The Revolt of the Animals by Władysław Reymont

Author:Władysław Reymont
Format: epub

5

Time sifted away like fiery grains of sand. The whole earth was consumed in the conflagration of the afternoon. The swelter made it hard to breathe, and soaked one’s skin with sweat. The burning breaths of air sopped up the last drops of moisture. The earth, burnt to a crust, gasped with thirst. Not a single leaf stirred, not a single voice resounded. The sky was suspended in a burnt-through yellowish film. Bluish, barely visible tongues of flame played above the fields. The air was nothing but a dry, voracious fire. A seething silence lay with unbearable weight on all and sundry. Everything seemed to melt and flow away in shimmering waves without end. The burning mirages consumed all colours. All might was shattered, as if beneath hammer blows. Even the soul fainted helplessly away. Only the sun, at the zenith of its power, wrapped in the hurricanes of its own incredible heat, rolled inexorably along its destined path.

As if congealed in fiery lava, Rex sat on high, at the summit of his crumbling bastion, which towered haughtily above the pinewoods. There the eagles rested in their beetling heights, there the owls nested.

Half the world flickered before his eyes. As far as the eye could see, the earth stretched on, as if embroidered with the whole pride of the fertile summer, advancing, rising by degrees to the east unto the whitened edges of the snow-capped mountains, stitched together by numerous rivers flashing with their glaze of molten silver. He looked upon green overspills of forest, the long tongues of lakes bent into the shape of palm fronds, their shores bedecked with paths of yellow sand, golden fields of grain upon which ricks were raised, white villages, the windows of which flashed amongst the orchards, cemeteries, where grave-crosses lifted their arms heavenward in prayer, manors spreading amidst their broad parklands, churches shooting aloft their slender spires enwreathed with green, bald, rocky hills haphazardly tossed about the landscape, towns similar to smashed mole-warrens, and here and there factories with their red chimneys stretching aloft, looking like cranes on guard. Beneath the high, pale heavens in the shimmering air of the afternoon hours, this whole, bright world trapped in the golden sheen seemed dead to his eyes, motionless, soundless, almost colourless, like a faded and dusty tapestry.

The sun was already suspended between north and west when the church bells rang out for vespers.

Slowly the bronze resounded with a celebratory, heaven-ascending hymn that arose as if from the hearts and longings of all creation. They sang sublimely, solemnly, and their prayers of praise soared ever higher, past the sun and the aether, until they reached the very footstool of the Pre-eternal One!

And simultaneously, as if in responsorial, there arose from field and wood and lowland, as if from the bowels of the earth, an explosion, fearsome in its power, of bellowing from all the animals. It shook the very trees so that torn-away leaves fell in showers, while the birds swept upwards, of a sudden, in gigantic flocks.

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