Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [44]
Or a trident.
Two tridents.
The section of cliff immediately behind the two tridents looked particularly forbidding—vertical and rough, with the upper section of the great cliff partially overhanging its base. Very difficult to scale.
‘Wizard! Come in!’ West called into his radio mike. ‘I’ve found them!’
An hour later, the Halicarnassus had landed on the flat sandy plain, dropped off a Land Rover four-wheel drive from its belly, and then lifted off to take up a holding pattern a hundred miles to the south.
Bouncing along in the Land Rover, the team joined West—now standing on the windswept cliff overlooking the two tridents. The team numbered seven, since the injured Fuzzy had stayed in the Halicarnassus with Sky Monster, along with Horus. Big Ears, however, was there and still mobile, thanks to a cocktail of painkillers.
Technically, they were in Tunisia. The landscape was empty and dry. There wasn’t a village or human settlement for fifty miles in any direction.
In fact, the landscape could better be described as a moonscape: the flat sandplain, the occasional meteorite crater, and of course the chain of mountains guarding the landward approach about a kilometre inland.
‘You know,’ Big Ears said, ‘they filmed Star Wars in Tunisia. The Tatooine scenes.’
‘I can see why,’ West said, not turning from the view of the sea. ‘It’s totally alien.’
Wizard came alongside West, handed him a printout. ‘This is the only reference my database has for Hamilcar’s Refuge. It’s a hand-drawn sketch on papyrus found in a worker’s hut in Alexandria, an Egyptian worker who must have worked on Imhotep VI’s reconfiguration of Hamilcar’s Refuge.’
The papyrus sheet bore a carefully-crafted diagram on it:
It was hard to tell exactly what the image depicted. Cut off at the top and bottom, it didn’t seem to show the entire structure.
‘Aqueducts and guard towers,’ West said, ‘and a filled-in excavation tunnel. Jesus, this place must be huge.’ He scanned the landscape all around him, but saw nothing but barren desert and the harsh coast. ‘But if it’s so huge, where the hell is it?’
He checked his printout of the Euclidian clue:
Follow the Deadly Coast of the Phoenicians
To the inlet of the two tridents,
Where you will behold the easier entrance to
The sixth Great Architect’s masterwork.
The Seventh has lain there ever since.
‘“The inlet of the two tridents”,’ he read aloud. ‘We’ve found the two tridents, so there’s supposed to be an inlet here. But I don’t see one. It’s all just one seamless coastline.’
It was true.
There was no bay or inlet in the coast anywhere nearby.
‘Just hold on a moment . . .’ Epper said.
He dug into his rucksack and extracted a tripod-mounted device.
‘Sonic-resonance imager,’ he said, erecting the tripod on the sand. He then aimed it downward and hit a switch. ‘It’ll show us the density of the earth beneath our feet.’
The sonic-resonance imager pinged slowly.
Piiiing-piiiing-piiiing.
‘Solid sandstone. All the way to the imager’s depth limit,’ Wizard said. ‘As you’d expect.’
Then he swivelled the imager on its tripod and aimed it at the ground a few yards to the west, the section of coastline directly in line with the two tridents—
Ping-ping-ping-ping-ping-ping . . .
The imager’s pinging went bananas.
West turned to Wizard. ‘Explain?’
The old man looked at his display. It read:
TOTAL DEPTH: 8.0 m.
SUBSTANCE ANALYSIS: SILICON OVERLAY 5.5 m;
GRANITE UNDERLAY 2.5 m.
Wizard said, ‘Depth here is eight metres. Mix of hard-packed sand and granite.’
‘Eight metres?’ Pooh Bear said. ‘How can that be? We’re 130 metres above sea level. That would mean there’s 92 metres of empty air beneath that section of ground—’
‘Oh, no way . . .’ West said, understanding.
‘Yes way . . .’ Wizard said, also seeing it.
West looked back inland at the sandplain stretching to the nearest mountain a kilometre away. The sand appeared to be seamless. ‘Amazing the things you can do with a workforce of