Colin Wilson believes that thousands of years before ancient Egypt and Greece became powerful, there was a great civilization whose ships travelled the world. Whereas we have no way of viewing the universe as a whole, these "old ones" possessed a knowledge system that offered a unified view of the universe, which was then passed on to descendants who escaped to Egypt and South America. It was this knowledge system - alien to modern man - that enabled them to move stones weighing a thousand tons. In this exploration of the remote depths of history, Wilson sets out to reconstruct that ancient knowledge. He attempts to understand how the long-forgotten people thought, felt and communicated on a universal plane.