"At the beginning of this book, a masterpiece of African literature, Clarence, a white man, has been shipwrecked and stranded on the coast of Africa. Brimful of self-importance, he demands to see the king, but the king has just left for the south of his realm. Traveling through an increasingly phantasmagoric landscape in the company of a beggar and two roguish boys, Clarence is slowly stripped of his pretensions, until he is sold as a slave to the royal harem.

But in the end Clarence's bewildering journey is the occasion of a revelation, as he discovers the image, both shameful and beautiful, of his own strange humanity in the alien figure of the king."--BOOK JACKET.