GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST

The well-known mystery-adventure writer for adults has done a rather unusual story for boys (and girls) to whom Latin is a dead language (period). Perhaps it will help -- It should -- for the story is concerned with the discovery of a lost community, Perdita, cut off by a falling mountain from civilization and maintaining through the Christian centuries its identity with the Roman city of the time when the Roman Empire included part of Africa. A curator of the British museum, and his son, an American scientist and his son, join a roughneck whose adventures had brought him into contact with a man who ran a curiosity shop in North Africa, and who had sold him a bracelet which happened to be a mate to one recently stolen from the Museum. They go to investigate the sources -- they stumble on Marcu, believed mad -- and they place the puzzle together and visit the lost city, get into trouble -- and out again -- and learn a great deal about Romancivilization at first hand.