The 1935 Australian expedition and Peaslee’s underground exploration begin as a planned archaeological investigation and end in unresolved personal testimony. A team from Miskatonic University travels into Western Australia to examine ancient stone remains; after weeks of excavation, Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee sets out alone at night and finds a buried structure that seems intimately familiar from his dreams. His account culminates in a book bearing his own handwriting, a discovery he cannot independently substantiate because he does not bring its metal case back to camp.

Expedition and Excavation

The expedition grew from reports of unusually ancient masonry in the Australian desert. Robert B. F. Mackenzie, a mining engineer, had documented stone blocks and markings and proposed that they might be remains of a previously unknown civilization. He and Dr Boyle offered to assist an expedition, while Mackenzie could arrange transport and heavy digging. Miskatonic University supported the undertaking, whose public purpose was described cautiously to avoid sensational coverage.

The university party included geology professor William Dyer, ancient-history professor Ferdinand C. Ashley, anthropology professor Tyler M. Freeborn, and Peaslee’s son Wingate. Mackenzie came to Arkham to help with preparations and arranged tractors at Pilbarra. The group also chartered a shallow-draft vessel to travel upriver. Their plan was to excavate methodically, sift the sand, and preserve the original position of anything they found. The expedition sailed from Boston on March 28, 1935, and continued by tractor into the desert. By May 31 the party had crossed a branch of the De Grey River and reached the desolate region where the ruins were reported.

On June 3 the explorers encountered the first partly buried blocks. Peaslee recognized a carved, curving design like the masonry he had repeatedly seen in dreams. Over the next month, excavation yielded about 1,250 blocks in varying states of wear. Many were carved megaliths with curved upper and lower edges; others were smaller, square or octagonal pieces resembling paving stones, while a few large fragments suggested arches or vaulted construction. More blocks appeared as the digging extended farther north and east, but the team could not establish their arrangement. Dyer was struck by their immense age, and Freeborn identified symbols that seemed to connect with ancient Papuan and Polynesian traditions. The dispersed stones and their condition suggested a history of geological upheaval on a scale difficult to reconcile with ordinary human chronology.

Peaslee’s unease had not subsided as the archaeological evidence accumulated. Dreams and pseudo-memories continued to trouble him, and aerial surveys by Wingate produced shifting, inconclusive impressions in the windblown sand. Peaslee once thought he had seen a significant arrangement of stones, but when he returned with the others, the moving dunes had obscured the location. The expedition therefore had a firm material record of the ruins, but no clear map of the structures that had once stood there.

The Night Walk

Peaslee introduces his decisive experience as an account whose reality he cannot certify. He presents the circumstances known to the camp separately from his own uncertain perceptions, and identifies Wingate, a trained psychologist familiar with his history, as the principal judge of his testimony. This distinction shapes the episode: the night walk and his absence were witnessed by others, while the underground discovery is known through Peaslee’s report.

On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, Peaslee went to bed early but could not sleep. Shortly before eleven, he set out on one of his habitual nocturnal walks, troubled by the pull of the northeastern terrain. An Australian miner named Tupper was the only person he encountered as he left camp. Tupper later saw him walking rapidly toward the northeast across the sand hills. The moon was slightly past full, and the sky remained clear. The wind had stopped and, according to those awake at camp, did not return for nearly five hours.

At about 3:30 a.m., a sudden gale woke the camp and brought down three tents. Peaslee’s absence was noticed, but his previous walks had not caused alarm. Some of the Australian members nevertheless felt that the wind was ominous. Mackenzie explained their reaction through local Indigenous traditions, which associated rare high winds beneath a clear sky with underground stone structures and the places where the marked stones lay scattered. The gale ceased abruptly close to four, leaving the dunes reshaped. These external details establish the conditions surrounding Peaslee’s disappearance from camp, without resolving what happened during the hours he was alone.

A Buried City and the Archive

In Peaslee’s account, the nocturnal journey begins as a walk without a definite destination. His waking perceptions mingle with images from his dreams: the exposed stones seem to belong to corridors and rooms of a pre-human city he recognizes from the period when, as he believes, his mind had been captive to the Great Race of Yith. He reports seeing both the desert and the imagined ancient landscape, unable to separate them cleanly.

A wind-exposed mound brought the visions briefly into focus. It was the largest concentration of blocks he had seen, an irregular mass roughly forty feet across and between two and eight feet high. Under moonlight and torchlight, Peaslee perceived that the curving designs on separate blocks formed parts of a larger decorative scheme. Unlike the scattered fragments uncovered during the expedition’s work, these stones seemed to remain in their original arrangement. He interpreted the pile as the ruined remains of a high corridor, once paved with octagonal blocks and connected to other rooms and descending passages. He also found himself knowing where routes to familiar landmarks and a central archive ought to lie, although the evidence in the stones alone could not explain that knowledge.

A faint current of cool air rose from a hollow near the mound’s center. Peaslee took it as evidence of a large space beneath the stones and, driven by curiosity and a sense of compulsion, began shifting loose fragments. As the opening widened, he felt a stronger, damp draft and found an aperture large enough to enter. Inside, the carvings appeared to match his dream images in detail. He describes recognizing the corridor as part of a city he knew from sleep, and believing that he could orient himself through surviving portions of its structure. That recognition did not reassure him: it intensified the conflict between the possibility that his memories came from an actual experience and the possibility that dreams and prior reading had shaped what he thought he saw.

Peaslee says he continued toward the archive, moving through dusty aisles and past recently fallen cases. He reached shelves marked with familiar hieroglyphs and found that some doors had sprung open. He expected to locate a particular book and struggled to reach a high shelf, using the open door and the locks as handholds. The details of this search make the scene more than an impression of ancient architecture: in his account, remembered knowledge guides specific actions, from choosing a route to anticipating how to remove and carry a case.

The Book and the Unresolved Return

Peaslee eventually opened a metal case and found a book that appeared to be in excellent condition. He recognized the cover’s unusual lettering and delayed opening it, extinguishing his torch to conserve its battery before finally illuminating the exposed page. What he saw, he says, left him unable to decide whether he was dreaming or confronting a reality that made ordinary ideas of time and space untenable.

The decisive claim is that the writing was not an ancient, unfamiliar script. The pages, which Peaslee describes as brittle and discolored by age, bore the letters of the familiar English alphabet and words written in his own handwriting. He presents this as the point on which the meaning of his troubled years and recurring dreams depends. The apparent age of the book makes the discovery especially difficult to account for: in his description, it had lain in the buried structure since before the advent of humanity, yet its script and hand belonged to him.

Peaslee closed the book, returned it to its case, and intended to carry it back to the surface so Wingate could examine it. But the account does not end with a recovered artifact. Peaslee acknowledges that he did not bring back the metal case, and that the underground corridors have not been found. He therefore leaves open the possibility that the experience was a new phase of myth-shaped dreaming. The expedition’s excavated blocks provide independent evidence of ancient ruins, but the most extraordinary link between those ruins and Peaslee’s personal history remains unconfirmed. The missing case preserves the central uncertainty: his account offers a startling connection between a buried world and his own mind, while withholding the physical proof that could settle whether the connection was real.