Lambros Lambrou leaves home for fabled Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara. He marries a local girl and is about to begin a family when repatriation is decreed under the Treaty of Lausanne. Forcibly returned to Greece, he stakes a claim upon an ancient cliff-top mooring appearing on no map and overlooking a mysterious lake in Macedonia. Once settled there, he obsesses over building a water pumping station to deliver the elixir of progress to his primitive village. But the leaders of the village incite distention and thwart his plan. Then Lazaros Zervas arrives. A prodigal American, reveling in his contrived asceticism, Lazaros lives in a cave high above the lake, spending his days composing music and arcane commentaries on Origen, reconstructing the polyphony of Renaissance masters and secretly penning the local priest's incomprehensible sermons. When the American offers his land as a conduit for the water, a feud engulfs the village just as war is about to engulf all of Greece. Neither love's amorphous lightning nor calamities of nature or foreign occupation can dissuade the politics of thirst and the boiling blood of feud.