Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly [53]
There was a ladder hewn into the guard tower’s curved flank, a ladder that wound around the outside of the structure, meaning they had to free-climb 200 feet above nothing but the swirling waters below.
Two head-chopping blades sprang out from slits in the wall-ladder, but West neutralised them with sticky foam and his team, roped together, successfully climbed around the gravity-defying guard tower.
On the other side of the chasm, Judah’s long lightweight bridge fell into place and his men ran across it, completely avoiding their drowning cage, reaching the base of their ascending staircase.
The wall-ladder on the outside of West’s guard tower brought his team up onto its balcony.
A tight tunnel in the back of the balcony delved into the chasm-wall itself and emerged on the other side of the bend, where West fired off three self-hovering flares. . .
. . . to gloriously reveal the far end of the chasm and their goal.
‘Holy shit. . . ’ Big Ears gasped.
‘Swear jar,’ Lily said instantly.
Standing there before them in all its splendour, towering above the waterway, lording over it, easily fifteen storeys tall and jutting out from the far facing rockwall, was a gigantic ancient fortress.
The steaming vents of the chasm gave the fortress a grim haunting look.
A super-solid square-shaped keep formed the core of the structure, with a giant gaping archway in its exact centre. This central section was flanked by two soaring defensive towers, high-spired pinnacles in the darkness. The style of these towers matched that of the guard tower that West had just passed through—only these were taller, stretching all the way up from the water.
Stretching downward from the Great Arch in the centre of the keep was a wide guttered rampway that lanced all the way down to the waterway, ending at a flat stone jetty. At least forty metres in length, with stairs nestled in its centre, the rampway resembled the step-ramps on Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple near the Valley of the Kings.
Never finished and never used for its intended purpose—and long since concealed by an ingenious Egyptian architect—this was Hamilcar’s Refuge.
West snatched his printout from his pouch, examined it:
Just like on the ancient drawing, the chasm before him ended at a Y-junction, splitting into two diverging channels. The Refuge sat nestled in the V at the top of the Y, facing the long upright ‘stem’.
Two more spire-like ‘sentry towers’ sat on either side of the stem, facing the two towers of the Refuge itself.
As if all this weren’t colossal enough, the Refuge featured two more soaring aqueduct bridges to add to the broken one in the main chasm—200 feet high and made of many bricked arches.
These two new bridges spanned the Y-channels of the waterway, but unlike the one crossing the main chasm, they were whole and intact.
It was Zoe who noticed the rockwall behind the Refuge.
‘It slopes backward,’ she said. ‘Like the cone of a—’
‘Come on, we don’t have time,’ West urged them on.
The final stretch of the chasm featured a descending stairway followed by an ascending ramp. The ramp slithered up the left-hand wall of the chasm, bending with every curve. Curiously, it bore a low upraised gutter on its outer edge, the purpose of which was not readily apparent.
Of course, this stairway–ramp combination was mirrored on Judah’s side of the chasm.
West and his team charged down their descending stairway, avoiding a couple of blasting steam vents on the way.
In the meantime, Judah’s team had just crossed their little gorge and arrived at their guard tower.
They started climbing around it.
The Ascending Ramp
An unusually high stepping-stone separated the base of the descending stairway from the base of the ascending ramp. It jutted out from the wall about thirty feet above the waterway.
The guttered ascending ramp rose above West and his team, stretching upward for maybe 100 metres, ending at the left-hand sentry tower. It was maybe four feet wide, enough for single-file only, and a sheer drop to the right of it fell away to the swirling waters below.