A journey into the forbidden - the erotic, the remote, the uncharted. Slade Steadman has written one of the most famous travel books ever. But he has been unable to write anything else for thirty years. A journey downriver in a remote eastern province of Ecuador among the Secoya indians gives Steadman the experience he has been seeking - and a miracle drug. He returns tothe USA with the drug that induces temporary blindness. He is energized - able not only to write and remember, but granted an almost uncanny prescience, bordering on second sight. He is able to work again, and enjoys a period of intense creativity back home on Martha's Vineyard, where he has lived as a recluse. He finishes the book he had always dreamed of writing and becomes famous once more. But the drug he has been taking has possessed him, and it seems there is no way to reverse its blinding effects. He becomes a captive - of the woman he has been his lover, of the man who helped him in Ecuador, of the scandal surrounding his blindness.