Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [5]
The Atrium
West emerged from the ceiling at one end of a long stone-walled room, hanging from his drop-rope.
He did not lower himself all the way to the floor, just kept hanging about 8 feet above it.
By the eerie yellow light of his original glowstick, he beheld a rectangular room about thirty metres long. The room’s floor was covered by a shallow layer of swampwater, water that was absolutely crawling with Nile crocodiles—not an inch of floorspace was crocodile-free.
And directly beneath West, protruding half out of the water, were the waterlogged, half-eaten bodies of two twentysomething Sudanese men. The bodies lolled lifelessly as three big crocs took great crunching bites out of them.
‘Big Ears,’ West said into his throat microphone, ‘there’s a sight down here that’s not PG-13. Tell Lily not to look down when you two reach the bottom of the rope.’
‘Righto to to that, boss,’ came an Irish-accented reply over his earpiece.
West fired a luminescent amber flare down the length of the atrium.
It was as if the chamber came alive.
Deeply cut lines of hieroglyphs covered the walls, thousands of them.
And at the far end of the chamber, West saw his goal: a squat trapezoidal doorway, raised several feet off the watery floor.
The eerie yellow glow of the flare also revealed one other important feature of the atrium—its ceiling.
Embedded in the ceiling was a line of handrungs, leading to the far raised doorway. Each rung, however, was lodged in a dark square hole that disappeared up into the ceiling itself.
‘Wizard,’ West said, ‘I’ve got handrungs.’
‘According to the inscription in Imhotep’s tomb, we have to avoid the third and the eighth rungs,’ Wizard’s voice said. ‘Dropcages above them. The rest are okay.’
‘Gotcha.’
The Eight traversed the atrium quickly, swinging hand-overhand down the length of the chamber, avoiding the two suspect handrungs, their feet dangling just a few feet above the crocs.
The little girl—Lily—moved in the middle of the group, clinging to the biggest trooper of the Nine, her hands clasped around his neck, while he swung from rung to rung.
The Low Tunnel
A long low tunnel led away from the atrium, heading into the mountain.
West and his team ran down it, all bent forward. Horus had been set free and she flew out in front of West, gliding down the passageway. Lily ran fully upright.
Water dripped from the low stone ceiling, but it hit their firemen’s helmets and rolled off their curved backs, away from their eyes.
The tunnel was perfectly square—1.3 metres wide, 1.3 metres high. Curiously, these were exactly the same dimensions as the passageways inside the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Like the entry shaft earlier, this horizontal tunnel was intersected by three cross-shafts: only these were vertical and they spanned the entire width of the tunnel, cutting across it via matching holes in the ceiling and floor.
At one point, Lily’s guardian, the large trooper named Big Ears, mis-stepped—landing on a trigger stone just before he leapt across one of the cross-shafts.
He knew his mistake immediately and stopped abruptly at the edge of the shaft—
—just as a gushing waterfall of swampwater came blasting out of the upper hole, forming a curtain of water in front of him, before disappearing into the matching hole in the floor.
Had he jumped, the rush of water would have taken him and Lily down into the unknown depths of the lower hole.
‘Careful, brother dearest,’ the team member in front of him said after the water had passed. She was the only woman in the group and a member of the crack Irish commando unit, the Sciathan Fhianoglach an Airm. Old call-sign: Bloody Mary. New one: Princess Zoe. Her brother, Big Ears, was also a member of the SFA.
She reached out and caught his hand and with her help he leapt over the cross-shaft and, with Lily between them, they took off after the others.
The Water Chamber (The First Gate)
The low tunnel opened onto a chamber the size of a small chapel. Incongruously, the floor of this chamber seemed to be made up of a lush carpet of