This is the haunting story of a beautiful north-of-England woman, Arla Bay, ineluctably drawn to New Mexico by the magnetic power of El Morro, a great sandstone outcrop in the heart of the Southwest, on which travelers throughout four centuries left their names and rubrics in the golden stone ... Arlo Bay becomes the responsibility of William Stone, a senior park ranger assigned to escort the deeply troubled woman to her goal, by way of many splendors of the Southwest.