Seven Wonders Read Online Free Page A

the two statues at the lip of the cavern.
    Up close, the statues were even more incredible. The details on the women’s faces were precise, the features carefully crafted; both women werequite beautiful, with vaguely African features and braided hair. Looking at them—at the eggs that speckled their bodies, at the missing breast on each of their chests—Jack’s heart rate began to quicken.
    “I’m not hearing any screaming,” Andy’s voice broke the silence. “So I’m gonna assume you made it.”
    Jack turned away from the statues, back toward the descending slope. He was about to answer when his helmet light flashed on something directly across from him—something that seemed to flash right back.
    “I’m going to need ten more yards,” he said.
    He made his way down the slope carefully, not wanting to upset more of the gravel. The cavern felt stable, but he was pretty certain now that he was in a man-made place that was much, much older than the marshy ruins high above.
    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