And men and women chanted the response in that quaintly harsh tone which the Magyar language assumes when it is sung. The brilliant sunlight played on the smooth hair of the girls, the golds, the browns and the blacks, and threw sharp glints on the fluttering ribbons of many colours which a light autumn breeze was causing to dance gaily and restlessly. The whole village was hushed save for the Litany, the clinking of the metal chains as the choir-boys swung the censers and the frou-frou of hundreds of starched petticoats—superposed, brushing one against the other with a ceaseless movement which produced a riot of brilliant colouring.
Soon the main road was reached, and now the vast immensity of the plain lay in front and all round—all the more vast and immense now it seemed, since not even the nodding plumes of maize or tall, stately sunflowers veiled the mystery of that low-lying horizon far away.
Nothing around now, save that group of willow trees by the bank of the turbulent Maros—nothing except the stubble—stumps of maize and pumpkin and hemp, and rigid lines of broken-down stems of sunflowers, with drooping, dead leaves, and brown life still oozing out of the torn stems.
And in the immensity, the sweet, many-toned sounds of summer—the call of birds, the quiver of growing things, the trembling of ripening corn—has yielded to the sad tune of autumn—a tune made up of the hushed sighs of dying nature, as she sinks slowly and peacefully into her coming winter's sleep. The swallows and the storks have gone away long ago. They know that in this land of excessive heat and winter rigours, frost and snow tread hard on the heels of a warm, autumnal day. Only a flight of rooks breaks the even line of the sky; their cawing alone makes at times a weird accompaniment to the chanting of the Litany. And the Maros—no longer sluggish—now sends her swollen waters with a dull, rumbling sound westward to the arms of the mother stream.
Silence and emptiness!
Nothing except the sky, with its unending panorama of ever-varying clouds, and its infinite, boundless, mysterious horizon, which enfolds the world of the plains in a limitless embrace. Nothing except the stubble and the sky, and far, very far away, a lonely cottage, with its surrounding group of low, mop-head acacias, and the gaunt, straight arm of a well pointing upwards to the sun.
And through the silent, vast immensity the little procession of village folk, with banners flying and quaint, harsh voices singing the Litany, winds its way along the flat, sandy road, like a brightly-coloured ribbon thrown there by a giant hand, and made to flutter and to move by a giant's breath.
Presently the shrine came in sight: just a dark speck at first in the midst of the great loneliness, then more and more distinct—there on the roadside—all by itself without a tree near it—lonely in the bosom of the plain.
The procession came to a halt in front of it, and two hundred pairs of eyes, brimful with simple faith and simple trust, gazed in reverence on the naïve wax figure behind the grating, within its throne of rough stone and whitewash. It was dressed in blue calico spangled with tinsel, and had a crown on its head made of gilt paper and a veil of coarse tarlatan. Two china pots containing artificial flowers were placed on either side of the little image.
It was all very crude, very rough, very naïve, but a fervent, unsophisticated imagination had endowed it with a beauty all the more real, perhaps, because it only existed in the hearts of a handful of ignorant children of the soil. It made Something seem real to them which otherwise might have been difficult to grasp; and now when Pater Bonifácius in his gentle, cracked voice intoned the invocations of the Litany, the "Salus infirmorum" and "Refugium peccatorum" and, above all, the "Consolatrix afflictorum" the response "Ora pro nobis" came from two hundred trusting hearts—praying, if not for themselves, then for those who were dear to them: the infirm, the sinner, the afflicted.