The book narrates the perilous journey of the poet Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia, it is a story of passion, violence and vengeance within the landscape of the Amazon jungle where the two lovers flee from society, and expose throughout the plot the hard living conditions of the enslaved settlers and the native during the caucho (rubber) fever in the inhospitably jungle where human beings are under the yoke of greed for the white liquid. In this story, it is the jungle who decides the destiny, the facts and the lives of the characters. It is this story that coins a very enigmatic and revealing phrase that delineates the silence between the urban world of Latin America and the world in the Amazon jungle: "los devoró la selva!", "the jungle swallowed them!"