A tribute to the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), a forerunner of the Surrealists and much admired by them, who developed a formal system with which to generate literary inspiration out of puns and the narrative references arising from these. Dalí saw Roussel as a precursor of his paranoiac-critical method and as an expression of his admiration conceived this innovative and experimental work in the form of a fantastic journey through Upper Mongolia.