TREASURE
BY CLIVE CUSSLER
Books by Clive Cussler
Sahara
Dragon
Treasure
Cyclops
Deep Six
Pacific Vortex
Night Probe!
Vixen 03
Raise the Titanic!
Iceberg
The Mediterranean Caper
POCKET BOOKS New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Copyright (D 1988 by Clive Cussler Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
for information address Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-70465-6
First Pocket Books printing November 1988
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POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Printed in the U.S.A.
A NOTE TO THE READER
Please forgive the inconvenience of converting measurements from what most Americans are used to. But in 1991 the United States finally became the last nation on earth to convert to the metric system.
It's easy.
1 kilometer roughly equals a little more than 1/2 Mile.
1 meter is slightly more than a yard, about 39 inches.
THE ALEXANDRIA LIBRARY truly existed, and if it had remained unravished by wars and religious zealots it would have given us not only the knowledge of the Egyptian, Greek and Roman empires, but those little-known civilizations that rose and fell far beyond the shores of the Mediterranean.
In A.D. 391 Christian Emperor Theodosius ordered all books and art depicting anything remotely pagan, which included the teachings of the immortal Greek philosophers, burned and destroyed.
Much of the collection was thought to have been secretly saved and spirited away. What became of it, or where it was hidden, remains a mystery sixteen centuries later.
THE PRECURSORS
July 15, A.D. 391
A land unknown A small, flickering light danced eerily through the black of the tunneled passageway. A man dressed in a woolen tunic that dropped below his knees paused and raised an oil lamp above his head.