Read Seven Wonders for Free Online Page A

few feet away, reaching into her backpack to retrieve her latex gloves and her plastic specimen containers, she knew that what she was looking at had never been written about in any textbook. As she pulled the gloves on over her long fingers, holding the flashlight in her teeth, she could even make out a few of the vine’s little seeds hanging beneath reddish bulbs between some of the thorns—the same shape, color, and texture as the seed her colleague had found at the entrance to the runoff.
    Sloane was looking at something both new and very, very old. Still not daring to touch the plant, even gloved, she followed its structure with her eyes. Twisting and turning, she traced it up the stone to a seam at the very top, right against one of the iron clamps, where the vine seemed to disappear into the very structure of the tunnel wall.
    Curiouser and curiouser . She glanced up toward the ceiling at the tiny fissures still letting wisps of early sunlight into the confines of the tunnel. Not much light, but certainly enough for the processes of photosynthesis. Plants grew in some of the deepest caves ever found, and thousands of feet below the surface of the oceans. Unlike humans, plants had found ways to survive in the harshest climates imaginable.
    But as Sloane moved even closer to the vines—her face now just inches away from the angry-looking red thorns and leafless stems—she noticed something even more peculiar than the way the vine seemed to vanish into the stones.
    She wasn’t sure, but she thought she could make something out behind the tangle of vine, something carved right into the wall of the tunnel. She couldn’t imagine that anything man-made would rival the botanical beauty she had just discovered, but she found herself intrigued enough to take a look.
    With extreme care, doing everything she could to avoid the thorns, she gingerly began pulling the red vines apart. At first, it was difficult; the vines seemed to pull back against her, and twice her hands almost slipped, her gloved fingers almost touching one of the oversize thorns. But then the vine started to give way. A moment later, she’d gotten through the twists and tangles and found herself face-to-face with a visage carved directly into the ancient stone wall.
    A woman’s face. Vaguely African, wearing what appeared to be an Egyptian headdress. Beneath the face, also carved into the stone, were row after row of Roman letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
    Christ . As a botanist, Sloane had studied a little Latin and Greek to better understand the various names of the plants beneath her microscopes, but apart from that, her grasp of ancient languages was pretty weak. The hieroglyphics were just pictures to her. But she could make out some of the Latin; specifically, halfway down the lettering, she recognized a single name: Cleopatra . Beyond that, her best guess was that the writing was some sort of dedication to the famed female pharaoh.
    She paused, her gloved hands still holding back the vines. She wasn’t certain, but she believed that Cleopatra would have been born right around the time of the construction of the Colosseum. She knew from the movies and television shows Christine had gabbed on about that Cleopatra had some sort of romantic involvement with a couple different Roman leaders:Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. But other than that, she couldn’t fathom why someone had carved a picture and dedication to Cleopatra into one of the greatest Roman constructions.
    As she pondered the question, her gaze drifted back to the hieroglyphics. Most of it was strange squiggles and incomprehensible shapes; but then her eyes settled on an image that was strangely familiar:

    Two opposing snakes twisted together, intertwined in what appeared to be a double helix. At the very bottom, the tail of one of the snakes twisted off in the wrong direction—but other than the tail, the snakes seemed to be in a very close approximation to the shape of DNA.
    Sloane