Free Written in the Ashes by K. Hollan Van Zandt Page B

and jewelry when the water is clear enough to see to the bottom, usually after the annual flood. Once I even saw a whore pissing through the grate.” Tarek smirked with pride at this memory.
    Hannah winced. The noxious assault on her nostrils was making her ill. For a moment she thought she could use the catacombs as an escape—she would just have to steal the barge—but the labyrinth continued and she became convinced she would get lost and end up dead in the sewer.
    Soon there was torchlight on the walls ahead.
    Hannah wanted to look presentable, so she undid her dark hair and let it cascade down from her shoulders to the small of her back. Then she began to pick through the tangled curls with the silver hairpin that her father had given her. A few moments later, she looked up from the knots in astonishment.
    A pair of twin sphinxes illumined by two torches sat side by side at the base of a wide set of four stone steps. At the top were two tall burnished doors with ebony and brass handles carved to look like vines. Hannah started to stand, but Tarek allowed the barge to float past. She looked back at him in confusion.
    “Oh, that is just the zoological entrance.” He waved his hand to show insignificance. “One of the lion cages is on the other side of that door… Ptolemy’s idea, in case his soldiers were followed into the catacombs.”
    The barge drifted a bit further before the roof of the tunnel dropped to a hand’s width above the water, preventing further passage. Beneath it, the river silently drifted into the dark sea. In the torchlight, clusters of barges tethered to posts clunked together, rocking in the gentle current.
    As soon as Tarek had the barge secured and they leapt off, he produced a string from under his tunica and applied the key at its end to a small lock in one of the doors. It opened with a noisy creak. They ascended a flight of narrow steps and then rounded a corner toward a rectangle of daylight, emerging through a small, unassuming door in a magical garden. Above them stood a tall stone obelisk carved top to bottom in hieroglyphics.
    Hannah blinked back the sun. Jemir was right; it was a dream of the gods. She never imagined such beauty existed. Everywhere there were cascades of flowers and fountains, reflecting pools and immense marble statues. Tarek pointed across the garden to the Shrine of the Nine Muses: a rotunda of columns with beautiful maiden statues in various poses holding writing instruments, masks, lyres and scrolls; and to the thirteen lecture halls beyond it, the medical wing, and the zoology and botanical wings, the outdoor theatre, the gymnasium: each more magnificent than the last, painted with intricate murals of Egyptian and Greek myths and set with rows of elaborate Roman tile.
    This was the Great Library of Alexandria, more beautiful than any heaven.
    They passed over a little footbridge and then walked toward a palatial structure with rows of massive, ornate columns set before it like sun-bleached whalebones; each was decorated with intricate painted scenes at the base. Hannah had never seen a structure so large before. She wondered how many camels standing on top of each other it would take to reach the top. As her count topped eleven, Hannah’s eyes reached the large cupola that crowned the high walls where glass of white, ruby, orange, violet, indigo and emerald scintillated in the sunlight. Tarek proudly explained the Alexandrian technique of variegated ornamental glasswork that was renowned the world over. Hannah was breath-taken. She only wished her father were there beside her to see it.
    On the ground all around them were marble statues of Zeus, Thoth, Hermes, and Serapis with rippling muscles and lifelike eyes that watched over the garden as men in long wine-red robes sauntered past, their hands clasped behind their backs, their somber faces preoccupied with scholarly tasks.
    Hannah followed Tarek between the widely spaced columns and through a massive and