Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Potop - The Deluge (1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin) - Vol 1.djvu/577

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the gates of the fortress peasants and nobles, villagers from various neighborhoods, people of every age, of both sexes, of all ranks, pressed forward to the church on their knees, singing prayerful hymns. That river flowed slowly, and its course was stopped whenever the bodies of people crowded against one another too densely. At times the songs ceased and the crowds began to repeat a litany, and then the thunder of words was heard from one end of the place to the other. Between hymn and litany, between litany and hymn, the people were silent, struck the ground with their foreheads, or cast themselves down in the form of a cross. At these moments were heard only the imploring and shrill voices of beggars, who sitting at both banks of the human river exposed their deformed limbs to public gaze. Their howling was mingled with the clinking of coppers thrown into tin and wooden dishes. Then again the river of heads flowed onward, and again the hymns thundered.

As the river flowed nearer to the church door, excitement grew greater, and was turned into ecstasy. You could see hands stretched toward heaven, eyes turned upward, faces pale from emotion or glowing with prayer. Differences of rank disappeared: the coat of the peasant touched the robe of the noble, the jacket of the soldier the yellow coat of the artisan.

In the church door the crush was still greater. The bodies of men had become not a river, but a bridge, so firm that you might travel on their heads and their shoulders without touching the ground with a foot. Breath failed their breasts, space failed their bodies; but the spirit which inspired gave them iron endurance. Each man was praying; no one thought of aught else. Each one bore on himself the pressure and weight of the whole of that mass, but no man fell; and pressed by those thousands he felt in himself power against thousands, and with that power he pushed forward, lost in prayer, in ecstasy, in exaltation.

Kmita, creeping forward in the first ranks with his men, reached the church with the earliest; then the current car-