 A Parisian lad spends a brief, life-changing time with a clan of the Imûhar, a high desert Berber people, called Tuaregs by the French. At age ten, Khénan s mother dies, and his father Najem, an Imûhar, brings him from Paris to Niger after an eight year absence. Khénan bonds with his grandfather, a clan elder, from whom he learns Imûhar ways, with his aunt, Tannès, who is engaged but falls in love with a man from another tribe, and with Chadèma, a girl whose relationship to him is a surprise. Khénan mourns his mother in a culture that doesn t mention the dead; Hamou, the outsider, courts Tannès; Paris is in the past and future; and, the desert is an ocean of beauty and trial.