Entrusted with her late husband's discovery of extraterrestrial life and enlisted by her dead husband's friend, anthropologist Pierre Saad, to help him smuggle a newly discovered artifact out of Egypt--an ancient codex concerning the human authorship of the Book of Genesis--Lucy Bergmann crash lands her plane on a slip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. Burned in the crash landing, she is rescued by Adam, a delusional American soldier whose search for both spiritual and carnal knowledge has led to madness.