Prologue

Time is the warp of the tapestry which is life. It is eternal,
constant, unchanging. But the woof is gathered together from the
four corners of the earth and the twenty-eight seas and out of the
air and the minds of men by that master artist, Fate, as she weaves
the design that is never finished.
A thread from here, a thread from there, another from out of the
past that has waited years for the companion thread without which
the picture must be incomplete.
But Fate is patient. She waits a hundred or a thousand years to
bring together two strands of thread whose union is essential to
the fabrication of her tapestry, to the composition of the design
that was without beginning and is without end.
A matter of some one thousand eight hundred sixty-five years ago
(scholars do not agree as to the exact year), Paul of Tarsus
suffered martyrdom at Rome.
That a tragedy so remote should seriously affect the lives and
destinies of an English aviatrix and an American professor of
geology, neither of whom was conscious of the existence of the
other at the time this narrative begins—when it does begin, which
is not yet, since Paul of Tarsus is merely by way of prologue—may
seem remarkable to us, but not to Fate, who has been patiently
waiting these nearly two thousand years for these very events I am
about to chronicle.
But there is a link between Paul and these two young people. It
is Angustus the Ephesian. Angustus was a young man of moods and
epilepsy, a nephew of the house of Onesiphorus. Numbered was he
among the early converts to the new faith when Paul of Tarsus first
visited the ancient Ionian city of Ephesus.
Inclined to fanaticism, from early childhood an epileptic, and
worshipping the apostle as the representative of the Master of
earth, it is not strange that news of the martyrdom of Paul should
have so affected Angustus as to seriously imperil his mental
balance.
Conjuring delusions of persecution, he fled Ephesus, taking ship
for Alexandria; and here we might leave him, wrapped in his robe,
huddled, sick and frightened, on the deck of the little vessel,
were it not for the fact that at the Island of Rhodus, where the
ship touched, Angustus, going ashore, acquired in some manner
(whether by conversion or purchase we know not) a fair haired slave
girl from some far northern barbarian tribe.
And here we bid Angustus and the days of the Caesars adieu, and
not without some regrets upon my part for I can well imagine
adventure, if not romance, in the flight of Angustus and the fair
haired slave girl down into Africa from the storied port of
Alexandria, through Memphis and Thebae into the great unknown.