 Atal first appears in Lovecraft's "The Cats of Ulthar" (1920) as the young son of an innkeeper in Ulthar who witnesses the weird rites of the cats on the night that the old cotter and his wife are killed.In "The Other Gods", he becomes the apprentice of Barzai the Wise and accompanies him on his doomed climb to the top of Mount Hatheg-Kla to see the gods.When Randolph Carter visits Atal in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1926), he is the patriarch of the Temple of the Elder Ones and is now well over 300 years old, "but still very keen of mind and memory".