Until he fell in love with Gala Éluard in the summer of 1929, Dalí had never known a woman's embrace—or so he confessed in his 1942 autobiography. The thirty-six-year-old Gala awakened violent desires, as well as fears, in the twenty-five-year-old artist, who welcomed and cultivated hallucinations and paranoiac visions as subjects for his paintings.

Strewn on the Spanish plain of Ampurdán, near Cadaqués, the seven magnified pebbles with shiny white surfaces act as screens for images that seem to be unrelated episodes in an unknown story. The elements on and among the pebbles include several lion's heads, a toupee, various vessels (one in the shape of a woman's head), three figures on a platform touching their hair and teeth, and a colony of ants. Favorite creatures of Dalí's since childhood, ants figured startlingly in his and Luis Buñuel's collaborative film Un chien andalou, also of 1929. If Dalí expressed his sexual anxieties here in Freudian metaphors—as suggested by the emphasis on hair and teeth—those metaphors might also have qualified as vignettes in a children's tale. Gala, just like a good fairy, was to cure his symptoms and remain his muse forever after.