These hills are also grey, and this sea is also grey, but the sun that shines down on them gives a colder, bluer, light.  The hills are naked stone, and the water is grey because it is a soup of grey strands, like sodden wool. If one of the strands were taken to Professor Rathbein, of Göttingen, it would send him into raptures, and unmake with one blow the theory that has been his life’s work. There are perhaps a dozen other men on Earth who would find it equally interesting.

A fierce smell of vinegar comes from the high water mark, where a blackening line of these strands lies rotting. No one is here to smell it.

There is no one here to see the two objects that lie further up the slope, above the mark of the highest storms.

There is a machine about the size of a hatbox, all gears and magnets and capacitors and thick hanks of copper wire, beginning to go black. A tin plate attached tells how the machine, or some part of it, was made in Philadelphia under U.S. patent 673,118.

There is a little piece of ancient bone carved into the shape of a fish, with a hole at one end through which a cord might be passed. There are no Professors at Göttingen, or anywhere else, who know this, but it is an ornament traditionally worn by pubescent girls among of people who lived in what is now north-eastern Bolivia, five thousand years ago.