In the tumultuous fires of the American Civil War, a young New York poet suffers a tumult of tense visions of past and future after a journalistic misadventure in the Holy Land. At the home of his ship chandler benefactor of Beirut, he meets his muse, the daring daughter. Back in New York, he is absorbed in her plot to sabotage her father's gun-running operation. Self-sabotaged and lost, there is a hellish POW camp, some of the fiercest fighting of the war, and the hallucinatory wages of peace.