Arizona, 1912…
With a napkin, he wiped his brow of the sweat that had formed, and folded it neatly back into his blazer's front pocket.
Mr. Walker confirmed that this was the planned meeting spot, in the old desert town between the saloon and the paddock. He decided to remain sat in the comfort of his motor car, a new Peugeot Type 126 which he had purchased on his last visit to France, and had arranged to have it shipped over with him upon his return. All against his manor, his many acres of land, his race horses, his bright yellow Peugeot was his pride and joy.
He sat there routinely wiping his forehead and brushing sand off of his shoulders for the following half hour, until the sound of a horse trotting towards him perked his attention. He closed the book he'd occupied his time in reading, and stepped out to greet the arrival.
Once they discussed their initial business, the archaeologist who had arrived left his horse in the care of the paddock owner, before he boarded the Peugeot as Mr. Walker rotated the handle on the front until the engine came back to life, and also flicked on the two large headlamps, before they drove off along the bumpy old stone road.
It took them two hours to cover the 50 miles, but eventually they reached the dig site. They had been digging for dinosaur fossils, and there was a full skeleton there… but it wasn't prehistoric beasts that Mr. Walker was here for.
"And you know something… this thing is deeper than the fossil, meaning it's way older." The archaeologist explained, Mr. Walker looking at him in surprise.
"And I thought you said the dinosaurs are many millions of years old?" Walker questioned.
"They are. Whatever this thing is, it's even older." The archaeologist answered as they crossed the hill brow, and then Mr. Walker stopped in his tracks. He removed his glasses, and in that moment thought that if there was such a thing as gods, this must be the work of them.
There in the ground was a perfect ring, around 20 feet in diameter. It seemed to be made of three main sections, outer, middle and inner rings, and on the outer one were nine chevrons equally spaced around the ring. The middle ring was covered in perfectly equal square divisions, each one containing a strange and unique symbol. Nearby there was also a second item, some sort of pedestal with two circles of buttons around a large red crystal ball in the middle.
"I looked up its design in the library of the college… it has striking resemblance to a hieroglyph found in Egypt, which appears to show a ring with a star in the middle, and gods walking out of it. It almost sounds like…"
"A gateway to the gods." Mr. Walker finished, the archaeologist nodding. "Could this be the gate to the kingdom beyond?"
"I suppose only time will tell." The archaeologist responded.
They would go on to fully excavate the ring and pedestal, and examine the surrounding areas. It became Walker's life work to find out what the gateway really was and if it could work. However, he would pass away in his 70s before he could manage to do much more than find out that the middle ring and chevrons worked simultaneously to enter in coordinates, but no kind of language he knew would translate out when he tried to enter them in through the pedestal.
His grandson didn't really believe in the same thing, that it was a gateway to the gods or even anything remotely of the sort. However, 'God's Lost Ring' as it had been named, would take a prized position in his museum, many decades later.