by Ben Mezrich
As he made it to the bottom of the slope, he found he was walking on more limestone, similar to the mantle the team from the British Museum had uncovered. The museum team had thought they were looking at a slab from a massive roof that had stood for nearly two hundred years before Herostratus burned it down. But Jack had suspected something much different, because of a single piece of pottery that had been sent to him by a colleague in the antiquities department at the University of London who had accompanied the original British Museum team.
The image on the pottery had been very similar to the statues behind Jack—women with vaguely African features, covered in symbols of fertility. They were evidence that fit Jack’s thesis: that the original Temple of Artemis predated the Greeks by thousands of years. And now, in front of him, was something even more definitive. Something quite incredible.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered, his voice echoing through the chamber.
The painting took up most of the far wall of the cavern—five feet high, maybe twice as long, painted in lavish strokes of color with a true artist’s skill.
“It’s a mural,” Jack said as he took his digital camera out of a pocket in his harness and began taking photos. “A tribe of women warriors leaving what looks to be a lush forest paradise. The women are similar to the ones pictured on the pottery and the statues. Each of them is missing a right breast. But instead of eggs, they’re carrying what look to be war javelins. And the forest—it’s hard to describe. So many greens, it’s really quite amazing.”
Then his eyes shifted to the glow that had caught his attention from across the cavern. One of the female warriors in the mural was carrying a large, flat stone, on which was carved the image of a golden snake, cut into seven equal segments. The segments were plated in some sort of metallic material, flashing in the glare of his helmet light.
Jack wasn’t surprised to see a snake; he knew that the snake was one of the most common images in the ancient writings and drawings of nearly every culture on earth: from the Judeo-Christian Bible—in the very first chapter, a snake tricks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden—to various Hindu texts dealing with Kundalini, the coiled Serpent, to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where various spells dealt with snakes, to Chinese texts rife with snake demons, dragons, and gods. Jack himself had seen the snake carvings in the Pyramid at Giza that guarded the metaphoric entrance to the watery underworld.
The ancient Greeks seemed especially obsessed with snakes. In Greek mythology, nearly every Greek god had at one point turned into, killed, or had sex with some sort of serpent. It was no surprise that perhaps the most well-known symbol from ancient Greece in the modern world involved a snake. The Hippocratic symbol of health and life, used in hospitals and doctor’s offices worldwide, was a snake wrapped around the rod of Asclepius, the god of healing, although in America, the image was just as often—and erroneously—a Caduceus, the staff of the god Mercury, which had two snakes wrapped together in the shape of a double helix. The confusion dated back to 1902, when a US Army officer adopted the Caduceus instead of the rod of Asclepius as the symbol of the Army Medical Core because he thought it looked cooler as a patch on his uniform. Jack guessed that the officer hadn’t realized the irony of his act; the Caduceus was actually the symbol of the Greek and Roman god of thieves, deceivers, and murderers.
Still, no matter how popular the snake was as a symbol in the ancient world, the image in the mural was intriguing, like nothing Jack had ever seen before. Female warriors carrying a stone tablet with a seven-segmented golden snake out of a vibrant forest—it was the sort of picture that an archaeologist could spend years, perhaps a lifetime, studying.
Jack didn’t need a lifetime to know that the mural—as mysterious as its details may have been—was further evidence that the Temple of Artemis wasn’t built by Greeks to worship a goddess. And with that, he was one step closer to proving that the culture he had become obsessed with—the culture most historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists believed was more myth than real—had actually once existed.
“Amazons,” Jack said, shooting picture after picture with the digital camera. “The women in this mural are Amazons.”
The weight of what he was saying reverberated through his chest. The Amazons, a fierce tribe of women warriors dating all the way back to the beginnings of mythology and history, had been the subject of Jack’s research for nearly half a decade. He had written a dozen papers about various relics and ancient documents that pointed to an incredibly advanced culture. Though nobody was certain who the Amazons were, where they had come from, or why they had eventually disappeared, there was much evidence, in Jack’s opinion, that they had once built themselves into a powerful civilization. The individual warriors themselves were so fierce that, according to legend, each woman would cut off her own right breast to better enable her to throw a javelin. With a religion dedicated to serving an all-powerful female goddess—referred to as Diana, Artemis, and even Eve, the original first woman, borrowed by Judeo-Christian theology—Amazons featured in stories that crossed cultural and geographical boundaries. They seemed to be everywhere, from the Bronze Age to Alexander the Great through the Romans and Greeks all the way into Medieval times.
When Jack had learned of a possible connection to one of the Seven Wonders of the World and heard about the discovery of the mantle beneath the dig site, he had quickly used his connections at Princeton to insert his team into the archaeology project. All they’d needed was the help of three of the sites’ local workers to unload the equipment Jack had sent ahead of their arrival, assist in cutting through the mantle with a rock drill, and set up the winch and pulley for Jack’s harness.
Jack had known he was pushing the boundaries of academic ethics by taking advantage of the Brits, but he wasn’t going to wait for the archaeologists; archaeology moved at a snail’s pace, with brushes and combs. Field anthropologists dove in head first.
And now Jack had made what might very well be the discovery of his career. A mural depicting Amazons carrying some sort of golden snake out of a forest, painted deep within one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
He was still taking photos, his head swimming with images of female warriors and war javelins, when he heard Dashia’s voice crackling over the speaker in his helmet.
“Dr. Grady.”
“What is it?” Jack responded, leaning closer to a spot on the mural to get a good picture of one of the warrior’s armor.
“It’s your cell phone. I wasn’t going to answer, but they kept calling.”
Jack could hear the sudden tremor in her voice.
“Your brother. He’s—Dr. Grady, you need to come back up here.”
Jack paused. His brother? He couldn’t imagine that anything involving Jeremy could be more important than what he was looking at, but he’d never heard Dashia sound so emotional before. He glanced at his watch—four a.m. With any luck, he’d still have a couple of hours before the Brits took over the site and kicked his group out. He could deal with whatever Dashia was so worked up about and still get back down for a second look.
“Okay, on my way.”
With enormous effort, he tore himself away from the warriors, the forest, and the gold, segmented snake, and started back up the gravely slope, dragging the aluminum rope behind him.
CHAPTER THREE
Sloane Costa dug her fingernails into the stone wall as she shuffled her feet a few steps forward along the six-inch ledge. Her calves felt like they were on fire from the effort, the heels of her field boots hanging out over the four-foot-deep ditch. An hour a day on the elliptical back in the gym at Michigan State had not prepared her for whatever the hell this was, but then again, nothing in her precise, organized life could have prepared her for what she had stumbled into over the past three hours.
She took a deep breath, then glanced down past her heels. It was hard to see clearly in the dim morning light seeping through the spiderweb of cracks in the curved tunnel’s ceiling,
but she guessed she still had about five yards to go. The ditch appeared to end just as it had begun; a sudden, eight-yard gash in the cobbled floor of the tunnel, bordered on each side by just the tiniest of ledges.
When she’d first come upon the ditch, she’d considered climbing down instead of trying to shuffle across. Four feet wasn’t that far; she’d already clambered down a rotted-out stairwell to get into the tunnel in the first place.
But then she’d looked closer, using the light from her miniature flashlight to illuminate the tangle of vegetation that filled the bottom of the ditch like twisting rolls of barbed wire. It had taken her almost two minutes to identify the long, ovate leaves and the bell-shaped, dark brown flowers: Letalis belladonna, from the family Solanaceae, a distant cousin to the more well-known Atropa belladonna. Even though she couldn’t see the vine’s miniscule thorns hidden beneath its curled leaves, she knew what would happen if she took one step into that ditch. A single scratch, and her bloodstream would be coursing with the toxins scopolamine and hyoscyamine. A few minutes after that, she’d have the dubious distinction of being the first botanical geneticist to be killed by a plant.
She put her cheek flush with the stone wall and shuffled another few inches along the ledge. She considered herself in pretty good shape for a twenty-six-year-old scientist; she’d run two half marathons since completing her master’s and tried her best to get to the gym every morning before locking herself in the lab. On the two days a week she was forced to teach undergrads to maintain her assistant professorship at Michigan State, she jogged the entire five miles to campus from her studio apartment at the edge of East Lansing.
But she was learning that there was a big difference between sweating your way through a training session in a state-of-the-art gym and being out in the field, dragging yourself deep through the bowels of one of the greatest structures in Europe, if not the world.
She took another careful step, then paused to listen for any Italian voices that might signal that the pair of Polizia who had first escorted her through the locked front entrance to the Colosseum—one of the oldest amphitheaters on Earth, the pride of the city of Rome, and one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World—had noticed she had disappeared. Just a few minutes past five in the morning on a hazy Saturday at the end of August, the middle-aged Italian officers had been easy to slip; once they’d led her down the refurbished stairway that led into the vast, two-level hypogeum—the underground labyrinth of narrow alleys, sloped tunnels, and dead-end cubbyholes that had once run underneath the arena floor—they had been content to sit next to one another on the bottom step, sharing a pack of cigarettes. The Polizia hadn’t spoken two words to her since she’d gotten Professor Lindhom, who’d spent three years as a visiting lecturer at the prestigious University of Roma, to call in a favor with the officer in charge of their garrison, getting them to bring her to the tourist attraction four hours before its opening time. Which was a good thing, since Sloane’s Italian was more than a little rusty, to the embarrassment of her grandmother, who still spoke with such a heavy accent she might as well have just stepped off the boat at Ellis Island.
Still, Sloane hadn’t expected to have been gone from her two irritated keepers for anywhere near this long. She gritted her teeth and took the last few steps along the ledge, then leaped back onto solid ground. She was relieved to hear the scrape of firm cobblestones against her boots. The tunnel was narrower here, the light from above even more obscured by the levels of hypogeum above. As she started forward again, carefully navigating along the cobblestones, she wished she’d packed a better flashlight along with the handful of tools she’d loaded into her backpack. She wasn’t experienced at fieldwork; she’d made her bones in the lab, analyzing botanical specimens collected by others. Of course, she’d had to accompany Professor Lindhom on a handful of expeditions during her training, but she’d always deferred the dirty work to the more eager doctoral students, the ones who seemed to get off on backpacking across the Sichuan-Hubei region of China, climbing a thirty-foot Metasequoia glyptostroboides to collect a single leaf, or scaling a three-hundred-foot cliff in Patagonia to find the seeds of a Fitzroya cupressoides.
Sloane had never been built that way. She’d always been a bit of a geek growing up, burying herself in books and computers in her suburban bedroom not ten miles from where she now lived in Michigan, while her two older sisters shuttled from field hockey practice to ballet lessons. She’d hardly even dated in high school and college, telling herself that true scientists didn’t have time for trivial distractions like men; she’d never even owned a television set, and she’d been to maybe three movies since she’d turned eighteen.
Her oldest sister, Christine, had often joked that Sloane had chosen to dedicate her life to the study of plants because she was basically a plant herself. Sloane didn’t take this entirely as an insult. There was something pure and logical about plant life, especially when you broke plants down to their internal elements. Not the pistols, stems, seeds, and leaves that kids learned about in grade school; deeper down, at the cellular level. Botanical DNA had a simplicity to it that filled Sloane with a sense of comfort and purpose. After receiving her master’s, she had done her best to carve out a place in what was an obscure science: tracing the evolution of certain plant species by way of their DNA. It was painstaking, boring science involving test tubes and microscopes, but hopefully, important enough to lock down funding to keep Sloane’s academic posting for enough years to earn herself a full professorship, and down the line, when Lindhom eventually retired, maybe even tenure.
Christine’s jibes aside, the idea that you could trace a plant back to its historical origins through its cellular chemistry spoke to the order Sloane had always looked for in the world around her. She knew that human DNA worked along the same sense of logic. In fact, during her master’s she was third author on an article outlining research that had led to the groundbreaking theory of Mitochondrial Eve—the evolutionary concept that all humanity could trace its origins to a single woman who lived around two hundred thousand years ago, somewhere in present-day Africa. Mitochondrial Eve was the Holy Grail of evolutionary science, one ancient woman whose DNA was the perfect, pure source of every generation that came after her.
Sloane wasn’t tunneling through the Colosseum, her boots kicking up dust older than Christianity, expecting to find the equivalent to Mitochondrial Eve in the plant world; but to her, the mystery she was trying to unravel felt just as important. Christine might never understand, but even the greatest accomplishments of mankind—let alone some field hockey championship or ballet performance—seemed no more impressive to Sloane than the glory of a single, perfect Leucobalanus leaf that represented tens of thousands of years of evolutionary struggle, surviving fires, storms, pestilence, the rise and fall of civilization after civilization. And all Christine would ever see was the leaf of a common oak.
Sloane felt her way down the cobblestones, running the flashlight over the stone walls to her right and left, moving much more cautiously since she’d narrowly avoided the ditch and the poisonous vines. It wasn’t oak leaves she’d ditched the two Polizia for, though she wouldn’t have been surprised to find an oak sapling or two poking out from one of the numerous creases and gashes that she’d seen all over the hypogeum. From the very moment she’d set foot in the Modern Wonder, she’d been awed by vastness of the place, the scale of something built so goddamn long ago. But unlike other tourists who found their way into the Colosseum, it wasn’t the architecture or the history that truly enthralled her. It was something that most tourists would hardly notice at all.
To Sloane, the subterranean tunnels were as fascinating as any imagined gladiator battle. Even without the help of a tour guide, she could make out the various notches and holes in the stone that were the remaining evidence of the machinery that had once functioned literally beneath the scenes: vertical shafts that had once held cages that could be lifted into the arena, depositing men, wild beasts, even sce
nery. Elevators, complex pulleys, hydraulics, most of it controlled by capstans—giant wheels pushed by slaves like enormous gears in the biggest watch ever constructed.
And even more incredible, as Sloane picked her way through the tunnels, pulling farther and farther from the Polizia, was the evidence of runoff canals she could see, often at waist level, dug right into the sides of the tunnels. She’d read in guide books that the entire arena could be flooded for the naumachiae, mock ocean battles that had involved small warships sailing through water as deep as nine feet.
But Sloane’s fascination with the mechanics of the hypogeum was mainly academic; what truly thrilled her were the incredible wonders she was seeing within the cracks, seams, and cubbyholes dug into the ancient stone. She’d read about what she was seeing, but until she’d climbed under the rope and the bright red PERICOLO! sign—a warning she didn’t need her grandmother to understand—and had started to observe the true diversity sprouting from every nook and gash in the elaborate tunnels of travertine stone, she didn’t truly believe it could be real.
Sloane wasn’t the first scientist to come to the Colosseum to study plants. According to the guidebooks, the Colosseum had one of the strangest botanical collections of any place on Earth. Vines, shrubs, and even trees had been found growing through the ancient ruins, a diversity that had yet to be adequately explained by modern science.
The first recorded study of the Colosseum’s plants had been done way back in 1643 by a scientist named Domenico Panaroli who had listed over six hundred and eighty different species. Barely two turns in the first tunnel Sloane had crawled through, she wondered if old Domenico had undersold the place. She’d lost count after a hundred different species—some from as far away as China’s South Sea, and some, like the deadly poisonous cousin of nightshade she’d almost stepped into, exceedingly rare. But it wasn’t just the diversity of species that intrigued Sloane; she could imagine that many seeds had been inadvertently carried on the hooves and in the coats of the various animals brought into the arena, or that the millions of tourists and spectators who’d wandered through the place over the centuries had acted as human vectors, depositing seed specimens as they went. What surprised Sloane—and bothered her, as she began to think it through—was the diversity of time periods the various species represented. Plants with DNA ages hundreds to thousands of years apart growing right next to each other in seams in the tunnel walls, sometimes woven together in impossible tangles.