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Plot summary

The plot concerns Querry, a world-famous architect, who is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference, he no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed - by Dr Colin, the resident doctor - as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutilation - see quotation below. However, Querry loses himself in working for the lepers, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. Then the white community finds out who Querry is...

'Perhaps Querry is also a patient,' Colin said.

'That's nonsense. I was thinking of the lepers - you have always dreamt of a school for rehabilitation, haven't you, if you could get the funds. For those poor burnt-out cases of yours.'

'Querry may also be a burnt-out case,' the doctor said. He looked at the fat man in the chair. 'Where now will he be able to find his therapy? Limelight is not very good for the mutilated.'

Querry meets Rycker, a man of strong Catholic beliefs who does not accept his own nothingness and tries to amplify the relevance of Querry's presence in that country. Rycker's wife is absolutely bored with his prudishness and her own lack of freedom. Querry never becomes physically intimate with her, but out of his dislike of Rycker, he accepts to take her to see a doctor in Luc, the capital, as she is afraid of being pregnant.

When she discovers she is pregnant by her husband shortly after, something that never happened before, despite his forcing himself on her regularly, she escapes from her husband and explains to Querry that it is still his child, since she was thinking of him during its conception and this allowed her to become pregnant. Her husband kills Querry in a crime of passion after concluding that the child was not his own.