[1] The locations are, at the beginning of the book, the ship from Marseille to Indochina and a brothel; later it is set in Cambodia, Laos, and Siam.
The most important characters are young adventuresome Claude Vannec and an old experienced adventurer named Perken, a Dane with German associations.
They relate to each other because of their nonconformism, which lets them collaborate to obtain their personal goals: the quest for the reliefs (for which they are motivated both archeologically and financially), as well as the search for a lost adventurer called Grabot.
The adventurers have to defeat hostile vegetation and traps (e.g. swamps, giant insects, punji sticks).
The price he pays is an injury to his knee, which progresses to ulcerating inflammation of the joint (in a time before the invention of antibiotics, at a place without any opportunity to do a sterile amputation), and he dies slowly in pain.