The Wild Carpathians E-Book

Mór Jókai

• Herausgeber: Mór Jókai
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Hungarians regard Az Érdély arány kora as, on the whole, the best of Jokai's great historical romances, and, to judge from the numerous existing versions of it, foreigners are of the same opinion as Hungarians. Few of Jokai's other tales have been translated so often, and the book is as great a favourite in Poland as it is in Germany. And certainly it fully deserves its great reputation, for it displays to the best advantage the author's three characteristic qualities—his powers of description, especially of nature, his dramatic intensity, and his peculiar humour.
The scene of the story is laid among the virgin forests and inaccessible mountains of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where a proud and valiant feudal nobility still maintained a precarious independence long after the parent state of Hungary had become a Turkish province. We are transported into a semi-heroic, semi-barbarous borderland between the Past and the Present, where Mediævalism has found a last retreat, and the civilizations of the East and West contend or coalesce. Bizarre, gorgeous, and picturesque forms flit before us—rude feudal magnates and refined Machiavellian intriguers; superb Turkish pashas and ferocious Moorish bandits; noble, high-minded ladies and tigrish odalisks; saturnine Hungarian heydukes, superstitious Wallachian peasants, savage Szeklers, and scarcely human Tartars.

Leseprobe

Mór Jókai

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Table of contents

INTRODUCTION.

BOOK I. BY COMMAND OF THE PADISHAH.

CHAPTER I. A HUNT IN THE YEAR 1666.

CHAPTER II. THE HOUSE AT EBESFALVA.

CHAPTER III. A PRINCE IN HIS OWN DESPITE.

CHAPTER IV. A BANQUET WITH THE PRINCE OF TRANSYLVANIA.

CHAPTER V. BODOLA.

CHAPTER VI. THE BATTLE OF NAGY SZÖLLÖS.

CHAPTER VII. THE PRINCESS.

CHAPTER VIII. THE PERI.

CHAPTER IX. THE PRINCE AND HIS MINISTER.

BOOK II. THE DEVIL'S GARDEN.

CHAPTER I. THE PATROL.

CHAPTER II. SANGE MOARTE.[29]

CHAPTER III. AN HUNGARIAN MAGNATE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

CHAPTER IV. THE MIDNIGHT BATTLE.

CHAPTER V. THE BANQUET TRIBUNAL.

CHAPTER VI. THE DIET OF KAROLY-FEHERVÁR.

CHAPTER VII. THE JUS LIGATUM.[55]

CHAPTER VIII. DEATH FOR A KISS.

CHAPTER IX. CONSORT AND CONCUBINE.

CHAPTER X. THE SENTENCE.

INTRODUCTION.

Hungarians regard Az Érdély arány kora as, on the whole, the best of Jokai's great historical romances, and, to judge from the numerous existing versions of it, foreigners are of the same opinion as Hungarians. Few of Jokai's other tales have been translated so often, and the book is as great a favourite in Poland as it is in Germany. And certainly it fully deserves its great reputation, for it displays to the best advantage the author's three characteristic qualities—his powers of description, especially of nature, his dramatic intensity, and his peculiar humour.The scene of the story is laid among the virgin forests and inaccessible mountains of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where a proud and valiant feudal nobility still maintained a precarious independence long after the parent state of Hungary had become a Turkish province. We are transported into a semi-heroic, semi-barbarous borderland between the Past and the Present, where Mediævalism has found a last retreat, and the civilizations of the East and West contend or coalesce. Bizarre, gorgeous, and picturesque forms flit before us—rude feudal magnates and refined Machiavellian intriguers; superb Turkish pashas and ferocious Moorish bandits; noble, high-minded ladies and tigrish odalisks; saturnine Hungarian heydukes, superstitious Wallachian peasants, savage Szeklers, and scarcely human Tartars. The plot too is in keeping with the vivid colouring and magnificent scenery of the story. The whole history of Transylvania, indeed, reads like a chapter from the Arabian Nights, but there are no more dramatic episodes in that history than those on which this novel is based—the sudden elevation of a country squire (Michael Apafi) to the throne of Transylvania against his will by order of the Padishah, and the dark conspiracy whereby Denis Banfi, the last of the great Transylvanian magnates, was so foully done to death.In none of Jokai's other novels, moreover, is the individuality of the characters so distinct and consistent. The gluttonous Kemeny, who sacrificed a kingdom for a dinner; the well-meaning, easy-going Apafi, who would have made a model squire, but was irretrievably ruined by a princely diadem; his consort, the wise and generous Anna, always at hand to stop her husband from committing follies, or to save him from their consequences; the crafty Teleki, the Richelieu of Transylvania, with wide views and lofty aims, but sticking at nothing to compass his ends; his rival Banfi, rough, masterful, recklessly selfish, yet a patriot at heart, with a vein of true nobility running through his coarser nature; his tender and sensitive wife, clinging desperately to a brutal husband, who learnt her worth too late; the time-serving Csaky, as mean a rascal as ever truckled to the great or trampled on the fallen; Ali Pasha and Corsar Beg, excellent types of the official and the unofficial Turkish freebooter respectively; Kucsuk Pasha, the chivalrous Mussulman with a conscience above his creed; the renegade spy Zülfikar, groping in slippery places after illicit gains, and always falling on his feet with cat-like agility; and, last of all, that marvellous creation, Azrael, the demoniacal Turkish odalisk, blasting all who fall within the influence of her irresistible glamour, a Circe as sinuously beautiful and as utterly soulless as her own pet panther—all these personages of a, happily, by-gone age are depicted as vividly as if the author had known each one of them personally.Finally, the book contains some of Jokai's happiest descriptions, and in this department it is generally admitted that the master, at his best, is unsurpassable. The description of the burning coal-mine in Fekete Gyemantok, of the Neva floods in A szabadság a hó alatt, of the plague in Szomoru napok, or of the Danube in all its varying moods in Az arány ember, stand alone in modern fiction; yet can any of these vivid tableaux compare with the wonderful account of Corsar Beg's aërial fairy palace, poised on the top of the savage Carpathians, or with the glowing picture of the gorgeous harem of Azrael, or with the fantastic scenery of the Devil's Garden, with its ice-built corridors, snow bridges, boiling streams, fathomless lakes, and rushing avalanches?R. N. B.

BOOK I. BY COMMAND OF THE PADISHAH.

CHAPTER I. A HUNT IN THE YEAR 1666.

Before us lies the valley of the Drave, one of those endless wildernesses where even the wild beast loses its way. Forests everywhere, maples and aspens a thousand years old, with their roots under water; magnificent morasses the surface of which is covered, not with reeds and water-lilies, but with gigantic trees, from the dependent branches of which the vivifying waters force fresh roots. Here the swan builds her nest; here too dwell the royal heron, the blind crow, the golden plover, and other man-shunning animals which are rarely if ever seen in more habitable regions.Here and there on little mounds, left bare during the long summer drought by the receding waters, sprout strange and gorgeous flowers, such perhaps as the earth has not brought forth since the Flood overwhelmed her. In this slimy soil every blade of grass shoots up like gigantic broom; the funnel-shaped convolvuluses and the evergreen ground-ivy put forth tendrils as stout and as strong as vine branches, which, stretching from tree to tree, twine round their stems and hang flowery garlands about the dark, sombre maples, just as if some hamadryad had crowned the grove dedicated to her.But it is only when evening descends that this realm of waters begins to show signs of life. Whole swarms of water-fowl then mount into the air, whose rueful, monotonous croaking is only broken by the melancholy piping of the bittern and the whistle of the green turtle. The swan, too, raises her voice and sings that melodious lay which now, they tell us, is only to be heard in fairy-land,—for here man has never yet trod, the place is still God's.Now and again, indeed, sportsmen of the bolder sort presume to penetrate far into this pathless labyrinth of bush and brake; but they are forced to wind their way among the trees in canoes which may at any moment be upset by the twisted tangle of roots stretching far and wide beneath the water, and it is just in these very places that the swamp is many fathoms deep; for although the dark green lake-grass and the yellow marsh-flowers, with the little black-and-red efts and newts darting about among them, seem close enough to be reached by an outstretched hand, they are nevertheless all under water deep enough to go over the head of the tallest man.In other places it is the dense thicket which bars the canoe's way. Fallen trees, the spoil of many centuries, but untouched by the hand of man, lie rotting there in gigantic heaps. The submerged trunks have been turned to stone by the water, and the roots of the lake-grass, the filaments of the flax-plant, and the tendrils of the clematis have grown together over them, forming a strong, tough barrier just above the water which rocks and sways without giving way beneath one's feet. The knotty clout-like film of the lake, stretching far and wide, seems, to the careless eye, a continuation of this barrier, but the treacherous surface no longer bears—one step further, and Death is there. This unknown, unexplored region has however but few visitors.Southwards, the wilderness is bounded by the river Drave. The trees which line its steep banks dip over into its waves. Not unfrequently the fierce stream sweeps them into its bed and away, to the great peril of all who sail or row upon its waters.Northwards, the forest extends as far as Csakatorny, and where the morass ends oaks and beeches of all sorts flourish. In no other part of Hungary will you meet with trees so erect and so lofty. The wide waste abounds with all sorts of game. The wild boars, which wallow in the swampy ground there, are the largest and fiercest of their kind. The red deer too is no stranger there, and huge, powerful, and courageous you will find him; nay, at that time, even gigantic elks showed themselves occasionally, and made nocturnal incursions into the neighbouring millet-fields of Totovecz; but at the first attempt to lay hands upon them, they would throw themselves into the innermost swamps, whither it was impossible to follow them....