They have built a great hall of glass, and inside it, no one sleeps and no one prays, though it is the hour when honest men do both.
I have never seen so many souls awake before the cock crows. They lie across benches with their heads on their bags, or they stand in long patient lines the way we queue for bread in a lean year, only these are not hungry. They are fed. You can see it on them. They carry warm brown drink in little cups and they yawn and do not thank the good Lord for the morning, because I do not think they have noticed there is one.
Outside the glass wait great iron birds. Larger than the church. Larger than the lord's whole house. Men in bright coats tend them the way we tend beasts before the plow, and I understand this, at least, for a beast must be readied before the day's toil. But then the birds swallow the people whole and rise into Heaven itself, and no one weeps, and no one crosses himself, and no one seems to think this strange.
A woman near me wept, but it was over her cup, which had spilled. Her whole cup, over a spill. In my village a woman weeps when the child does not wake, and holds her peace over the rest.
They have made a place where a man may cross the whole of God's earth between one dawn and the next, without a single blister, without a prayer, without ever once being afraid. I stood among them and I was afraid enough for all of them. Such ease is not given freely. Somewhere, the bill is being kept.