Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [112]
‘Come on, Captain,’ Avenger said, arriving at West’s side, rousing him from his thoughts. The rest of his team came up behind him, guiding Lily and Pooh Bear with them. ‘You’re not done yet.’
West led the group up the path that spiralled around the stalactite.
Everything was moist, all the overgrown foliage was like that found in a rainforest: plants and mosses that needed moisture rather than sunlight to live.
At times the going was difficult, since some of the bushes had grown out and over the path and hung off the edge, out over the drop.
Although it pained him to do it, West hacked through the fabled plants with a machete, to carve the way.
Higher and higher they went, into the upper reaches of the supercavern.
The great quicksand lake and the ziggurat fell further and further away from them. The drop down to the lake was now a clear 400 feet, dizzyingly high.
At one point along the path, they came across a surprising splash of colour: a beautiful cluster of roses. White roses.
‘How can they survive here without sunlight?’ Pooh Bear asked.
West was thinking the same thing, when he saw the answer: a series of tiny bore-holes cut into the rocky ceiling of the cavern. They were barely a few inches wide, but they seemed to emit light—natural light. The little bore-holes must have reached all the way to the surface of the mountain.
West noticed that the roses would catch daylight from some of the holes for a few moments every day—enough to keep them alive and regenerating.
‘The Persian White Desert Rose,’ he breathed. ‘Extinct. Till now.’
‘Come on,’ Avenger shoved him on, oblivious to the monumental discovery. ‘I’ll put some of them on your grave.’
They pressed on.
On a couple of occasions the path delved into the stalactite— crossing through its core. Whenever it did this, the path met and crossed the claustrophobic vertical bore shaft that West had climbed into at the bottom. The shaft, it seemed, bored all the way up through the great stalactite. On these occasions, the group would just jump across the narrow shaft.
The Catwalk and the Most Holy Shrine
At length, they came to the point where the stalactite met the ceiling of the supercavern.
Here, a rotten wooden catwalk stretched out from the stalactite across the upper surface of the great cave.
The ancient catwalk threaded itself through several U-shaped beams that hung from the ceiling, and it stretched for about fifty metres before it stopped just short of a very large recess in the ceiling.
Handrungs continued from there, heading out across the ceiling and up into the dark recess. To hang from the handrungs meant dangling by your hands high above the quicksand lake 500 feet below.
‘This is it,’ West said. ‘This is where all roads end.’
‘Then go,’ Avenger said. ‘You may even take the Arab with you—although I shall keep the girl with me as insurance.’
West and Pooh Bear ventured out across the ancient catwalk, high above the supercavern.
The wood creaked beneath their feet. Dust and debris fell off the catwalk’s underside, sailing all the way down to the sand-lake. Twice the catwalk lurched suddenly, as if the entire assembly was going to fall.
They reached the end of the catwalk.
‘I’ll go first,’ West said, eyeing the handrungs. ‘I’ll trail a return rope as I go. If the Piece is up in that recess, we’ll need a rope to send it back.’
Pooh Bear nodded. ‘I want to kill them all, Huntsman, for holding a gun to her head.’
‘Me, too. But we have to stay alive. So long as we’re breathing, we’ll still have a chance to do exactly that,’ West said. ‘The key is to stay breathing.’
‘Be careful.’
‘I’ll try, buddy.’
And with that, West grasped the first handrung, and swung out onto it, 500 feet above the world.
Against the spectacular backdrop of the mighty Hanging Gardens, the tiny figure of Jack West Jr swinging hand-over-hand across the rungs in the ceiling of the supercavern looked positively microscopic.
Fluttering near him, watching over him as always, was Horus.
Trailing a ‘return rope’ from his belt—a rope that went all