Chapter 27

The manuscript bristled with the rough idiom of far-flung camps of veteran legionaries, with the slang of Rome and Egypt of nearly two thousand years before, and there were references to people and places that appeared in no histories or geographies known to modern man—little places and little people that were without fame in their own time and whose very memory had long been erased from the consciousness of man, but yet in this crude manuscript they lived again for Erich von Harben—the quaestor who had saved the l…