Seven Ancient Wonders

by Matthew Reilly

  Which begs the question: is it possible that those ancient Greek poets were perhaps merely describing an ordinary stone ziggurat whose decorative foliage, left uncut and unkempt, had simply outgrown its tiers and overhung them at the edges? Could this reputed ‘Wonder’ have really just been very very ordinary?

  AIRSPACE OVER SAUDI ARABIA

  19 MARCH, 2006, 0300 HOURS

  1 DAY BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS

  The Halicarnassus shoomed through the night sky.

  The big black unregistered 747 zoomed out of Africa on a flight-path that would take it across Saudi Arabia to one of harshest, wildest and most lawless countries on Earth.

  Iraq.

  It made one stop on the way.

  An important stop in a remote corner of Saudi Arabia.

  Hidden among some barren rocky hills was a cluster of small man-made caves, long-abandoned, with flapping rags covering their doorways. A long-disused firing range stood nearby, ravaged by dust and time; discarded ammunition boxes lay everywhere.

  It was a former terrorist camp.

  Once the home of Mustapha Zaeed—and the resting place of all his notes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

  Covered by West, Stretch and Pooh Bear, the flex-cuffed Zaeed scrambled inside one particular cave where, behind a false wall, he located a large trunk filled with scrolls, tablets, sandstone bricks, gold and bronze ornaments, and literally dozens of notebooks.

  It also contained within it a beautiful black-jade box no bigger than a shoebox. Before he passed the trunk out to the others, unseen by West’s men, Zaeed grabbed the black-jade box, opened it, and gazed for a moment at the fine-grained orange sand inside it. It lay flat, undisturbed for many years. It was so fine it was almost luminous.

  He snapped the jade box shut, slipped it back into the trunk, and passed it out to the others.

  Then on the way out of the hidden space in the wall, he triggered a small electronic beacon.

  Zaeed emerged from behind the false wall and presented the trunk to West. ‘My life’s work. It will help.’

  ‘It had better,’ West said.

  They grabbed the trunk, hauled it back to the Halicarnassus, and resumed their course for Iraq.

  Inside the Halicarnassus, West’s depleted team went about the task of finding the location of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  While West, Pooh Bear and Lily pored over Lily’s most recent translation of the Callimachus Text, Zaeed—his flex-cuffs now removed—was on his knees, rummaging through his dusty old trunk.

  ‘You know,’ Pooh Bear said, ‘it would be nice to have some idea what these Gardens actually looked like.’

  West said, ‘Most drawings of the Gardens are little more than wild interpretations of vague Greek sources, most of them variations on the classic ziggurat shape. No-one has an actual image of them—’

  ‘Don’t speak too soon, Captain West! That may not be so! Here it is!’ Zaeed called, pulling a crude rectangle of very ancient cloth from his trunk.

  It was about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, rough and rectangular. Its edges were worn, ragged, unsewn, like hessian cloth. Zaeed brought it over to the others.

  ‘It’s a draft cloth, a simple device used by ancient kings to keep an eye on the progress of their faraway construction sites. The cloth would be taken by a royal messenger to the worksite, where the messenger then drew the scene. The messenger would then bring the cloth back to the king, thus showing him the progress being made.

  ‘I found this cloth in a pauper’s tomb underneath the town of Ash Shatra, in central Iraq—the tomb of a horseman who had died near the town, having been robbed and left for dead by bandits. Although he was buried as a pauper, I believe he was actually a royal messenger returning to New Babylon with a draft cloth of the Hanging Gardens for Nebuchadnezzar. Behold, all of you, the only picture, so far as I know, of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon:

  ‘It looks like an open cave in the mountainside,’ West said. ‘Only they refined the natural opening into a magnificent arch.’

  ‘What is that upside-down triangle suspended from the ceiling of the cave?’ Pooh Bear asked.

  ‘It looks like a gigantic stalactite. . . ’ Stretch said.

  West said, ‘And that structure on the cave-floor directly beneath it appears to be a ziggurat, encased in a construction mud-mound. You used the mound to build the ziggurat and then you took the mound away after you were finished.’

  Zaeed eyed West sideways. ‘If that is a full-sized ziggurat,Captain, then that stalactite must be at least fifteen storeys tall. It must be immense.’

  ‘What are all those criss-crossing lines covering the two structures?’ Lily asked.

  ‘I have long pondered those lines, child,’ Zaeed said. ‘I believe that they are an ancient form of scaffolding—a multi-levelled temporary structure made of wooden poles used to build the Gardens. Remember, this cloth is a progress report—it depicts the Gardens being built. I therefore surmise that they are a building tool.’

  Pooh Bear asked, ‘Lily. What does the writing say?’

  Zaeed said, ‘My brother, this is not written in the language of Thoth. It’s just standard cuneiform, written by a messenger for his king—’

  ‘Lily can read cuneiform,’ West said. ‘Go on, Lily.’

  Lily read the text box: ‘It says: Progress report: Construction continuing as scheduled. Nineteen worker deaths. Sixty-two injuries. Losses tolerable.’

  ‘Losses tolerable,’ Stretch repeated. ‘Doesn’t look like the despots of this region have changed much over the ages.’

  They returned to Lily’s translation of the Callimachus Text’s sixth entry:

  The Hanging Paradise of Old Babylonia.

  March towards the rising Sun,

  From the point where the two life-givers become one.

  In the shadow of the mountains of Zagros,

  Behold the triple falls fashioned by the Third Great Architect

  To conceal the path he hewed

  That climbs to the Paradise

  Which mighty Nebuchadnezzar built for his bride.

  ‘Well, it begins straightforwardly enough,’ West said. ‘You march due east from the point where the two life-givers become one.“The life-givers” is the name the Mesopotamians gave to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This must be a reference to the point where they meet.’

  ‘Baghdad?’ Pooh Bear asked. ‘It stands at a point of convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates. Isn’t it the site of ancient Babylon?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ West said. ‘Babylon lies underneath the modern-day town of Hilla, to the south of Baghdad. And your theory doesn’t strictly obey the verse. The two rivers bend very close to each other at Baghdad, but they don’t become one there. They actually come together much further south, at the town of Qurna. There they become one big super-river—the Shatt al-Arab—which flows south through Basra before draining into the Persian Gulf.’

  Stretch said sourly: ‘I can’t believe the Americans haven’t found the Gardens already. They must have over 150,000 troops in Iraq right now. They could easily have sent huge forces of men to check out every waterfall in the Zagros Mountains due east of Baghdad, Hilla and Qurna by now.’

  West paused, an idea forming in his mind. ‘Unless. . . ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The modern town of Hilla does indeed stand on the ruins of Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon,’ he said. ‘But now that I look at it closely, our verse does not refer to “Babylon” at all. It mentions the Hanging Paradise of Old Babylonia. Old Babylon.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Pooh Bear asked.

  ‘Consider this,’ West said. ‘New York. New England. New Orleans. Today, many cities and regions are named in memory of older places. In some ancient texts, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon is actually referred to as New Babylon. What if the Gardens were never in New Babylon, but were, rather, built in an older city also named “Babylon”, but built far from the newer city that adopted its name. The origina
l Babylon.’

  ‘It would explain why Alexander the Great’s biographers never mentioned the Gardens when he passed through Babylon and why no-one has found them near Hilla,’ Stretch said. ‘They would only have seen New Babylon, not Old Babylon.’

  ‘Two Babylons. Two cities.’ Zaeed stroked his sharply-pointed chin. ‘This is a good theory. . . ’

  Then suddenly his eyes lit up. ‘Of course! Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before?’

  ‘What?’

  Zaeed dashed to his trunk and scrounged among the notebooks there.

  As he did so, he spoke quickly, excitedly. ‘If I may take Captain West’s theory one step further. Modern logic assumes that the Tigris and the Euphrates follow the same courses today that they followed back in 570 BC. They flow down from Turkey, through Iraq, before joining at Qurna in the southern marshlands.

  ‘Now consider this. Mesopotamia is the birthplace of all flood myths. Why, the tale of Noah and his Ark is but a flimsy retelling of the story of Zisudra and his animal-carrying boat. Why is this so? Because Iraq’s flood myths stem from very real floods: of the Persian Gulf breaking its banks and flooding far inland, ripping apart eroded land formations and, on occasion, diverting the courses of the two great rivers of the region, the Tigris and Euphrates. A Westerner named Graham Hancock has written about this very convincingly in a marvellous book called Underworld. Ah-ha! Here it is!’

  He produced a battered book, opened it to a page containing a map of Iraq. Prominent on the map were the two major rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, that joined in a V shape in the south of the country:

  Zaeed had scribbled the locations of Hilla, Qurna and Basra on the map.

  He explained. ‘Now. As we continue to do today, people back in ancient times built their towns on the banks of the two great rivers. But when the rivers diverted onto new courses due to flooding, it follows that those same people would have abandoned the old towns and built new ones, the ones we see on the banks of the rivers today.

  ‘Many years ago, in my search for lost documents relating to the Hanging Gardens, I mapped the locations of abandoned towns, towns that were once situated on the banks of the rivers, but which, once the rivers diverted, were simply deserted. From these locations, I was able to reconstruct the former courses of the two rivers.’

  ‘So where did they converge back then?’ West asked.

  Zaeed grinned. ‘See, that was what I did not know—that their point of convergence was the all-important factor.’

  With a flourish, Zaeed then flipped the page to reveal a second map of Iraq, only on this map, an additional dotted V had been drawn directly beneath the present-day one:

  Zaeed pointed at this new river junction—it lay south of Qurna, roughly halfway between it and Basra.

  ‘The rivers,’ Zaeed said, ‘used to meet here, at the town of Haritha.’

  The Halicarnassus shot into Iraq, heading for the southern village-town of Haritha.

  As it did so, everyone prepared for their arrival—prepping guns, maps, helmets and tunnel gear.

  Alone in his office, with Horus perched on his chair-back, West kept one eye on a laptop computer that Wizard had set up soon after their mission in Tunisia had gone to hell.

  It was the microwave communications net he had instructed Wizard to create, to scan for any signals emanating from, or coming to, the Halicarnassus.

  As they crossed the border into Iraq, the laptop pinged.

  Someone on board the plane had sent out a homing signal.

  HARITHA, IRAQ

  19 MARCH, 2006, 0900 HOURS

  1 DAY BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF TARTARUS

  To get to Haritha, the Halicarnassus had to skirt the port-city, Basra.

  As it soared over the outskirts of Basra, Sky Monster’s voice came over the PA. ‘Hey, Captain West, you better come up here and see this.’

  West went up to the cockpit and peered out the windows.

  A long column of heavy-duty vehicles was rumbling out of Basra, heading north toward Haritha.

  It was a gigantic convoy. Of American military vehicles.

  Troop trucks, engineering vehicles, Humvees, jeeps, motorbikes, plus no fewer than ten Abrams battle tanks and several Black Hawk helicopters, prowling overhead.

  In all, it amounted to maybe 5,000 troops.

  ‘How can this be?’ Zaeed asked, appearing behind West with Pooh Bear.

  ‘How can they be onto us again?’ Pooh Bear asked.

  West just stared at the convoy, trying not to betray his thoughts: Who gave us away?

  ‘Oh, shit!’ Sky Monster exclaimed, hearing something through his headphones. ‘The Yanks just scrambled fighters from Nasiryah. F-15s. We better find this place fast, Huntsman.’

  A few minutes later, they arrived above the dusty town of Haritha, situated on the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab River about fifty kilometres north of Basra.

  ‘Okay, Sky Monster, swing us due east,’ West said.

  Sky Monster banked the Halicarnassus above the town, but as he did so, he and West glimpsed the highway coming from the north, from Qurna—

  —and on that highway, they saw another column of American vehicles.

  It was almost identical to the first—lots of troop trucks, Humvees and tanks; and another 5,000 men, at the very least.

  West’s mind raced.

  ‘Judah must have had people at Qurna, searching for the waterfalls,’ he said. ‘But Qurna is the wrong junction of the rivers. He was searching too far to the north.’

  ‘And now—suddenly—he knows to come south,’ Sky Monster said pointedly. ‘How about that. . . ’

  West just tapped him reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘East and low, my friend.’

  But their position was clear—with a rat in their ranks, they were now caught between two converging convoys of overwhelming American firepower.

  If they found the Hanging Gardens—which wasn’t guaranteed— they’d have to be in and out fast.

  Within minutes, the jagged peaks of the Zagros Mountains rose up before them, the boundary line between Iraq and Iran.

  Numerous small rivers snaked their way through the range’s maze-like system of peaks and valleys—descending to the Shatt al-Arab. Waterfalls could be seen everywhere: tall thin string-like falls, short squat ones, even horseshoe-shaped ones.

  There were many double-tiered waterfalls, and several quadruple-tiered falls, but as far as West could tell, there was only one set of triple-tiered falls in the area due east of Haritha: an absolutely stunning cascade easily 300 feet from top to bottom, that bounced over two wide rocky ledges, before flowing into a stream that wound down to the mighty al-Arab. These falls lay right at the edge of the mountain range, looking out over the flat marshy plain of southern Iraq.

  ‘That’s it,’ West said. ‘That’s them. Sky Monster, bring us down anywhere you can. We drive from here. You take the Hali to these co-ordinates and wait for me to call.’ He handed Sky Monster a slip of paper.

  ‘Roger that, Huntsman.’

  The Halicarnassus landed on the flat cracked surface of a lakebed that hadn’t seen water in 1,000 years.

  No sooner had its wheels touched down than its rear loading ramp dropped open, banging onto the ground, and—shoom!—a second four-wheel drive Land Rover came rushing out of the big plane’s belly, bouncing down onto the mudplain and speeding off to the east, kicking up a cloud of sand behind it.

  For its part, the Halicarnassus just powered up again and took off, heading for the secret hangar where Jack West had originally found her fifteen years before.

  The Land Rover skidded to a halt before the towering triple-tiered falls. The roar of falling water filled the air.

  ‘Allah have mercy,’ Pooh Bear said, gazing up at the falls. At 300 feet, they were the size of a thirty-storey building.

  ‘There!’ West called.

  A narrow stone path in the rockface led behind the lowest tier of the waterfall.

  West hurried along it.
The others followed. But when they arrived behind the curtain of falling water, they were confronted by something they hadn’t expected.

  On every tier of the falls, the water was thrown quite a way out from the cliff-wall, propelled by its rapid speed. This meant that the actual face of each tier was largely water-free—except for a layer of moss and a constant trickle of dribbling water. It alsomeant that each cliff-face was concealed by the falls themselves.

  And behind the curtains of water was a most curious feature.

  Cut into the face of each rockwall was a dizzying network of ultra-narrow paths that criss-crossed up them. There were maybe six paths in total, but they wound and intersected in so many ways that the number of permutations they created was huge.

  Gazing at the twisting array of pathways on the first cliff-face, West saw with dismay the alarming number of wall-holes and blade-holes that opened onto the paths.

  Booby traps.

  Zaeed was awed. ‘Imhotep III. A genius, he was, but a sinister genius. This is a very rare type of trap system but typical of his flair. There are many paths with deadly snares, but only one of the pathways is safe.’

  ‘How do we know which route is the safe one?’ Stretch asked. ‘They all seem to intertwine.’

  Beside West, Lily was gazing intently at the path system behind the waterfall.

  As she looked at it, something clicked in her mind.

  ‘I’ve seen this before . . .’ she said.

  She reached into West’s backpack and extracted a printout.

  It was titled: ‘Waterfall Entrance—Refortification by Imhotep III in the time of Ptolemy Soter’.

  ‘Well, would you look at that. . . ’ Stretch said.

  The lines on the printed image exactly matched the layout of the pathways on the waterfall.

  ‘But which path is the safe route?’ Pooh Bear asked anxiously.

  ‘That I don’t know,’ Lily said, deflating.

  ‘Wait a second,’ West said. ‘Maybe you do. . . ’

  Now he rifled through his pack for a few moments, before he said, ‘Got it!’

  He pulled from the backpack a tattered brown leatherbound notebook.