Unthinkably more ancient is this Earth than we dare to dream, and innumerable are the marvels and the mysteries of her shadowy and forgotten prime. Race upon race has arisen from her teeming fens, or descended upon her from beyond the stars, and each has reigned over the primordial Earth in its turn. But in the flux of unmeasurable ages each has gone down at length into the dust, and strange and terrible are the legends whispered of their doom. In truth, it has been writ that many are the newly-founded cities whose foundations are reared upon the sundered shards of forgotten cities crumbled into dust, and by the world forgot.

Of all Earth-dwellers, none is more ancient than that frightful abomination whose enigma is mercifully hidden from the knowledge of men behind the name of Ubbo-Sathla, as a ghastly visage may hide its lineaments behind a mask. It is said that the Unbegotten One lay wallowing in the bubbling slime of Its lair from the Beginning, as It shall wallow at the End, and that Ubbo-Sathla is destined to be the last of all living things upon this Earth as It was the First; For Ubbo-Sathla is both the source and the end. Before the coming of Tsathoggua or Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the new-made Earth; a mass without head or members, spawning the gray formless efts of the prime, and the grisly prototypes of terrene life. And though there be many of Its spawn that leagued with the Begotten of Azathoth in that war the idiot Chaos raised against the Elder Gods, Ubbo-Sathla knoweth naught of contention nor of change, not even of Time itself, being changeless and eternal. From the very Beginning, Ubbo-Sathla abides in the teeming slime-pits of gray-litten Y'qaa, ceaselessly casting-forth the mewling prototypes of all earthly life. And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great cycle of time to Ubbo-Sathla.

Now, upon remote and terribly-guarded Celaeno lie hidden those glyph-engraved tablets of star-quarried stone which the Azathoth-spawn rashly thieved from the citadel of the Elder Gods, which was the first of their acts of rebellion against Those that had created their progenitor; yet even those immemorial Records contain little concerning the source and creation of Ubbo-Sathla.