After passing through the short tunnel, West led his now-larger group into another cube-shaped chamber—about fifty feet high, wide and long—only this time, his tunnel opened onto the chamber from the base, not up near the ceiling.
Before him was a rail-less stone path which hugged the chamber’s left-hand wall. A quicksand pool lay to the right, filling the rest of the floor.
The low stone path, however, led to something quite astonishing.
Seven giant stone steps that rose magnificently upward to a doorway cut into the ceiling of this chamber. Each step must have been at least seven feet high, and they all bristled with holes and recesses of various shapes and sizes, some of them door-sized, others basketball-sized, every one of them no doubt fitted with deadly snares just waiting to be triggered.
To the left of the giant stairway, flush against it, was the same stone wall that flanked the path. It was also dotted with variously-sized trap-holes. To the right of the stairs, there was nothing but empty air.
The intent was clear: if you were thrown off the stairs, you fell all the way down to the floor, made entirely of quicksand.
‘It’s the levels,’ Zaeed realised.
‘What?’ West said.
‘Remember the progress report I found, the sketch of the Gardens under construction. These steps weren’t originally steps at all. They were the step-like levels that led up to the main archway of the cave. Imhotep III converted them into this ascending stairway trap.’
‘Clever.’
Zaeed said, ‘If I’m right, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon lie beyond that doorway in the ceiling.’
Avenger pushed West forward—while maintaining his grip on Lily. ‘Captain West, please. Time is of the essence. Lead the way.’
West did so, taking on the giant steps.
He encountered traps on nearly every one.
Blasts of quicksand, trapdoors, upward-springing spikes designed to lance through his grasping hands, even a one-ton boulder that rolled suddenly across the fifth step.
But through skill and speed and quick thinking, he got past them all, until finally he stepped up into the opening in the ceiling, emerging on a dark platform which he sensed opened onto a wider, infinitely more vast space. And so he lit a flare and held it aloft and for one brief moment in time, standing alone in the darkness, Jack West Jr beheld a sight no-one had seen for over 2,500 years.
Standing there before him, in all their incredible glory, were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
He needed eight more flares to illuminate the gargantuan cavern fully.
It was better described as a supercavern, for it was the size of twenty football fields laid out in a grid. It was perfectly square in shape, and its floor was made up entirely of quicksand—giving it the appearance of a vast flat lake of yellow sand.
And rising up from this sand-lake, in the exact centre of the supercavern, was a fifteen-storey ziggurat—the variety of stepped pyramid common in ancient Mesopotamia.
But it was the natural feature that lay above the ziggurat that inspired sheer wonder.
An absolutely immense limestone stalactite hung from the ceiling of the cave directly above the ziggurat. It was so huge, its mass so great, it dwarfed the ziggurat. Perhaps 25 storeys tall, it looked like an inverted mountain suspended from the ceiling of the supercavern,