“It turned out that his discovery was on the summit of a hill some miles from Dykirk, named Kerachan Hill. He had had a little cottage, or cabin, built on the hill, and had lived in it for some weeks. It took us most of the day to get to his little home, so we stowed my luggage and waited until the next morning to inspect his discovery.

“And it was really astounding. The summit of the hill was flat, and there, with a few crumbling stone blocks scattered about, but in the center of that level expanse, was a shallow pit, newly dug, that was circular in shape and perhaps twenty feet across. At its bottom, a foot or so from the surface of the ground, lay a flat round stone, the surface of which was almost completely covered by a mass of strange characters, carven into it deeply.

“It was to decipher this inscription that Powell needed my help, for I am by way of being an expert in hieroglyphics, cuneiform writing, and such. He said that he had found this inscription beneath a protecting layer of cement of some kind, and was afire to learn its meaning, as he well might be.

“So, I settled in the little cabin and began work that very day. To my surprise, I found the inscription quite easy to decipher, for all that the characters were totally strange and unknown. Whoever had carved it had placed in it, here and there, small pictures, symbols, giving a key for its translation purposely. Within a month I had translated and arranged my translations of it, and found that the inscription told a stupendous, incredible story.

“According to it, these ruins of forts that lay scattered through Scotland had been built ages before by a race of strange folk who had invaded the Earth then. And these strangers had come, not from another planet, as one might suppose, but from a single atom in the Earth.

“This will sound incredible to you, as at first it did to me, but consider. We know that each atom of our Earth consists of a number of electrons revolving about a nucleus, and what is that but a miniature solar system? Just as our sun and its circling planets may be an atom in a vastly larger system, and so on infinitely, perhaps. The idea is not new, it was advanced years ago. And in this particular atom of the Earth, on its electrons, its tiny planets, dwelt a race proportionately tiny, the atomic people, I will call them. They had crowded over every one of their electron-planets and were now gradually stifling from their ever-increasing numbers.