Summary
A collegiate mind, scrubbed clean by salt and catastrophe, washes up on the splintered deck of a ghost ship already haunted by a suicidal stowaway and a lion whose amber eyes reflect the cosmos. Together, boy and beast drift into an Africa that feels less continent than fever dream: ochre dunes exhaling hot memory, skies bruised with vultures, nights so star-drunk they seem to pulse. Months erode into a primordial pas de deux—man shedding civility, lion shedding menace—until a Bedouin princess on a desert thoroughbred gallops into the frame, peril snapping at her stirrups. Rescue becomes courtship, courtship becomes covenant, but a predatory bandit covets the same shimmering prize. In the scorched melee of blades, paws, and honor, a mallet of iron fate cracks the student’s skull; amnesia shatters, identity floods back like a monsoon, and love, now fully remembered, sails westward toward a New World that may not deserve it.
Synopsis
While on vacation from college, William Bankinton is shipwrecked. His mind a blank, he is picked up by a derelict ship upon which there are only a lion and a stowaway named Broot. After Broot commits suicide, Bankinton and the lion are cast adrift upon the shores of Africa where they exist in a primitive state for several months. One day, when Nakhia, the daughter of the Bedouin chief Ali-Es Hadji is out riding, she is beset by danger. Bankinton comes to her rescue and gradually he and the girl fall in love. Ben Saada, the bandit chief, desires Nakhia, and tries to kidnap her. The lion and Bankinton once again come to her defense, and in the ensuing fight, Bankinton is struck on the head and his memory is restored. He then proposes to Nakhia, and the couple set sail to America where they are reunited with Bankinton's family.
