At the end of a quiet and industrious life a station master decides to write his autobiography. At first all goes well and the story is smooth and delightful. But the author would not be Karel Capek if he left it at that. In the middle of his work the honest station master discovers to his horror that his apparently respectable and conventional life contains treacherous undercurrents. As a result of this the autobiography threatens to blow up in a Freudian cataclysm. The author's sanity and humanity, however, manage to tame the demons and spread peace over the troubled waters. The book is the third part of a trilogy of which the first was HORDUBAL and the second METEOR. The unity of these books is purely ideological, and their story is not continuous.
