In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight in to the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temp tations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner compo ses a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifi ce, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injurie s of the spirit.