local clergy frame the Christian order he is beginning to disrupt. The opening of the novel follows the forester’s arrival in a small river town and his move into the looming stone “Kauzburg,” whose nocturnal beauty and rumored hauntings unsettle and enchant him. He hires Marianne, a striking “child of the street,” and is quickly captivated; a fishing outing and moonlit walk intensify the charged, ambiguous bond between them. During a violent storm he searches for her, only to discover in the cellar a lightning‑revealed underpass and a carved owl over a kneeling figure, hinting at a buried pagan cult; in the darkness she embraces and bites him, then reappears demurely as if nothing happened. A solemn Catholic procession the next day casts Marianne as a Madonna‑like bearer of a wax child, sharpening the novel’s tension between pagan and Christian images. Alone, the narrator explores the tunnel, emerging into a hidden, untouched valley strewn with marked stones like an old altar site, where a soft, human sigh suggests new mysteries as the opening ends. (This is an automatically generated summary.)