Four Americans venture deep into the Moroccan Sahara, hoping to find a celebrity holy man named Calvin Bild. Lara, a middle-aged professional beauty, her troubled son Eric, her lover Wally, and their would-be mascot, a Hollywood composer rightly known as Judas, self-confessed producer of music-like noises, step warily away from the civilization they know into a blinding landscape of uncertain possibility. Once found, Calvin Bild turns out to be a cheerful old West Point man, a physician of unusual warmth and even more unusual artistic powers. And out in the Sahara, when the seekers of their God-within ask Calvin Bild for guidance, he tells them, among other things, that while he claims to be no intellectual, "the desert does not answer the great and painful questions, it heals them."