[Meridian 03] • 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.