The Lion of Petra — Talbot Mundy

Talbot Mundy was an early 20th century English writer who often wrote under the pseudonym Walter Galt. At age 19 he left London to travel to India and parts of the Near and Far East. Most of Mundy's novels are set in India under British Occupation in which the loyal British officers encounter ancient Indian mysticism. In the 1920's Mundy wrote stories about Tros of Samothrace, a Greek freedom fighter who aided Britons and Druids in their fight against Julius Caesar. An excerpt from the first chapter reads, "The beginning as concerns me was when I moved into quarters in Grim's mess in Jerusalem. As a civilian and a foreigner I could not have done that, of course, if it had been a real mess; but Grim, who gets fun out of side-stepping all regulations, had established a sort of semi-military boarding-house for junior officers who were tired of tents, and he was too high up in the Intelligence Department for anybody less than the administrator to interfere with him openly."