The terrified villagers flee the green-eyed White woman stumbling trance-like through the morning mist. They believe she is a witch bringing evil spirits from the impenetrable jungle where they dare not venture. Alfoldi Santillana, an astonished Italian botanist, sees a woman looking like a dazed denizen of the French Riviera, who collapses at his feet.
At the hospital days later in remote Siguiri, the British doctor, Jeremy Wilkinson, diagnoses his beautiful but mysterious new patient with retrograde amnesia. Sister Caroline, a French nun, gives her a psychological lifeline—a pseudonym, Sylvia Monserrat. Over the next few weeks, while her whereabouts remain unknown in the outside world, Sylvia struggles to regain her memory, her identity, and her raison d’être. Dr. Wilkinson, who is living a life of self-imposed exile and loneliness to escape the bitter memory of being jilted by his fiancée, romances Sylvia and dreads learning who she is.
Meanwhile, Sylvia empathizes with Paul Marion, a young fellow American patient, who is serving a five-year prison sentence for a bogus drug charge concocted by KGB Major Vadislav Motorov. As Paul draws Sylvia deeper into his outlandish plot to escape from prison, the dedicated doctor reluctantly helps out to avoid losing her love.
During a thunderstorm in the evening of the prison escape, a thunderclap reboots Sylvia’s memory, flashing bad memories—such as her terrifying plane crash, her unhappy marriage to a French diplomat in Dakar, Senegal, and her aimless, jet-setting life while awaiting divorce. And good memories—such as her dear father, a U.S. diplomat, and her reaffirmed goal of a diplomatic career of her own. But Sylvia has no time to reminisce with death once again stalking her, as she swims for her life in the dark Niger River too turbulent even for the crocodiles.
Finally alerted to Sylvia’s identity as the missing daughter of a U.S. ambassador and her whereabouts in a Soviet-sponsored, anti-American dictatorship in West Africa, the U.S. State Department appeals to the governor for assistance. The police commissioner, Captain Jean-Pierre Equilbecq, one of Dr. Wilkinson’s many grateful patients, dutifully rounds up four of the suspects in the prison escape—Sylvia, the doctor, Professor Santillana, and Sister Caroline—and escorts them to the airport. Major Motorov, who is in charge of airport security, is delighted by what appears to be another propaganda opportunity, until the nationalistic captain politely disappoints him...M.F