“Let’s hope it’s not the same reaction,” said Selma. “I’ll get this information to you as soon as I have it. The map is already on your iPad with the site marked. Good-bye.”

Sam turned off his iPad. Remi said, “Ready to face the tour?”

“Eager.”

They went outside to where Tibor was sitting in his cab. He got out and opened the back door. When they were in, he said, “You wanted to see the town?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “Can we start at the river?”

“Of course,” he said. “This is a good year for the Tisza. There are no floods, no droughts, no chemical spills upriver, no anything. Last year, we had everything.”

Sam was watching his telephone, where Selma’s map was on the screen. “It looks like a big river.”

“It runs from north of Hungary, in the Ukraine, all the way down here, about a thousand kilometers, and empties into the Danube on the Serbian border. It’s been important since ancient times. We don’t get a lot of rainfall here on the southern part of the great plain. But the water comes south from the high country in the Ukraine, and the Mura River comes in from the east in Romania and brings the snowmelt and rain from the Transylvanian mountains.”

Remi said, “I suppose the course of the river has changed since ancient times?”

“Many times. It was a slow, meandering river, with big loops going back and forth across the plain. But people never leave anything alone. In 1846, Count István Széchenyi started straightening it. He cut it down to about a thousand kilometers just by cutting across the loops. Now there are about six hundred kilometers of dead channels. They did more to improve it in the eighteen eighties, nineties, and the nineteen hundreds. Maybe there was some more that I’m not remembering or never heard about. But then in 1937 they realized that they’d better start fixing the parts that they’d ruined. Now the river is pretty straight, but it still floods—maybe worse than ever. The channels fill up with silt. But they’ll keep fixing it as long as new politicians are born.”

Sam said, “Up ahead, can you cross the bridge and show us the other side of the river?”

“Certainly,” said Tibor. “We call that side Új-Szeged. It means ‘New Szeged.’ The old city was all on the west side.”

“Is the east side really new?”

“It was always here, of course, but the city has grown mostly in the empty areas.” He crossed the low, recently painted iron bridge, and they looked down on the river.

“Can you take us along this side a few miles?”

“Sure,” said Tibor. “It’s a beautiful, sunny day. We have the sunniest city in Hungary.”

He drove them along until Sam could see they were near the spot that Albrecht had mapped. It was a large open field that was planted with alfalfa and left fallow.

“What is this land on the right?” asked Remi.