THE TARTARIAN DANGER --- BOOK THREE: CIVILIZATION BENEATH

The Wizard had spent two books looking upward. At domes. Towers. Bells. Stars. Monuments. Pyramids. Megaliths. Then he made the mistake of looking down. There was another civilization beneath the civilization. Water pipes. Drains. Sewers. Cisterns. Tunnels. Foundations. Wells. Aqueducts. Underground chambers. Storage systems. Buried streets. Utility corridors. And an uncomfortable quantity of human waste. The Wizard smiled. "If you want to know how advanced a civilization really was, stop looking at the king's throne and find the toilet." Book Three would investigate the systems that allowed cities to remain alive. Not merely their monuments. Their metabolism. Where did the drinking water come from? Where did sewage go? How were floods controlled? How were underground chambers ventilated? How were enormous populations supplied with food? Where was that food stored? How were cities heated and cooled? What happened to garbage? What infrastructure disappeared beneath later streets? And if an advanced civilization really had been erased, what portions of its buried infrastructure should still be detectable? This time the Wizard would follow the pipes. Because palaces could lie about civilization. Monuments could exaggerate it. Legends could romanticize it. But eventually everybody needed water. And eventually everybody needed somewhere for the water to go. The Wizard opened the first folder of Book Three. Across the top he wrote: CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - WHERE DID ALL THE WATER AND WASTE GO?