“Here. Put these on,” he said, handing her a second pair of freshly laundered white gloves. “I got them especially for you.”

“What is it, a book?” Sana asked, once she got her hands into the gloves. She could see an ancient-looking leather-bound volume sitting on the corner of the desk.

“It’s called a codex,” Shawn said. “It’s an example of the first books that superseded the scroll, since you can get more in it and access various portions of the text far easier. What makes it different from a real book, like the Gutenberg Bible, is that it was done completely by hand. Handle it carefully! It’s more than fifteen hundred years old. It had been preserved for more than a millen nium and a half by being sealed in a jar buried in the sand.”

“My word,” Sana said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hold something quite so old for fear it might disintegrate in her hands.

“Open it!” he urged.

Gingerly, Sana folded back the cover. It was stiff, and the binding audibly complained. “What’s the cover made of?”

“It’s kind of a leather sandwich stiffened with layers of papyrus.”

“What are the pages made out of?”

“The pages are all papyrus.”

“And the language?”

“It’s called Coptic, which is kind of a written version of ancient Egyptian using a Greek alphabet.”

“Truly amazing!” Sana said. She was impressed but wondered why Shawn had said it was such an important find for him. Some of the statuary he’d found in Asia Minor seemed far more substantial.

“Can you see that a large section of the book has been torn out?”

“I can. Is that significant?”

“Very much so! Five of the original, individual texts of this particular codex had been roughly removed in the 1940s to sell them in America. Other pages had been rumored to have been removed to start kitchen fires in a fellahin mud hut.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Indeed. Many an academic has cringed at the thought.”

“I also notice that the inside of the front cover has been opened up along its edge.”

“I did that myself very carefully with a steak knife about an hour ago.”

“Was that wise? I mean, considering the age of this thing. I imagine there are more appropriate tools than a steak knife.”

“No, it probably wasn’t wise, but I did it because I couldn’t help myself. At that point I was horribly disappointed with what’s in the codex. I had expected a virtual gold mine, and instead I’ve rescued the equivalent of the output of one of the world’s first copy machines.”

“I don’t think I’m following you,” Sana admitted. She handed the ancient book back to Shawn to absolve herself from responsibility. She pulled off the gloves. His excitement was palpable. She was more than intrigued.

“I’m not surprised.” He took the codex and replaced it to its former position on the corner of the desk. In the middle of the desk, under the glare of both a desk lamp and a floor lamp, were three individual pages held flat by various objects, including a pair of Shawn’s ancient-coin cuff links. The pages were heavily creased from being folded up for thousands of years. It too was papyrus, like the pages in the codex, but it seemed to be older. The edges had blackened to the point of appearing burnt.