They discover that the better-preserved life forms have vanished and that some form of experiment has been done, though they are only able to speculate on the subject and the possibility that it is the missing man and dog. Near the camp, they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder One buried under each. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon, they are dubbed the 'Elder Ones'. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Six of the specimens seem to be badly damaged, the others uncannily pristine. The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms, completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals, after discovering an underground cave while boring for ice cores. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains taller than the Himalaya.

He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. The story is written in the first-person perspective by the geologist William Dyer, a professor from Miskatonic University. A non sequitur mass-market paperback cover, and the current cover used for the Del Rey Books publication.

At the mountains of madness