Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/152

146 them breathlessly with unmoving eyes, the butt-ends of their guns upon their breasts, and their fingers upon the trigger; and at intervals the report of fire-arms, sometimes in the rear, sometimes on either side, proved that the sport of death was in process.

As the Young Man followed the steps of the Seer, the walls hollowed out through the rock began to diverge, always embracing a wider horizon, until one took its direction to the east, the other to the west, as far as the eye could follow them.

They ran on and on,—one might have said they would embrace all space,—and they increased in height and they spread in breadth, and their girdle of rock grew up into the horizon and lined the whole arch of the sky with a vault of stone, so closely that it formed a building as immense as the world, granitic, gray, without verdure, and without azure! And, far in the distance in this granite world, the Young Man perceived the phantom of a Sun nailed upon the overhanging canopy and lighting the inclosed space with its oblique rays. But its glimmer seemed rather the sickness of light than light itself. Innumerable throngs hurried to and fro through this wan atmosphere, as if all the nations of the earth were collected there, and, like the crossing surges of great seas, the uproar of the myriad voices broke against the granite walls of that world!

The Soul entranced by the Dream, the Soul of the Young Man, asked: "Master, where are we?"

And he answered: "In the Sanctuary which Humanity has, for the present, chosen for its Home; but from which God is absent!"

He then entered a group seated upon the threshold. Each one composing it had an open ditch before him, his own property, deep and long as a grave; and each bore upon his head a lamp which, as he stooped, lighted the dark trench before him, whence he selected the tools of various trades. Each worked with his hands, though his look was stolid as the face of an idiot; and the Young Man saw some who held in their fingers the head of a pin, and their brows were as furrowed with expressionless wrinkles as if they had passed the whole of their lives in