It is 18__. J.G. Hallam is an English apothecary, sent by his father to open a shop in the new world. But instead Hallam becomes a partner in a photography business; when he is offered the opportunity to take photographs for the municipal government, the bleak and ungainly young city takes shape before his lens. One hundred and fifty years later, these are the photographs that Professor David Hollis despairs of finding. Tormented by his colleagues' derision and his own failing health, Hollis is helped by an unusual kinship with his daughter's fiance, John Lewis. After Hollis slips beneath the waves of Toronto's harbour, following in death the man he pursued in the last years of life, it falls to Lewis to assist the grieving widow Marion in vindicating her dead husband. The shores of Lake Ontario have shifted dramatically over the century and a half: Hollis had speculated that the sunken ship containing the photographs would be beneath the site where the city's new Union Arena is to be
