This was during the week of May 15. The local authorities were skeptical of father's story. Even with the public facts of the previous year--the coming of the giants, the battle on Bird's Nest Island--what father now said was incredible. This atom, within the rock, as the source of the inexplicable "giants," was to these local officials too much for belief. Heaven knows, one cannot blame them--especially since the rock had vanished and no one remained who had ever seen it, or even heard of it, save father and Ransome. Father was taken to Portland for treatment. When he had recovered, the authorities at Washington sent for him. Officialdom there placed more credence in what he had to say; but not enough to do anything about it! As a matter of fact, what could they have done? On the night of May 20, with father still ill, and in Washington with Ransome to give their testimony, our place at King's Cove was unoccupied. The Togarites poured from the tiny rock, a thousand of them in this first party. They grew into the boathouse, then left it, and roamed over King's Cove in the moonlight, still growing. It must have been near dawn, when the first of them came out. Togaro was presently with them, I have no doubt. What they did was far different from the sporadic appearance of those giants of the year before. Organized, intelligent action now! Shortly after that dawn of May 21, the world rang with the news that giants had come again. In Washington, the officials with whom father had been in consultation knew now that everything he said was the truth. The menace was at hand! The world was fronted by the strangest, gravest crisis of its civilized history! CHAPTER XXX _The World at Bay_ I can give only a broad picture of those events which followed during May. They are history today. I saw them, as presently I will explain, from an inside viewpoint; a narrow viewpoint indeed. But as the world saw them, so were they now unfolded to father. The dawn of May 21 showed giants rising from King's Cove. The first reports were contradictory and confused. But the giants were there! They were apparently about two hundred feet tall. A score of them at first. Then more--a hundred or so. The few people who lived in the vicinity of King's Cove took instant flight. There were at first no casualties except a woman who fainted and an aged man who died of heart failure running with his family along the road toward Elton. The giants did nothing menacing. They seemed busy moving about the neighborhood. They trampled it. Cleared it. Spreading out over a mile or so of territory along the water front. A plane passed overhead and reported that they appeared to be occupying the territory, not in haphazard fashion, but with a rational, methodical planning.