IN the catacombs of a ruined 14th-century French monastery, a team of grad-student archaeologists from Yale stumbles on something peculiar. It’s a convex piece of glass that looks like it could have come from a pair of—wait a minute, yes that’s exactly what it looks like, but it couldn’t be—a pair of eyeglasses of a distinctly 20th-century design. It must be a joke. But what’s this? In an alcove of the same underground necropolis, sealed since well before the modern era, the team finds a packet of documents, parchment covered in medieval languages, nothing surprising among them except for one item toward the middle of the bunch. On this parchment is scrawled a message in recognizably 20th-century English language and script. It says: “HELP ME. 4/7/1357.”
Yes, it must surely be a joke. For the desperate plea was apparently written in the hand of their distinguished professor, Edward Johnston, leader of this dig, who at the moment is known to be in New Mexico conferring with the management of a high-tech company that’s been financing the expedition.
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