A grey pall of rain shrouded the whole world and drank the colours dry, smothering the light and submerging the earth in shadow, so that everything seemed like the delirium of a dream, and sadness rose from the stagnant fields, from the torpid forest, from the lifeless wastes, and slouched heavily in a thick cloud. It paused at the dismal crossroads, under crosses stretching out their desperate arms, on empty roads where naked trees trembled with cold and sobbed in torment. It looked into abandoned nests with hungry eyes, into tumbledown cottages; in dead cemeteries it wandered among forgotten graves and decaying crosses. And on it flowed through the whole world through bare, stripped, desecrated fields, through godforsaken villages. Peering into huts byres and orchards. Until the cattle lowed in alarm, trees bent down with stifled moans and people sighed woefully in terrible, inconsolable longing for the sun.
Władysław Reymont, “The Peasants”, 1909
