Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/439



Hlava was hastening to Zgorzelitse he could not move so quickly as he wanted, for the road had grown immensely difficult. After a sharp winter and hard frosts, after snows so abundant that whole villages were hidden beneath them, great thaws came. February, in spite of its name Luty (Savage), did not turn out in the least degree savage. First rose dense and impenetrable fogs, then rains came which were almost downpours, rains from which the white drifts thawed before the eye. During intervals between downpours winds blew such as were usual in March, hence fitful and sudden,—winds which broke up and blew away swollen clouds in the sky; on the earth they whined through thickets, roared through forests, and devoured that snow under which just before limbs and branches were dreaming in the calm sleep of winter. On the fields the widely spread water wrinkled its surface, rivers and streams rose. Fish alone were delighted with such abundance of the fluid element; all other creatures, held as it were on a halter, hid in huts and houses. In many places the passage from village to village was possible in boats only. There was no lack, it is true, in swamps and forests of roads or dams made of beams and round logs, but the dams had grown soft, and the logs in low places had sunk in quagmires, so that passage over them was dangerous or quite impossible. Especially difficult for Hlava was the advance through Great Poland, which was full of lakes where the overflows were greater than in other parts, and travelling, particularly for horses, more difficult. He had to halt often, and wait entire weeks, either in small towns, or in villages with nobles who received him and his people hospitably, according to custom, glad to hear him tell of the Knights of the Cross, and to pay with bread and salt for the news which he gave them. Therefore spring had announced itself in the world

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