During World War II, an unnamed American cartographer sees something unexpected on a flight over North Africa's Atlas Mountains: a village. But to his chagrin, it appears on no maps. Only a few vague whispers of a settlement in the area named Faq' exist. Given the cartographer's extreme aversion to the hidden, his hunger to discover, he feels he has no choice but to investigate. The journey through the desert nearly kills him, but at long last, he finds a fertile valley with a small settlement: this is Faq'. After contemplating the sky, he forces himself onward, eventually collapsing on the threshold of the village. They nurse him back to health, and when he gives the correct answer -- nothing -- to their chief's riddle -- What must be? -- he becomes the first outsider to ever live among them. Their way of life is strange. Almost all men spend all their days counting upwards alone in their huts on pain of death. The village originated when the Arab mathematician Alfaleen was accused of heresy for claiming that pure reason was the greatest power in the universe and therefore also Allah. He and his exiled people founded the village of Faq' a millennium ago to live according to that idea. Ever since, the village's chief, always named Alfaleen, has spent his life in the contemplation of nature's purest problem, that of number. The village exists to test the hypothesis that the highest nameable number is as far from the end as unity, which they do by counting forever. At first, the cartographer loves this life. The village shares everything, and suffering is virtually nonexistent. Even counting does not bore him; instead, he reaches something like tranquility through it. But then, he begins to remember the rest of the world -- its inequality, its flaws, its injustice. He realizes that he cannot live without pain, and one night, he leaves. They do not pursue him, and he swears never to return.