Until the Day Break

Excerpt from Until the Day Break
Cracow!
As if some ancient God had flown south from the ice towards the sun, and passing from the plains where the Vistula flows to the Adriatic, had suddenly beheld before him the crest of Tatra and its vassal mounts staring into the heavens; as if then in weariness the God, feeling his strength desert him, his pinions beat slower, had let fall a tumbled mass of hovels and of castles, of churches and battlements destined to build cities where the Egean swells or where blisters the sun of Tripoli, so lies Cracow, the fortuitous work of his giant hand, by the side of the lazy Vistula, under the shadow of the great green hill. Upon Cracow plays the pale sunlight of Poland, white as if coloured by dead snows, and wistful as if saddened by forgotten liberties; it cannot be gay, this Polish sun, for gaiety would outrage the anonymous land the three empires have eaten.
In the street under the great green hill walks the conquered race, less careless than indifferent, as if conscious of subjection and inured to it by custom. It goes about little affairs of the day in its chaotic city of mediaeval lanes, through dirt and beauty, towards the modem quarters far from the Wawel, the green hill now symbolic. Upon the Wawel stand the double-towered cathedral, where a few Poles worship because their fathers worshipped, the castle whose face they avoid.
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