Touchstone

About Touchstone

Book III, Touchstone when Professor Nordhausen is again the catalyst for a new mission. After encountering an operative of the Assassin cult in Wadi Rumm in Book II, the professor discovers a curious papyrus scroll in the man's backpack that appears to be a rubbing from Egyptian hieroglyphics. He writes them down from memory and later sees that they correspond to no known surviving sample of the ancient writing, so if they were indeed a rubbing, where was the original stone? To find out he makes a secret time jump to the British Museum in old London where he learns that something is terribly wrong with the famous Rosetta Stone. He is able to read and understand the Hieroglyphics, but apparently no one else is, because the stone has been strangely damaged.

Returning with this news he first faces the wrath of Maeve Lindford for his unauthorized time jump, then manages to convince the project team that the Assassin cult must have deliberately damaged the Rosetta Stone so they can use the ancient language as a code, and only Nordhausen can now read and understand the characters. The resulting time mission sends the professor and Maeve Lindford off to the year 1799, as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt is just underway. They want to have a look at the Rosetta Stone at the exact moment of its discovery, but are shocked and amazed at what is uncovered. This sets off another dangerous shift, some 10,000 years into the past to an ancient, and heretofore unknown site in the Egyptian desert.

Volume (III) in the award winning Meridian Series, Foreword magazine's Silver Medal Winner for Science Fiction "Book Of The Year," 2002 - By John Schettler


Genre: Science Fiction