Free Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies Page A

great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. 33

Borussia
    Watery Land of the Prusai
    (1230–1945)
     



Sabaudia
    The House that Humbert Built
    (1033–1946)
     



Galicia
    Kingdom of the Naked and Starving
    (1773–1918)
     



I
    The road to Halich is very wide, extremely bumpy and almost empty. It runs across rolling open countryside for 60 miles south from L’viv, the chief city of western Ukraine. Every now and again one passes through a roadside village with its goose-pond, its old wooden houses and flower gardens, and its rebuilt, onion-domed church. Though the fact is nowhere advertised, one is travelling over part of the ‘continental divide’, the watershed between the Baltic and the Black Sea. To the west and north-west, all waters flow into the basin of the Vistula. To the east and south, they flow either into the Dniepr or the Dniester. Our road, via Rohatyn, is heading for the Dniester. 1
    Our driver, Pan Volodymyr, belongs to the middle-aged generation that learned to drive during the Soviet era. Indeed, one could talk of a Red Army driving style – utterly fearless and completely regardless of human life. Pan Volodymyr seems to care nothing either about his own skin or about passenger welfare. His main technique is to charge at full speed down the middle of the road, wheels straddling the centre line. In this way, he avoids the steep camber and the deepest of the potholes that multiply on the tarmac’s outer edges, but the main purpose, one suspects, is to be lord of the road. He careers along, oblivious to the bucking motion, the constant jumps and jolts, and the non-stop judder of an over-stressed chassis. He constantly takes left-turning corners blind, then fights with the shaking steering wheel as the vehicle yaws back over the hump into the dangerous pothole zone. He spurns his seat belt, except for a short stretch where the police are known to lurk; and he clearly has no use for the handbrake, which lies buried under a pile of bottles and magazines. Worst of all, when he sees another car approaching, he refuses either to slow down or to move over. Instead, he clings to a position within inches of the centre line, daring the oncomer to give way, and only veering outwards at the very last second. He is equally contemptuous of combine harvesters, of massive swaying timber-trucks, and of drivers from the same school of driving as himself. When asked if he could possibly keep his speed below 75 mph, he presses on regardless in sullen silence.

    In Rohatyn, we circle the square looking for a place to stop. An oversize statue of the beautiful Roxolana stands in the centre. This daughter of a local Orthodox priest was seized as yasir or ‘human booty’ during a Tartar raid in the early