Tsombay, the African forest hunter, transported to a South Carolina plantation in 1714, has never before seen pale people with blue eyes or copper-colored people with black eyes. Nor has he seen such a sky in his worst nightmare, the sun naked, the star-pictures all wrong. Even the woods are alien, as if a twisted reflection of his own beloved forest back home, though he will kill his slave-driver to escape into those forbidding trees to search for his wife and son, torn from him a year past by the slave trade...