Marta Randall says more than once that the planet Hoep-Hanninah, on which this novel takes place, is a small planet with only one small continent; this seems a fitting setting for what might be called a small story, featuring but a handfull of characters. Toyon and Alin, the main characters, are a couple who came in hopes of exploring the ruins of a city in the desert, though no one else ever seems to believe that that is what they are. Quellen, a low-level employee of the company that has a monopoly on exports from the planet, and agrees to transport them because she thinks they are there for some "score", and hopes to be cut in for enough of a share to get off the planet she's thoroughly tired of. The governer, Rhodes, an amateur botanist who's been blackmailed by the company manager to look the other way, but hasn't even bothered to inquire what it is he's looking the other way from. And Leo Haecker, the company manager who really runs the planet, who plans for the two he is sure are GalFed agents to have a little "accident" on their trip to the ruins, as he is certain it is merely a ruse to find out what it is he has been up to.

It sounds like it could be something of an adventure novel, but is written in a style of shifting POVs and oblique, vague utterances that make it feel quite unlike one. It takes the trope of the "primitive, nomadic aliens who are not what they seem" in a somewhat different direction, but is not really all that different from a lot of novels like this written in the mid-70s.

From the back cover:

Toyon was a Terran, powerful in his own sector of the galaxy, but here on the planet of Hoep-Hanninah, he was a tourist who did not speak the language.

Toyon was a brilliant man, but to the apelike, expressionless natives of this planet, he was a threat.

Toyon had a dream he was determined to realize: to travel to the ruined city in the north and explore it. But the Hanninah were as determined to thwart him; for in the path of his expedition to the ruins lay the secret of their survival.

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Inside the front flap:

I am Toyon Sutak.
I am rich, the owner of a fleet of freighters. I regulate the flow of grain and gold from planet to planet. When I visit among my worlds, I am welcomed to cavalcades and crescendoes. Now I circle above a planet that holds my dreams -- a small planet, one ocean, one continent, and a lost city I have yearned to visit since my childhood -- Hoep Tashik.

I am Alin Kennerin.
I am Toyon's wife, competitor, lover, companion, enemy; but, most of all, I am myself. Empire-builder, pilot, painter, ethnologist. I plan to study the strange, simian inhabitants of this small planet. Perhaps this journey will bring Toyon and me together again. It has been so long since I trusted him.

( Duplicated from my Amazon review ) ( )