Morgana Royal is an elfin young woman, a multimillionaire heiress and scientist living with her servants on the Sicilian coast, who has invented an airship levitated by a secret new process. Roger Seaton is a penniless scientist living in a hermitage on the mountain behind a California resort, who has invented a weapon that will vaporize any nation that threatens war. The two of them spend most of the book separately musing about the futility of love and marriage, the impossibility of happiness, and the degeneracy of the modern age, until Morgana flies into the airspace of a mythical desert city and sets off the only thin thread of plot this book has.