01_-_The_Alchemyst

“Hekate’s home,” Flamel explained. “You are the only living humani in
the last two thousand years to see it. Even I’ve only ever read about it.”
Scatty smiled at the looks on the twins’ faces. She nudged Josh. “Where
exactly did you expect her to live? A trailer?”
“I wasn’t…I mean, I don’t know…I didn’t think…,” Josh began. The
sight was incredible, and from the little he had studied about biology, he
knew that no living thing could grow so huge. No natural thing, he corrected
himself.
Sophie thought the tree looked like an ancient woman, bent over with
age. It was all very well for Flamel to talk about the distant past and a twothousand-year-old
warrior or a ten-thousand-year-old goddess: the numbers
meant almost nothing. Seeing the tree was different. Both she and Josh had
seen ancient trees before. Their parents had taken them to see the threethousand-year-old
giant redwoods, and they had spent a week camping with
their father in the White Mountains in the north of California as he
investigated the Methuselah Tree, which, at nearly five thousand years old,
was supposed to be the oldest living thing on the planet. Standing before the
Methuselah Tree, a gnarled and twisted bristlecone pine, it was easy to
accept its great age. But now, seeing Hekate’s tree house, Sophie had no
doubt that it was incredibly ancient, millennia older than the Methuselah
Tree.
They followed a smoothly polished stone path that led to the tree. As
they got closer, they realized that it was more like a skyscraper than they’d
first thought: there were hundreds of windows cut into the bark, with lights
flickering in the rooms beyond. But it was only when they reached the main
entrance that they appreciated just how vast the tree was. The smoothly
polished double doors towered at least twenty feet tall, and yet they opened
at the merest touch of Flamel’s fingers. The twins stepped into an enormous
circular foyer.
And stopped.
The interior of the tree was hollow. From just inside the entrance, they
could look straight up to where wispy clouds gathered inside the tree. A
gently curving staircase curled up along the inside of the trunk, and every few