Seven Wonders (32 page)

The Siq made one more turn, and Jack could see the opening at the other end of the narrow gorge, a vertical slice of brightness reflecting its way down the rose-colored walls. The wind around him had begun to pick up, even though the other side of the Siq was more protected by the mountain’s cliffs.

“Al Uzza was often associated with Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt.”

“Who was associated with Diana,” Sloane said. She’d read Jack’s articles thoroughly. “The goddess of your Amazons.”

Jack smiled.
His
Amazons? They had come a long, long way from the Amazon culture he’d attempted to reconstruct from archaeological finds and assorted artifacts.
His
Amazons battled ancient Greeks and Alexander’s armies; perhaps even fallen in love with Roman generals and populated Brazilian rainforests. But they didn’t leave snake segments beneath Wonders of the World.

“Diana, or sometimes Eve. But the connection doesn’t end there, as you’ll see in a moment.”

Jack pointed up ahead, where the three Bedouin had drawn their camels to a stop, right at the opening of the Siq. Magda made a noise with his lips, and Jack suddenly felt his camel lurching downward, into a controlled kneel. Andy gasped as his and Sloane’s camel did the same, nearly pitching the two of them onto the cobbled stone floor.

“I think this the end of the ride,” Jack said.

He slid off his saddle and stepped away from the camel, shaking his throbbing ankle as the blood moved back into his legs. Then he helped Sloane off of her ride, leaving Andy to pitch himself gracelessly to the ground. The three of them headed for the opening. As Jack passed next to Magda and his clansmen, Jack bowed his head, pressing his hands together.

Jack said as Magda waved him on.

“The storm should last another thirty minutes. Then it will be safe to make your return. My cousin will stay with the camels at the entrance to the Siq. As-salaam-alaykum,
sadeke
.”

With that, the three Bedouin turned and led their camels back through the Siq, the way they had come. When their hooves were only echoes against the walls, Jack turned back to the opening. He readjusted his kaffiyeh over most of his face and gestured for Andy to do the same. Sloane pushed her veil back over her eyes, and they stepped into the wind, sand, and light.

• • •

It didn’t matter how many times Jack had stood in this very spot, staring up at the magnificent, multistoried façade of Al Khazneh—the Treasury, Petra’s most iconic building—carved right into the red-and-white streaked stone. Every time was like the first, a breathtaking moment even without the fierce wind-whipping sand against his kaffiyeh. The scale of the thing was magnificent: from the thirty-foot-high Greek-style columns that held up the first story, to the carved statues standing in covered alcoves along the second floor, to the peak of the center citadel, rising right up into a ledge of the cliff face above. There was an open doorway on the first floor, leading into blackness. Jack knew from previous visits that the Treasury had actually been built as a crypt, and the bottom floor had once housed the coffins of various Nabataean royalty before ten generations of grave robbers left nothing but an
empty cave filled with more elaborate carvings.

But at the moment, Jack wasn’t interested in the crypt or the missing coffins. Instead, he pointed at the two human-size statues on the second floor, flanking the central citadel. He leaned close to Sloane, so that she could hear him through the veil.

“Tell me what you see,” he said as she held one hand over the blue material above her eyes, holding it against the wind.

“Two women. I think they’re holding something.”

“Axes,” Jack said. “The two women are Amazons. Elaborately detailed, carved two thousand years ago—by a people whose gods were nothing more than faceless cubes.”

The two statues were the reason Jack had visited Petra numerous times over the years, especially when he was studying the nearby Bedouins. To him, the statues were some of the best evidence that the Amazons were more than myths; the Nabataeans left their myths to be detailed by the imagination. In Jack’s view, these two sculptures were something else, something based in reality. Two axe-wielding Amazons to guard the Nabataean royalty on their way to the afterlife.

“Above them are the four winged eagles that were supposed to carry the dead souls up to whatever the Nabataeans viewed as heaven.”

“I thought this was a Treasury.”

“Actually, that’s a misconception. It was originally a tomb, built around the time of Christ. Over the years, a number of legends of it being a storage house for hidden treasures sprang up, which led to it being renamed. The most famous of these legends was that Moses himself had stopped here on his journey to Israel; at Aaron’s behest, he’d hidden some of the gold he’d taken from the Egyptians, then continued on his way.”

Jack couldn’t see Sloane’s eyes, but he could tell that she was staring at him.

“Moses’ gold, here?”

Jack pointed to the top of the citadel at the peak of the second floor of the façade almost eighty feet above his head.

“There,” he said. “In that urn.”

Even through the wind and sand, Jack could make out the stone sculpture: three feet high, oblong, with curved arms that almost looked like wings, standing atop a circular base. The rounded sides of the urn were covered in pockmarks.

“The pictogram.”

“Exactly. The pockmarks are actually bullet holes. The Bedouin believe that some of Moses’ gold is hidden inside that urn, and when they ride by on their camels, they often fire their rifles at the stone. But all indications are that the urn is solid, through and through.”

It was almost too perfect, Jack thought to himself. A pair of axe-wielding Amazons guarding a stone urn that was supposedly full of gold. If he’d thought it through before, he wouldn’t have even needed the pictogram to know where he was supposed to go next.

As he started forward toward the façade, he reached into his long white robes and retrieved his folded-up metal grappling hook. Andy was right behind him, but Sloane paused, still staring at the urn.

“You’re going up there?”

“We’re all going up there,” Jack yelled, through the wind. “It’s too dangerous for us to be separated. Right now, we’ve got the place all to ourselves, but that could change.”

He hit the switch on the edge of the grapple, and the spiderlike claws flicked open. Andy was already pulling the heavy rope out from under his own robes. Jack approached the rock face and began scanning for a good place to make their ascent. As cliff climbs went, it wasn’t going to be difficult to chart a path up to the story of the façade; there were many gaps and cracks in the red sandstone, and even with the wind, they shouldn’t have much trouble pulling themselves up along the rope. He knew that Andy was
up to the task, and from what he’d seen of Sloane so far, she could certainly keep up.

The truth was, Jack had wanted to climb Petra ever since he’d first come through that Siq, years ago. He had just been looking for the right excuse.

• • •

“I don’t think I can make it,” Sloane hissed as Jack held out his hand as far as he could, trying to reach to where she clung to the stone eagle, her long blue robes billowing around her like a typhoon’s waves. “I can’t reach.”

The terror in her voice was palpable, but Jack tried his best to ignore it, extending his body from the ledge of the citadel roof. Andy was holding him by his legs, helping to keep him steady as he tried to grab Sloane’s extended wrist. Again, he missed by inches.

“You’re going to have to jump,” he shouted, over the wind. “It’s only a few feet. I’ll catch you.”

Sloane yelled something back, but her expletives were lost in the wind. Jack glanced down at the eighty-foot drop to the stone floor in front of the Treasury. A little higher up, he could barely make out Sloane’s veil where it had caught on one of the Greek columns, a fleck of blue against the red-white stone.

“I promise I won’t let you fall.”

Sloane looked at him, her face pressed against the eagle’s beak. Then she nodded. She took one last breath, her porcelain cheeks tight against the rock, and then she leaped toward him through the air. Jack reached out with both hands, nearly kicking Andy off the citadel roof behind him, and made a grab for her wrists. At the last second, his fingers touched skin, and he pulled her toward him, using her inertia to swing her onto the citadel roof behind him. Then he grabbed Andy by the back of his robes and
yanked him back onto his knees.

Jack exhaled, tasting sand and sweat, then turned his attention to the urn, which was between the three of them at the peak of the sloped citadel roof. Up close, the bullet holes were like miniature craters in the stone. Jack could only guess at how heavy the thing might be—one hundred, two hundred pounds? From a few feet away, it appeared that the archaeologists were right, that it was solid through and through. But Jack hadn’t climbed the façade to break into the urn.

“Thirty degrees to the back and left,” Sloane said, a tremble in her voice. Jack could see that her eyes were red, but he didn’t know if it was from the sand, or the fear.

Jack nodded. Dashia’s enlarged version of the pictogram had been clear. It wasn’t a broken urn that the image had shown, but a tilted one. Jack crawled closer and put a hand on either side of the sculpture. The stone felt cold against his skin, a single bullet-made crater digging against the base of his palm.

He pushed as hard as he could, using his shoulders and thighs, ignoring the pain in his ankle and the stinging sand against the back of his neck—and the urn started to move. Barely at first, centimeter by centimeter, but then more smoothly, as if on tiny ball bearings. Jack kept pushing until the thing was at the proper angle, back and to the left—and he felt a slow rumble beneath his legs. For a brief second, he feared that the citadel was about to collapse beneath them. He grabbed the rope, right up near where the grapple was still dug into the lip of the citadel’s roof, but then Andy was jabbing his shoulder and pointing to a spot directly above the urn where the façade met the uncarved cliff.

A dark, oval opening had appeared in the solid rock. Grooves in the stone directly behind the urn led into the opening—where they disappeared into complete darkness.

Jack looked back at Sloane and Andy.

“It appears that Moses liked a good climb,” he said, grinning.

And then he started up the grooves and into the darkness.

• • •

Jack held the lit flare high above his head as he pulled himself up the last groove and out onto a stone ledge that overlooked an interior cavern stretching a good fifty feet in every direction; the walls were rough and red, streaked with white like the exterior of the cliff and the cavern floor—another ten feet below the ledge, stretching out ahead of him like the semi-circle of an amphitheater—was covered in thick sand. But it wasn’t the floor or the sand that caught Jack’s attention as he peered through the orange glow of the flare. It was the elaborate stone catwalk that ran up the far wall: three connected platforms, with more of the ladderlike grooves rising up along the wall between them, each no wider than the two-foot ledge on which he now stood. The platforms weren’t attached to the wall; instead, they appeared to be held up by thin, cylindrical columns, two on each side, all of them approximately fifteen feet high. Unlike nearly every other surface of the cavern, the columns contained no red at all. Their curved surfaces were smooth and a much purer shade of white than the flecks and stripes within the sandstone.