Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville

the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro, so that they may get to
     other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. Now in a high arch, now in a low, the bridge vaults over glen and
     stream whether mortals keep in mind this vaulting of the bridge's course or forget that they, always themselves on their way
     to the last bridge, are actually striving to surmount all that is common and unsound in them in order to bring themselves
     before the haleness of the divinities. The bridge gathers, as a passage that crosses, before the divinities whether we explicitly think of, and visibly give thanks for, their presence, as in the figure of the saint of the bridge, or whether that divine presence is obstructed or even pushed
     wholly aside.
    The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.
    To stand on the Charles Bridge today, among the press of tourists and moody sightseers - the sights are always so much less
     than it seemed they would be - is to feel the essential truth of Hei­degger's numinous definitions, however unnumi-nous may
     be the present-day reality of Prague, heritage city of heritage cities.
    River, bridge, the human community . . .
    Castle on its crag was the seat of therulers for a half century from 1085, when King Vratislav I settled his court there. After 1140, when themoved back to Prague Castle on the left bank of the river, John Banvilleceased to be a centre of royal power until Charles IV turned his omnivorous attention to the area and rebuilt the castle
     and erected fortifications, the mighty remains of which are still to be seen. During the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century
     most of Charles's handiwork was destroyed. Subsequently,became a small independent town of traders and craftsmen, which in turn was flattened by the steamroller of history to make
     way for yet another fortress. The effects of these successive declines and falls are palpable still in the sombre, silvery
     air that seems so much thinner on those heights than down in the Old Town or even in melancholy Mala Strana.lures few tourists, a fact that adds immeasurably to its charm. It is best approached from the metro station, despite the
     looming Palace of Culture, a typical example of brutalist gigantism from the communist era, and the equally awful Corinthia
     Towers Hotel which, by a piece of glum serendipity, finds itself overlooking a prison - the exercise yard had to be roofed
     over to spare the hotel's guests the sight of the prisoners at break time plodding their doleful circles. Leaving these horrors
     behind, one enters Naanother of Prague's inexplicably deserted and faintly sinister streets. Here is the Tabor Gate, there the Church of SS Peter
     and Paul. The Rotunda of St Martin is a Romanesque jewel, still functioning as a church, one of the tiniest I have ever entered.
     The cemetery boasts the graves of, among many others, the composersand Smetana - the latter wrote an opera based on the legend ofand her lusty ploughman - and the writers Kareland JanNeruda. Walk on and you enter a lonely little park - the Czech word for garden, sad, seems, for the English-speaker, peculiarly appropriate here - incongruously peopled by four sets of enormous stone figures
     by Josef Myslbek, another occupant of the nearby cemetery, representing not only, and inevitably,and Pfemysl, but also Zaboj and Slavoj, the latter described by my Eyewitness Travel Guide as 'mythical figures invented by a forger of old legends'. The statues were moved here in 1945 from their original site, the
     Palacky Bridge, damaged by American bombs in February that year. That is another characteristic of bridges, unremarked in
     Heidegger's dithyramb: they tend, unhappily, to attract bombardment.
    What do I recall most clearly from my last visit toI draw up an inventory. Dead, damp leaves beside a gravel pathway. A mother and her toddler wandering through the cemetery
     in a vaguely questing