Seven Wonders Read Online Free

the dark opening in front of him—if he was right, the team from the British Museum had stumbled onto something much more ancient than the Greek monument they had been searching for.
    “Uh, Doc,” Andy’s voice cracked through his helmet. ““What are you doing? The rope seems to be swinging kind of crazy.”
    Jack focused on the opening as he swung through the darkness. He couldn’t be certain, but at the end of the arc on his pendulum path, heguessed he was about ten feet away. There seemed to be ample space between the two statues although he didn’t know how steep the pitch was on the other side.
    Not that it mattered; Jack’s mind was already made up.
    “Andy, that’s because I’m about to do something a little foolish.”
    There was a pause on the other end of the speaker.
    “Chief Jack foolish?”
    Jack grinned. It was shorthand that Jack was sure Andy was proudly in the process of explaining to Dashia. It dated back three years before, when the two of them had spent four months living with the Yanomami, the legendary Fierce People who lived deep in the jungle on the Venezuelan-Brazilian border. During a hunting expedition, Jack had somehow insulted a minor chieftain, and the man had challenged him to a duel. Jack had foolishly accepted, and they had fought using ritual long spears tipped with scorpion stingers. Thankfully, the scorpions in that region weren’t deadly—but the sting was immensely painful and caused debilitating hallucinations that could last up to thirty-six hours.
    Jack had lost the fight, but both men had been pricked in the process. When they’d finally come out of their delirium, everyone in the village was calling him Chief Jack. To this day, Jack wore a pouch filled with the scorpion stingers on a leather necklace beneath his shirt to remind him where his bravado had gotten him.
    “At the very least. When I give the signal, I want you to give me slack. Ten yards should do it.”
    “Doc—”
    “Ten yards, kid. On my mark.”
    Andy knew better than to argue. Over the past few years, he had accompanied Jack on field expeditions all over the world. Before the Yanomami, there had been the Swat Pukhtun, the sometimes-violent nomads of the remote valley of Northern Pakistan. Before that, a tribe of mountain peoplein Tibet who lived so high up the rear face of Everest, their skin had turned a permanent shade of blue.
    In Jack’s mind, the best field anthropologists didn’t ply their trade sitting in stuffy classrooms; they went out and took risks, submerging themselves in cultures that often seemed utterly alien.
    Jack tightened his jaw, making his body straight like an arrow as he approached the height of the pendulum arc, aiming his arms out toward the opening—
    “Now!”
    And he was sailing forward, the slack aluminum rope trailing out behind him. For a brief second he was weightless, his legs windmilling in the darkness, and then he was angling down, right between the two statues. His boots touched dirt and a plume of dust erupted around him, momentarily blinding him. Then he was skidding down a forty-five-degree angle, dirt and gravel sliding with him. He was about to topple forward when the rope behind him went taut and he gasped, the harness digging into his chest and shoulders. He coughed, hard, and the dust finally began to settle around him, the orange cone from his helmet light painting the scene in shifting, momentary glimpses.
    As he’d suspected, he was now in some sort of chamber, carved right out of the limestone. The sloping ramp he was on led down to a semicircular cave that appeared to be about fifteen feet high at its peak and maybe ten feet deep. The walls and ceiling were smooth, but when he looked more carefully, he could see hair-thin seams between carefully chiseled segments of stone.
    Nothing primitive about the craftsmanship here, Jack thought to himself. He turned carefully on his heels, trying not to dislodge too much gravel as he shifted back toward