Aviator Marie Vallières de Beaumont goes on a journey to find her lover Bill Lancaster after his plane disappears in the Sahara. After her plane is forced down in the Ténéré she meets Lieutenant Antoine Chauvet of the French Camel Corps who joins in the hunt for Lancaster. As the two endure hardships in the desert, they begin to develop feelings for each other.

The boisterous and cheerful lives of the residents of Cameroon are barely dented by incursions of supernatural power in this humor-filled rendition of traditional folk tales in modern guise. In the story, a cheerfully naughty girl crosses paths with a witch who has the power to satisfy her curiosity about men by changing her into a young man. She then becomes one of the boy suitors for the amorous attentions of a policeman's daughter. Some of the men have unusual names and even odder magical gifts: one of them has the ability to make a man's genitals disappear when he shakes hands with him.

Aged 33, Lili goes to Africa for the first time in her life, to Agnam, a Sahelian village in the northeast of Senegal.

On her way to visit her childhood home in a colonial outpost in Northern Cameroon, a young French woman recalls her childhood, her memories concentrating on her family's houseboy.