At The Egyptian Harbor

Sweating stevedores, a sweetmeat vendor, a laden donkey cart, a dancing girl watched by drinking sailors, priests of Melqart and Osiris, a Hebrew warrior, a Philistine dignitary, an Assyrian, an Anatolian, red-haired Achaeans, an exotically clad black man followed by Phoenician urchins, a blond Northerner, sounds of feet, hoofs, wheels and rolled barrels, smells of dyeworks, dung, smoke, tar, sandalwood, myrrh, spice and salt spray. The salt spray might easily have been overlooked but not by Poul Anderson.

After years at the Time Patrol Academy, Pummairam will return fully grown to the same month and will marry both Sarai and Bronwen. Will they not recognize him? Everard says of Sarai:

"'If any questions arise in her mind, I think she'll be too wise to ask them.'" (Time Patrol, p. 330)

Pum understands that most people of 950 BC would be merely "'...bewildered and frightened...'" (p. 328) by the idea of time travel. He thinks that he can accept it because:

"'...I was always on my own, never cast into a mold and let harden.'" (ibid.)

When did the apparently contradictory idea of travel into the past become even conceivable? In the twentieth century, Keith Denison:

"...had accepted the fact of time travel more readily than most. His mind was supple and, after all, he was an archaeologist." (p. 59)

I think of "The Year Of The Ransom" and "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks" together as "The Thieves Of Time" because both are about the Exaltationists. "The Year..." ends with the recruitment of Wanda Tamberly to the Time Patrol whereas "Ivory..." ends with the recruitment of Pum.