Buda is mastered by the Turks. Student Gábor and his companion flee a troop into the castle, just in the garden of Gül Baba. Gábor and Leila, the daughter of Gül Baba fall in love with each other. Ali pasha, who wants to marry the girl, has the two Hungarians caught in order to let them be executed.

Three people – a returned prisoner of war, his beautiful second wife, and the possessive, hunchbacked spinster who is his sister-in-law by his first marriage – are isolated in a little house under an extinct volcano, where each strives for personal happiness but is suffocated by their dependence on the others.