Chapter 4

A TRIP TO LONDON

As soon as he opened his eyes and had a look at his bedside clock on that Thursday morning in the late fall of 1997, Elmer James Galway had the odd feeling that his day was not going to be an ordinary one. To begin with, the sixty-three-year-old professor of classical history at Oxford University had slept late. This was not due to some alarm clock malfunction but rather to a dog failure. Slipper, his golden retriever—so named because of his predilection as a puppy for that particular object—had not climbed on the professor’s bed and gently woken him up at 6 o’clock, as the dog dutifully did every morning, weekends included.

It was already 7:45 when Galway hurriedly got out of bed. As he headed for the kitchen to prepare his first cup of tea of the day, he bumped into an equally hurried Slipper coming in the opposite direction. “You’re late, old boy, and so am I; we have no time for your morning walk. And it’s all your fault,” he said, pointing his forefinger at the dog and pretending to be annoyed with him. He received a loud bark in return.

The telephone rang before he could reach the kitchen. He took the call in his study, while a restless Slipper kept trying to get his attention.

“Elmer? It’s David. I left you a message yesterday.” David Green was the founder and owner of one of the leading companies of antiquarian book dealers in Britain: David Green Rare Books & Manuscripts Limited, and from time to time he sought Galway’s expert advice on the origin or authenticity of some ancient manuscript. He was calling from his office on the top floor of the company’s main shop, a three-story building in London’s Mayfair district.

“I’m sorry, David, I got home late last night and didn’t check my messages. What’s up?”

“I’d very much appreciate your opinion on an item that has been offered to us. It’s a rather urgent matter. Any chance you could come over?”

“Today?”

“If at all possible . . .” and, to make his request more attractive, he added: “It’s something that might interest you, too.”

“Hold on a second. Let me see . . . I know I’m already running late for the library committee meeting.”

There was a short silence while Galway looked up his appointment book—he kept one at the college and another one at home, the two versions not always agreeing with each other. “Oh dear, I have an overseas visitor this afternoon. But I think I’ll be able to manage if I . . .”

“That’ll be great!” Green enthusiastically cut him off. “Any time today would be just fine. Thank you, Elmer; I really appreciate your help on this one.” And he hung up before the professor had a chance to confirm that he would indeed be making the trip to London.

There were some arrangements to be made first. He could not miss the library committee meeting where substantial cuts to the scholarly journals subscription budget would be discussed and, without some staunch opposition, also approved. The meeting would likely take up the best part of the morning, but he could certainly catch the 12:45 train and be in London by 2:00. He avoided as much as possible driving to the city, which he considered an unnecessary hassle, preferring instead the convenience of traveling by train even if the quality and reliability of the service was no longer what it used to be.

It was too late to cancel his afternoon appointment. He would ask Bradley Johnston, his former student and now a junior faculty member, to look after his overseas visitor, a lady from some Canadian museum. She is probably interested in a guided tour of the Ashmolean’s reserve collections, which are not open to the general public, he thought, and Bradley could perfectly well do it in my place. Funded in 1683 and part of Oxford University since the middle of the nineteenth century, the Ashmolean is Britain’s oldest public museum. Among its treasures of art and archaeology there are major pieces of Greek and Roman sculptures, such as the Apollo from Olympia and the Prima Porta Augustus.

When Galway finally took a seat in the 12:45 direct train from Oxford to London Paddington station, he was very pleased with himself. The meeting had been less turbulent than he had anticipated and, more important, he had single-handedly prevented a drastic reduction in the department of classics funds for the purchase of learned journals. Some idiot from financial services had tried to justify the cuts by arguing that most of the information was available on the Internet for free anyway. The poor fellow obviously had no idea of how scholarly research was carried out.

But in reality, Galway was well aware that an increasing number of academic journals now published electronic versions that could be accessed at very low cost from practically anywhere at any time—and not only at the library during opening hours. Although he would have been reluctant to admit it, he mistrusted scholarly articles in electronic form and preferred the definitiveness of the printed version. Unlike its electronic counterpart, the latter could not be altered at will with a few keystrokes or clicks of the mouse.

“A compact disc might contain the equivalent of a small library,” his defense of the printed word would start, “but you are a slave to the technology needed to read it. The ancient texts, on the other hand, written on traditional supports—clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, parchment, or paper—require no such intermediaries between text and reader. Without those ‘hard copies’ from the past we would know next to nothing of antiquity; and we’d better make sure that some hard copies of our own age are still around for the benefit of fortieth-century scholars.”

Galway loved books as objects in themselves, and not only because of the information they contained. Reading a text from a computer screen was no match for the pleasure he derived from handling the bound stack of sheets, delicately turning a page or merely feeling the texture of the paper. He never missed an opportunity to browse through the shelves in Green’s rare book store, located in the first floor of the Brook Street building. The place had the musty smell of dust and old paper typical of second-hand bookshops. Occasionally he would also visit the second floor, where the most valuable books and manuscripts were kept under special temperature and humidity conditions.

During one of these visits he had held in his hands a copy of the first printed translation into Latin of Euclid’s Elements, dating from 1482. Surpassed in reputation only by Pythagoras and Archimedes, Euclid of Alexandria was one of the most prominent mathematicians of ancient Greece. He received his earlier training during the third century BC in Athens from the pupils of Plato, and later taught and founded a school in Alexandria. In his most famous work, the Elements, he developed geometry and the theory of numbers in a systematic way by logical deduction from certain basic assumptions or postulates, “bringing to irrefutable demonstration the things that had only been loosely proved by his predecessors,” as the fifth-century Neoplatonist thinker Proclus put it. Through its countless editions and translations, Euclid’s masterpiece became the most successful and influential mathematical textbook of all time.

The 1482 Latin edition up for sale was based on a medieval translation from Arabic by the English monk Adelard of Bath. Apart from the mathematical significance of the work, this particular edition inaugurated an era in the history of printing by featuring for the first time diagrams and geometrical forms cast in blocks of metal—a feat that the Venetian printer claimed no one before his time had been able to perform. The attractive, hand-colored copy was in excellent condition and had an early eighteenth-century inscription attesting its provenance from the library of a Jesuit convent.

Galway had opened the book at a random page and had translated part of the Latin text in his head. Without really trying to understand the mathematics, he had surmised that the author was discussing the prime numbers, that is, those positive integers that cannot be decomposed as a product of two smaller ones (the page actually contained Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers*). When he inquired about the price, merely out of curiosity, he was informed that “it is currently priced at 300,000 pounds”—about 450,000 dollars.

Over the years, Galway had built a small collection of ancient books and manuscripts, a few of them quite rare although none nearly as highly prized as the ancient copy of the Elements. But the pieces he treasured most were four Egyptian papyri scrolls given to him by his father. Galway junior had always felt uneasy about the papyri and would only show them or mention their existence to his closest friends. He suspected his father of having procured the scrolls by less than legitimate means during one of his field trips and so did not quite consider himself their rightful owner. They might be worth a small fortune, but Elmer had never dared to have the papyri appraised for fear of being questioned about their origin. Museums and reputable dealers in most countries now had a strict policy of not acquiring material that had left its country of origin illegally.

Times have changed, he would try to reassure himself; ethical standards in his father’s time regarding artifacts discovered in the course of diggings or expeditions to remote corners of the world were much more relaxed than they are today. Take the nineteenth-century Italian explorer and one-time circus strongman Giovanni Belzoni, for example. One of the first Europeans to enter the Egyptian temples and pyramids, he shipped large numbers of Egyptian antiquities back to the British Museum in London, notably the colossal bust of Ramesses II. In his 1820 best-selling book Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, he gives some idea of the archaeological practices of the time: “Thus I proceeded from one cave to another, all full of mummies piled in various ways, some standing, some lying, some piled on their heads. The purpose of my researches was to rob the Egyptians of their papyri; of which I found a few hidden in their breasts, under their arms, above their knees, or on the legs, and covered by the numerous folds of cloth that envelop the mummy.” At least Belzoni had the courtesy of leaving some papyri for future archaeologists—such as his father?—to help themselves, thought Galway sarcastically.

He had never mentioned to his father his misgivings about the scrolls—nor, for that matter, about the vast assortment of other artifacts, from coins to sarcophagi, that Sir Ernest had brought back from excavation sites over the years—partly due to the fact that the exuberant father and his reserved offspring did not get along all that well, but he did seek the advice of his elder brother John.

“Nonsense, finders keepers,” was the not-so-subtle response he received from him. And John went on: “Had it not been for the British and the Germans who dug ’em up, all that stuff would still be rotting in the caves or wherever it was they were found. You know better than I that before Schliemann got there, the Greek peasants were using those old stones so precious to you to build chicken coops. And how many thousands of ancient records and literary works did Egyptian peasants set on fire just to get a kick out of smelling burning papyrus? We did those people and humanity a favor, Elmer.” Heinrich Schliemann was one of the pioneers of modern archaeology. German-born and later an American citizen, he conducted extensive diggings in the late nineteenth century in Greece leading to the discovery of the ruins of Troy, the shaft graves with their immense treasure of gold, silver, and ivory objects at Mycenae, and the palace of Minos at Knossos, on the island of Crete.

John Arthur Galway had the flamboyant personality and the outspoken manners of the successful businessman he actually was. He had a Master’s degree in geology but never intended to become a scientist. Fresh from university, he founded an import-export company dealing in gems—emeralds in particular but also rubies and other precious stones. He was also a junior partner in a multinational corporation mining for emeralds in Colombia.

John had his own idea of what his younger brother should do with the scrolls. “I know a chap in Bogotá who’d pay a pretty penny for those papyri of yours. No questions asked,” he told Elmer. “You’d stop having qualms about them and on top of that you’d be set up with a jolly bundle for your retirement. What do you say?” Elmer politely replied that he would think about it, but what he was really thinking was that his brother had even fewer scruples than his father.

The train was pulling into London’s Paddington station on time. At that early afternoon hour the place was already bustling with people coming and going, and it took Galway a good twenty minutes to get a taxi. He gave the driver the address of David Green Rare Books & Manuscripts Limited. Traffic was heavy, and it took him another twenty minutes to reach his destination.

The first floor of the building was open to the public, whereas access to the upper floors was by appointment only. Galway entered the shop and went up the stairs to a landing with a chair on one side of a closed door and a small table on the other. The sign on the door read “Access restricted. Please ring for service.” He rang the intercom buzzer, identified himself, was let in, and continued up the stairs. When he got to the next and top floor, he walked down the narrow corridor toward the reception desk.

“Professor Galway, so good to see you!” It was Sandra, Green’s secretary, greeting him in her usual merry mood. Sandra, a brunette of powerful build and still unmarried in her late forties, was totally committed to her job. Her warmth and good humor made clients and visitors alike feel welcome as soon as they came in. “Hello, Sandra; good to see you too. How’s Beauty doing?” Galway was inquiring after Sandra’s cat. “She’s been unwell lately, the poor darling. The vet put her on a special diet. Seems she’s been eating too much, just like her mistress!” She laughed. Galway smiled uncomfortably, unsure of what to say next.

“Elmer, so glad you could make it!” interrupted David Green coming out of his office. Saved by the bell, Galway thought. Green gripped the professor’s right hand with both of his and shook it vigorously while he invited him to come in. And after a “No interruptions, Sandra; thank you” to his secretary, the two men disappeared behind the closed door of Green’s office.

*See Appendix 2.