Vistula [antikvár]

And so it flowed for centuries before an unknown monk set on parchment the first Polish sentence. Indeed, it has flowed always, since time first entered into the human understanding. Its present course — at least in general outline, with a characteristic curve in the middle reaches — was probably formed at the close of the last ice age, when in the Carpathian Mountains snow melted for the first time, and after thousands of years of unbroken winter, the first spring emerged. It is one of the oldest rivers in Europe. It was tens of thousands of years old even when in the impenetrable forests, in the oak or yew woods the first flicker of fire leapt up, started by an unknown being. By the shores of this very river, in Piekary near Cracow, were found the earliest traces of man on the Polish lands. There is something moving in the fact that the earliest forms of human life appeared even then in the valley of that same river which after centuries was to become a symbol and synonym of Polishness. We know little about our Neandertal ancestor, who for the first time looked comprehendingly into the grey waters of the Vistula, and later identified it with some articulate word. His skill and comeliness probably did not distinguish him from his sparse kinsmen in other parts of the continent. He shivered with cold in damp, smoky caves; died from wolves' fangs and a myriad unknown diseases; he screamed in fear of the dark; clumsily he hunted animals then common but now extinct — first with an unwieldy, roughly hewn stone, then with a flint-headed spear. Hunger and terror exhausted for dozens of generations the resources of human emotions, and were the accompaniment to every moment of a brief and brutal life. Even in the late paleolithic, the Vistula basin was not a land friendly to people, and in no way could it be compared with the mythical islands of Paradise. But we did not clear out. We clove very quickly to that flat, wooded plain, intersected by a winding, grey river. Maybe just then, by way of slow genetical mutations, there began to form that specific feature of the Polish mentality which enables us to recognize each other at the ends of the earth: an instinctive, overpowering attachment to our native land; an inveterate, intense stubbornness which makes us hold on to a piece of the most miserable sand and enables us to survive in even the most catastrophic times. This river has seen the whole — literally the whole — history of this country, it appears in chronicles, is recorded in documents and eyewitnesses' reports. It is this river of which we learn in cryptic ancient tales and folk legends, handed down from generation to generation, from before the evolution of the earliest forms of state and the emergence of a community consciousness. V