Port, Kit, and Tunner sit in a North African café and debate whether to travel deeper into the Sahara Desert.

Port follows a native stranger named Smail through dark streets to an encampment and has sex with a prostitute.

The prostitute Marhnia grabs Port to steal his wallet as he tries to leave; he flees and loses the wallet in his panic.

Eric Lyle invites Port to travel by car to Boussif, leaving no room for Tunner in the vehicle.

Tunner plies Kit with champagne on the train to Boussif; she panics in the native car and they end up having sex.

Port tricks Tunner into traveling with the Lyles to Messad by pretending there is only room for one passenger.

Port and Kit go on an evening bike ride outside Boussif and discover their views on life lead to opposite conclusions.

Lieutenant d'Armagnac pressures Port to retract his theft accusation against the local hotel proprietor Abdelkader to preserve community relations.

Port panics on learning Tunner is bringing his passport to Bou Noura and immediately bribes his way onto a night bus.

The hotel at El Ga'a turns the couple away due to a meningitis outbreak; Kit arranges a ride on a produce truck.

Port is admitted to the only hospital room in Sba and diagnosed with typhoid; Kit is given medication to administer at precise intervals.

Kit spots an approaching vehicle from the hospital rooftop and runs down to the market, where she finds Tunner has arrived.

Kit returns to the hospital room to find Port has died and chooses not to tell anyone.

Kit strips off her clothes at a garden outside town, immerses herself in a pool, and sleeps under a tamarisk tree.

Miss Ferry from the American Consulate meets Kit in Oran and tells her that Tunner has been waiting for her.

Three Americans — Port, Kit, and their companion Tunner — arrive in postwar North Africa seeking adventure and meaning in the vast Sahara Desert. Port's restless nature drives the trio deeper into the interior, while his liaison with a local prostitute and Kit's subsequent affair with Tunner on the train quietly unravel their marriage. After scheming to rid themselves of Tunner, Port and Kit travel alone toward increasingly remote towns, but Port falls gravely ill on the journey. Despite reaching a remote military outpost where typhoid is diagnosed, Port deteriorates rapidly as Kit struggles to maintain her vigil. When Tunner tracks them down, Kit abandons her dying husband to spend the evening with him, returning only to find Port already dead. She flees silently into the desert, and the novel ends with a shattered Kit being returned to Oran, where Tunner waits to take her home.

Port and Kit's fatal journey from arrival to abandonment.

An unnamed man wakes disoriented in a stale hotel room, uncertain of the time or his surroundings.

Port recounts his dream of a speeding train to Tunner at the café; Kit bursts into tears and leaves.

Kit wakes early, stages Port's unmade bed to conceal his overnight absence, then opens the door to Tunner.

Port meets Eric Lyle alone at the hotel bar; Eric makes a cryptic remark implying intimacy with his own mother.

Kit informs Port that the Lyles carry British passports, exposing Eric's claim of being Australian as a lie.

Port and Kit pass a native man crouching completely naked and shaving himself with a knife during their bike ride.

The three Americans arrive in Ain Krorfa to find the hotel fountain full of garbage and weevils floating in their soup.

Port visits a brothel with Mohammed and becomes obsessed with a blind woman dancing alone, who turns out to be another man's property.

Mohammed tells Port that he once walked in on Eric Lyle and Mrs. Lyle having sex together.

Port confesses to Kit over drinks in Bou Noura that he believes Eric Lyle stole his passport, not Abdelkader.

Port grows dangerously ill on the overnight bus to El Ga'a, sinking deeper into his seat in the cold.

Port tells Kit from his hospital delirium that he has spent his entire life living for her without knowing it.

Tunner discovers Eric Lyle rifling through his belongings in his hotel room and punches him twice before throwing him out.

Belqassim disguises Kit as an Arab boy, brings her into his house, and locks her in a small room.

Kit bribes Belqassim's wives with jewelry from her own collection and they help her slip out of the compound at night.

From Port's disoriented awakening in the novel's opening pages, a series of telling details foreshadow the tragedy ahead. Port's unsettling dream about a speeding train sets Kit on edge, while her morning deception — staging his bed to hide his absence — signals the pattern of concealment that will define their marriage. The Lyles arrive as a corrupting presence, with Eric's shady behavior and the shocking secret of his relationship with his mother slowly coming to light through the hotel proprietor's revelations. As the couple travels deeper into Algeria, the squalor of each new destination wears them down, and Port's nighttime visit to a brothel ends in existential despair over a blind woman he can never possess. Port's confession about Abdelkader's innocence and his delirious declaration that he has lived for Kit reveal emotional depths surfacing only as he is dying. After Port's death, Tunner is left alone to confront Eric's betrayal, while Kit's captivity in Belqassim's house begins the brutal final chapter of her disappearance.

The overlooked moments that quietly shaped the journey's end.

Kit confronts Port about telling Tunner his dream, insisting that Tunner is a gossip who cannot be trusted.

Port recalls Kit's warning about Tunner's intentions toward her but chooses to stay at the encampment with Marhnia anyway.

Mrs. Lyle delivers a stream of racist diatribes against Arabs, the French, and Jews throughout the long car ride to Boussif.

Port reads aloud the roadside sign meaning 'The Eastern Way' as the car enters Boussif and notices dark clouds massing on the horizon.

Port tells Kit that the sky feels like a solid dome sheltering them from absolute darkness beyond, which immediately terrifies her.

Eric Lyle approaches Port asking to borrow ten thousand francs; Port flatly refuses and gives him only three hundred.

Kit wakes with a hangover in Boussif to find Tunner sleeping beside her and urgently removes him from the room.

Captain Broussard demands to see the couple's passports and refuses to accept that Port and Kit are legally married.

Kit and Tunner climb a tall sand dune outside Sba; Tunner mentions their train liaison as simply the last time it rained.

Port hallucinates in his final moments that the sheltering sky is slowly splitting open to reveal the darkness beyond.

Kit refuses Tunner entry to Port's hospital room, tells him Port is unchanged, packs all the money, and flees the town.

One of Belqassim's wives' children discovers Kit is a woman; the wives rush in and violently attack her.

Amar speaks to Kit in French in the marketplace, gradually causing her to remember her own identity and that she is being sought.

Nuns at a church find Kit with only her passport; she refuses to speak and attempts to escape when taken to the airplane.

Kit gazes out the airplane window at the violent blue sky and is paralyzed by terror that it could rip open.

Beneath the surface of the Americans' journey runs a current of unspoken warnings, missed opportunities, and irreversible choices. Kit's early confrontation with Port about Tunner goes unheeded, just as Port ignores his own recognition of the danger and stays with Marhnia anyway — a pattern of willful blindness that will cost them both dearly. The iconic conversation about the sheltering sky, in which Port imagines a solid dome protecting them from absolute darkness, captures the existential dread at the novel's heart and directly prefigures his dying hallucination of the sky splitting open. Small revelations — Eric's loan scheme, Kit's guilty morning after with Tunner, Captain Broussard's bureaucratic cruelty — accumulate into a suffocating pressure that neither Port nor Kit can navigate. Kit and Tunner's encounter on the sand dune, where he treats their liaison as a casual footnote, confirms how completely she has been abandoned to her own recklessness. Kit's imprisonment in Belqassim's house, her near-erasure of identity, and her final paralysis gazing at the airplane sky form the darkest arc of the novel's inexorable ending.