Free The Babel Codex by Alex Archer

readily in the dust on the cave floor.
    Hefting the saddlebags of water onto her shoulder again, Annja strode toward the back of the cave. The floor became steeply angled, but there were enough knobby ridges to make the going fairly easy.
    She stepped down and descended into the earth.
    * * *
    Almost twenty minutes later, she found the intersection of tunnels. They didn’t quite make an X, but it was close enough.
    Burris played his beam around. “This was in the translation?”
    “Yes.” Annja flicked her light toward the tunnel on the right. “At some point, that leads back to the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, but it has probably collapsed along the way and that’s why this system hasn’t been found by explorers coming from there.”
    “That’s not our tunnel?”
    Annja pointed her flashlight to the left. “That’s our tunnel.” She started forward, excitement growing inside her.
    “What if this tunnel is collapsed, too?”
    “We don’t have much farther to go. We’ll know soon enough.”
    * * *
    Ten minutes later, Annja found the tunnel section she’d been searching for. She had to search three times for it, playing her flashlight beam over the uneven surfaces. Only a few tool marks stood out in the stone.
    Putting her backpack down, she rummaged through the toolkit she’d brought and took out a stiff-bristled brush. Carefully, she swiped at the northern wall, dislodging dust and debris.
    “What are you looking for?” Burris peered over her shoulder.
    “Cracks.”
    Burris snorted. “That wall is full of cracks. How are you going to know when you find the right one?”
    “Because it looks like this.” Annja focused the flashlight on a web of cracks three feet off the ground.
    “What is that?” He studied the shape, about three inches by three inches.
    “A ziggurat. It’s the symbol for the Tower of Babel.”
    “That looks square. I thought we were looking for a tower.”
    “Some towers are built square or rectangular. Like the ziggurat. The Assyrians, Sumerians and Elamites—to name a few—built towers like these for temples. The Sialk Ziggurat in Kashan, from the third century BC—found and excavated in the 1930s—is still standing.”
    After some careful study, she gently pressed on the ziggurat symbol. Nothing happened. Annja pressed harder and the ziggurat appeared to move. They both watched in awe as the image sank inward.
    Stone rasped against stone, causing a minor tremor to fill the tunnel and dust to sift down from the ceiling.
    Burris squawked and dropped into a kneeling ball pressed against one of the tunnel sides.
    Gradually, a section of the wall slid inward, grating along runners carved into the floor. A minute later, it stopped.
    Annja thrust her flashlight into the darkness, sniffed the air and followed the light inside.

Chapter Fifteen
    On the other side of the massive door, Annja followed a short tunnel that led to a much larger chamber, which the flashlight’s beam couldn’t quite span. When she panned upward, the beam reached twenty feet and disappeared against the blackness.
    Burris stumbled to a stop beside her. “How far down do you think we are?”
    She estimated the distance they’d come and the angle of the descent. “Maybe three hundred feet.”
    “Didn’t realize it was that deep.” He took a long breath and let it out. The light reflecting on his face revealed his worried expression. “So what are we looking for?”
    “The tower in the shadow of the tower.”
    “Sounds like something out of a fortune cookie.”
    Annja moved forward, flashing her light around. “The inscription was written for someone who already knew what they would be looking for. It’s not a Wikipedia entry.”
    “Yeah, I got that.”
    An image blurred through the flashlight beam. Annja backtracked, searching for what she thought she’d seen, moving slowly now.
    That’s when she saw the low stone pedestal with the tower on top of it. The pedestal had been cut from a stalagmite