Part 47 (2/2)
An entire city.
A collection of stone buildings, all of them tall and thin like towers, stretched away from him for at least five hundred yards. Bridges connected all of them-some dizzyingly high, others very low, others still were constructed of steeply angled stone stairways.
Ca.n.a.ls of water filled the ”streets” between all these buildings, seawater that over the millennia had seeped in through the cave's two entrances and flooded the city's floor.
Dominating the forest of towers before him was a ma.s.sive ziggurat, a great stepped pyramid that rose up in the very center of the ghost city.
Exactly as it did in ancient Ur,Jack thought.
At the summit of this ziggurat was a very peculiar structure: an ultrahigh and very thin laddertype object that shot up vertically from the ziggurat's peak until it hit the rocky ceiling of the cavern two hundred feet above.
At the point where the ladder hit the cavern's ceiling, a series of runglike handholds led to the spectacular centerpiece of the cavern, a centerpiece that took Jack's breath away.
Looming off to the side of the underground city was another inverted pyramid-bronze and immense, exactly like the one Jack had seen at Abu Simbel.
It hung from the ceiling of this cavern, hovering like some kind of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p above the vast indoor city, easily twice the size of the ziggurat below.
From where he stood, Jack couldn't see any buildings directly beneath the pyramid-he guessed that it hung suspended above a bottomless abyss like the one at Abu Simbel had done.
But unlike the one at Abu Simbel, this pyramid was surrounded by its supplicant city, an exact twin of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.
Jack wondered if all six of the vertices were somehow subtly different, unique shrines built to complement a central upsidedown pyramid-Abu Simbel had a ma.s.sive viewing hall looking out at its pyramid this one had a city of spectacular bridges kneeling before it.
Suddenly, shouts and mechanical noises made Jack look up. They'd come from the other side of the cavern.
A flight of steep stone steps rose up the side of the nearest tower. Jack climbed them.
Arriving at the summit of the tower, he was rewarded with a full view of the immense cavern and a glimpse of exactly where he stood in this lifeordeath race.
Things didn't look good.
There, standing on a rooftop halfway across the vast cavern, having obviously got here some time ago, surrounded by the men of his quasiprivate army, was Wolf.
Jack swore.
His enemies were far more advanced across the labyrinth than he was. Once again he was starting from behind.
And then, among the group of soldiers standing immediately behind Wolf, Jack glimpsed a diminutive figure, and his heart sank.
He only saw the figure for a moment, but the image lodged in his brain instantly: head bowed, left arm in a sling, right hand gripping Jack's fireman's helmet, terrified and alone, it was a small black boy with gla.s.ses.
It was Alby.
COMPARATIVE POSITIONS OF JACK'S AND WOLF'S TEAMS THE CITY AND THE PYRAMID.
THE SECOND VERTEX.
BENEATH THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.
SOUTH AFRICA.
DECEMBER 17, 2007, 0255 HOURS.
JACK TOOK IN the monumental task ahead of him.
First he a.s.sessed Wolf's position, over on the other side of the cavern.
They must have entered via the main western harbor some time ago, because they were standing on a tower roughly halfway between their harbor and the ziggurat.
A big head start.
But as he looked more closely at them, Jack frowned. Wolf's troops seemed to be laying longbridging planks over the rooftop in front of them and then running across each plank to the next tower.
Jack then looked at his own situation and instantly he saw the reason behind their unusual method of travel.
The tower on which he stood hadno roof. In fact,all of the tower tops he saw from up here were roofless.
They were all completely hollow, like smokestacks.
And yet, curiously, nearly every rooftop was connected to two or three more rooftops by the dizzying network of bridges.
”Oh, man,” Jack said, realizing. ”It's a huge trap system.”
Every roof that Jack could see from here was the same.
On each one there was a tonguelike platform stretching out from the leading edge of the roof to its middle, out over that tower's black hollow core.
Ringing this tonguelike platform were three smaller steppingstonelike platforms, each situated exactly halfway between the central platform and the roof's three other edges, and each requiring a substantial jump of about five feet to land on them.
Jack examined the rooftop on which he was standing.
Carved into the stone tongue on which he stood was some text written in the Word of Thoth. On each steppingstone was a similar carving.
”How does it work?” the Sea Ranger asked.
”Question and answer,” Jack said. ”This carving here, on the tongue, is the question. You jump on the steppingstone carved with the correct answer. If you're right, the stepping stone holds your weight.”
”And if you're wrong?” Lachlan asked.
”If you're wrong, I imagine it doesn't hold your weight and you fall down the hollow of the tower.”
The Sea Ranger looked down into the black void inside the tower before them. Its walls were sheer and slick. You'd never be able to climb out, if you hadn't already landed in something deadly.
Jack said, ”I imagine the struts holding up the false steppingstones are made of a brittle material. They look strong, but they're not.”
”But you have to getevery riddle right all the way across,” Julius said. ”Would you stake your life on your ability to answer all those riddles correctly?”
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