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.