And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the rising of the immense ancient thing stopped, and it now just stood there in the night, this great grey dome, on the surface of the Red Sea, within view of the Sinai coast, looking like some megasized enclosed sports stadium.

Anyone still standing on the oil rig or on the decks of the naval vessels stared at it in speechless awe.

It dwarfed the carrier.

It dwarfed the oil rig.

Bigger than a dozen Great Pyramids, it dwarfed everything.

It was then that a final mechanism was triggered.

There came a great groaning sound and suddenly eight seams appeared in the giant grey dome and, like petals on a flower, eight segments of the huge roof all began to retract in perfect unison, withdrawing down into the outer wall ringing the city, allowing moonlight and fresh air to touch the city-maze and the castle for the first time in thousands of years.

Now the entire thing really did look like a supergigantic sports stadium: a breathtakingly huge hollow concrete ring, fully open to the sky, with its mighty eighty-storey-tall greystone ring-wall holding back the waves of the Red Sea, while in its middle—hundreds of feet below sea level—lay the city-like labyrinth, with its buildings of all shapes and sizes, and, poking up from the exact centre of the space, the high castle with the pinnacle and the throne mounted on it.

It was of another time, another civilisation.

This was momentous.

Stunning.

Historic.

Sphinx was not a man who was easily awed, but at that moment he was well and truly blown away.

He’d seen many strange and wondrous things in his capacity as a watchman of a secret city, but nothing like this, not on this scale.

He gazed out over the now open-air city, bathed in glorious moonlight, and at the towering grey wall ringing it.

To Sphinx’s right, peeking over the rim of the outer wall, he could see the bow of the aircraft carrier, while off to his left, he could see the uppermost deck of the still-rocking oil rig: floodlights from both played over the massive space.

The Russian carrier was, of course, under his command.

As was the oil rig.

It had long been owned by loyal royals, their job: to stand guard over this site, like the watchmen at the Three Secret Cities did. The crew on the rig could not know what lay below the seabed, but their ground-penetrating radars had long shown that there was something large down there connected to the ancient places of the world.

Sphinx eyed the throne at the centre of the maze.

‘The Life Throne,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take us time to traverse this city-maze and reach the castle.’

Mendoza added, ‘And to sit on the throne, you must scale the castle and pass through its holy doors in the correct order.’