THE MAHABHARATA QUEST:THE ALEXANDER SECRET Read Online Free Page A

leads for techno-terrorism. But he had met the leader of the task force for the first time only today. And he didn’t like what he saw. What was worse was, having backed the idea to the hilt initially, there was no way for him to withdraw from the task force. It was a difficult situation.
    The email alert from his Blackberry intruded on his thoughts. Not tonight. Normally, he welcomed the challenge of an after office hours email. It usually meant there was a problem to be solved. And Imran was nothing if not a problem solver. A true Gemini, he loved nothing more than the novelty of a new crisis rearing its ugly head. It gave him the variety his nature sought as a natural diversion from his routine work.
    He glanced at his email inbox. What he saw there made him sit up immediately. It was an email from a ghost.
    The tomb of a Queen
    As Damon and Alice entered the inner chamber an eerie sight greeted them in the diffused light that filtered through the doorway from the lone lamp in the outer chamber.
    In the centre of the room lay a stone larnax, plain and unadorned. There was no other object in the room. But it was not the emptiness of the chamber or the simplicity of the larnax that stood out.
    On the wall of the chamber facing the doorway, an immense stone snake seemed to emerge from the floor of the tomb. The massive coils of the snake’s body wound from the floor, across the length of the far wall, up to the roof of the chamber, terminating in a massive five-headed hood, which protruded from the wall for around three feet over the stone larnax on the floor below. Its enormous jaws gaped open and its fangs were bared, as if expressing displeasure at an unwelcome intrusion.
    Like a protective shelter for the larnax. Alice couldn’t help the thought flashing through her head. As it was in life, so it was in death for this queen.
    Adding to this surreal vision were the carvings on the remaining walls of the chamber. There were serpents carved in bold relief, coiled, hissing, and stretched out. In the dim light, they looked like stone shadows about to leap off the wall.
    Marco staggered in with both the pole lights and stopped short as he saw the strange decoration in the tomb.
    ‘What on earth is this?’ he whispered, overawed.
    Alice looked at her two companions excitedly. ‘It is her tomb!’ Her voice trembled with the thrill of the discovery. For the last twelve months they had been hoping that their guess about the occupant of the tomb had been correct. Now, all doubts were laid to rest.
    ‘Um… you’ll want to see this.’ Marco had been walking around the chamber, studying the carvings. The chamber was fairly large, at least fifty feet in length. Marco was now standing in the far corner of the chamber opposite the entrance, just below one of the massive coils of the snake that towered over them.
    Alice and Damon hurried up to see what he had found. Hidden behind the bulk of the snake, as it reared off the wall, was an opening. They looked at each other. Was there a third chamber? This was unusual for a Hellenistic tomb.
    Marco didn’t need to be told. He was already carrying one of the lamps to illuminate the hidden doorway, revealing a small chamber lined with two rows of shelves which bore stone statues and stone slabs of different sizes.
    Alice and Damon proceeded to examine the contents of the shelves.
    ‘She certainly had a fascination for snakes,’ Damon remarked, studying a five-inch-tall statuette carved from stone which depicted a beautiful, young woman trapped in the coils of an enormous serpent which was wrapped around her from head to toe.
    Alice nodded. ‘Remember that Alexander III was said to have been fathered by a serpent. I guess the stories about her fascination for snakes were true after all.’
    ‘This is amazing,’ Damon remarked as he read the inscriptions on a square tablet, which was around ten inches long. ‘These texts can fill in many of the gaps about what actually happened