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 on 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.
