The entire superlong maze—floor, walls and ceiling—all rotated slowly to the left, so that what, moments before, had been the left-hand wall was now the floor.

The effect was as shocking as it was sudden.

As the floor tilted quickly and passed through forty-five degrees, all the water that had poured into the floor’s trenches from the waterfalls now sloshed wildly and, thanks to gravity, flooded downward, as a wall of raging waves, charging down through the trench-paths, bouncing off their many right-angled walls in an effort to settle on the new ‘floor’ of this cavern.

Then the giant unseen ancient gears that had caused the colossal rotation issued a deep muffled clank and the rotation ceased and the maze was still again.

‘The only safe spots,’ Jack said, ‘appear to be the white blockhouses. The rotation mechanism—the turning sequence—must be on a timer of some kind. You take refuge in a blockhouse and, from there, you figure out how you’re going to get to the next blockhouse. But you only have a certain amount of time to navigate that section of the maze and get to the next blockhouse before the rotation mechanism kicks in again.’

Zoe said, ‘And if you don’t get to a blockhouse in time, you get washed down by the water. If you don’t drown, you’ll lose your bearings and become lost. If you get tipped out again by another rotation, you’ll be hopelessly lost for good.’

Alby said, ‘What about moving along the tops of the trenches?’

Lily shook her head. ‘The builders of these kind of mazes tend not to like it when someone tries to cheat the system.’

Jack pointed at the nearest blockhouse, located a hundred metres into the maze, right in the centre.

‘Okay, people. We don’t have time to linger. Rastor and Sphinx are already moving through this maze. This is a test of memory and speed, under constant pressure. Look at the maze closely and find the correct route to that first blockhouse. We also need to time how often this thing rotates, because we’ll have to get to each blockhouse before the next rotation occurs and hurls us off our feet.’

They observed the maze for the next thirty minutes.

Jack and Zoe used their stopwatches and, after three more colossal rotations—which brought the original ‘floor’ back to that position—they calculated that the massive elongated space rotated to the left approximately every ten minutes.

As they did this, Lily and Alby charted a course to the first blockhouse.

Once they were inside the trenches, they’d be working from memory, so they needed to know which way to turn at each intersection.