He dies wretchedly of typhoid fever and she succumbs to white slavery and madness. In climactic scenes of death and madness, sound explodes to increase the terror of a nihilistic vision. His cry was a separate thing beside him in the desert. It went on and on. The sound in the extended death scene alternates between the purity of the silence which Port had sought in the desert and the savage crying of the wind, an expression of the void outside the small room where he lies.
Language becomes as meaningless as the sound of wind.
Kit survives her husband and continues the journey into the abyss. Sound punctuates her departure from civilization and consciousness. Drums from a desert ceremonial throb in the background as she sheds her clothes and inhibitions and bathes in an oasis pool. Rescued by French authorities and flown back to Algiers, she goes insane. The scream of the airplane engine at takeoff and the thrust of the plane into thc sky repeat the aural imagery of Port's death scene and precipitate her madness.