Soon the white settlers realize that they are not alone: a group of descendants of runaway slaves live in the area, in a settlement—generally known as a quilombo—they call "The Island" because it is the only permanently fertile spot in a sea of sand where it rains only during the rainy season.

They find a fishing hut on the shores of the ocean and notice that Massu (Seu Jorge), the fisherman, has salt which he regularly obtains from his father on the nearby Island.

Yet soon they establish contact with the itinerant trader who brings the salt (fittingly called Chico do Sal), but he too does not offer any viable connection back to the civilization.

She finds an international scientific expedition that, for the purpose of observing the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, had come to the remote desert to verify claims made by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity concerning the curvature of space.

[1] Áurea falls in love with Luiz, a young soldier escorting the expedition, whom she also asks to request permission for her and her family to return home with the scientists.

Their fate is fundamentally altered when, in 1942 (the year Brazil declared war on the Axis powers), a Brazilian military plane crashes in the ocean nearby.

They happily reunite, and Maria brings deep joy to Áurea when she plays a tape-recording of "real music", Frédéric Chopin's Prélude "Raindrops", op.

Áurea, remembering a conversation she had with Luiz fifty years earlier concerning Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, asks her daughter whether the astronauts, travelling at high speed in a rocket, returned younger than they left.

Maria, unlike her seemingly isolated mother not acquainted with the twin paradox (that Luiz attempted to explain to Áurea in 1919, and the latter did not entirely understand), states that they returned older.