Summary
A sirocco of forbidden ardor whips across the Saharan emptiness when the almond-eyed daughter of a hawk-nosed emir, raised on suras and silken obedience, locks gazes with a cobalt-uniformed French lieutenant whose epaulettes glint like bayonets against the dunes. Their clandestine dusk-time lessons—his French syllables, her Arabic poetry—ignite a spark hot enough to scorch the parchment of tribal law. Discovery looms; the sheik’s scimitar gleams like a half-moon. She flees under star-drunk skies aboard a frigate bound for Marseille, veils swapped for couture, sand for mistral. Yet France, perfumed with absinthe and revolution-haunted boulevards, proves no sanctuary: colonial whispers brand her odalisque, Catholic maids hiss infidel, and her lover’s aristocratic uncle sniffs tainted blood. Between Montmartre cabarets echoing with Debussy and the muezzin-less dawn, she oscillates, a pendulum of identity, until a dagger of desperation—inked in blood-oathed vows—tips her toward a sacrificial gambit meant to appe both her ancestral djinn and the republic that will never claim her.
Synopsis
The daughter of an Arab sheik falls in love with a French naval officer, thus breaking the strict rule of social law of her people, as well as her religion. She follows him to France, where, torn between her love and her devotion to her own tribe, she seeks to resolve her dilemma through dangerous means.
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