A deafening uproar -- the cracking of wood and glass, the grating and crushing of iron, and the pitiful cries of men, women, and children -- The traveler leaps free just as the train, battered by the rockslide, plunges off the mountainside. Yet he has not leapt alone, for he had seized in his arms a shy, mute American boy. The Hungarian traveler soon finds himself confronted by a series of disturbing puzzles. Suddenly the mute child speaks fluent Hungarian -- and the grateful boy's father, Dumany, seems already to know intimate details of his child's rescuer's life! And even more disturbing than Dumany -- the American Croesus said to have served the devil -- is his strangely reserved wife.

Author Biography

Moric Jokay de Asva (1825 - 1904), outside Hungary also known as Maurus Jokai, was a Hungarian dramatist and novelist. Jokai was extremely prolific. It was to literature that he continued to devote most of his time and his productiveness after 1870 was stupendous, amounting to some hundreds of volumes. Stranger still, none of this work is slipshod and the best of it deserves to endure. Amongst the finest of his later works may be mentioned the unique and incomparable Az arany ember (A Man of Gold, translated into English, among others, under the title The Man with the Golden Touch), the most popular A koszivu ember fiai (The Heartless Man's Sons), the heroic chronicle of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 and A tengerszemu holgy (Eyes like the Sea), the latter of which won the Academy's prize in 1890. He was also an amateur chess player. His jovo szazad regenye (The novel of the next century - 1872) is accounted an important early work of Science Fiction though the term did not yet exist at the time. In spite of its romantic trappings, this monumental two-volume novel includes some acute observations and almost prophetic visions, such as the prediction of a revolution in Russia and the establishment of a totalitarian state there, or the arrival of aviation. Because it could be read as a satirical allegory on Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, the book was banned in Hungary in the decades of the Communist regime. (Its "Critical Edition" was delayed until 1981.)