Morskie Oko is the largest lake in the Polish Tatras, emerald water in a granite bowl at 1,395 metres, and the road stops short, so everyone arrives on foot. The way up is nine kilometres of valley between walls of spruce. Górale coachmen have worked this road for generations and still take it at a walking pace, carts in summer and sleighs once the snow comes. The horses turn back at the Włosienica clearing, so the last climb is walked by everyone. Then the lake arrives. The granite headwall of the Mięguszowieckie peaks rises from the water in one wall, Rysy, the highest point in Poland, behind it, and a wooden hut on the shore. A short scramble to the iron cross above it gives you the whole thing: the emerald surface, the wall, the summits doubled on the water.
A near-level path takes you round the shore in under an hour, trading the crowded viewpoint for gravel beaches and the sound of water off the cliffs. From the far side the hut has shrunk to a dot, and the reflections rearrange with every step you take. From there a rough trail switchbacks up a steep hour to Czarny Staw pod Rysami, the darker, higher lake that feeds this one from under Rysy. Most day visitors stop at the first lake, so the granite presses closer and the quiet comes back as you climb. Brown trout live in water this cold and this high, and they named the place: the valley is Fish Brook and the lake was once Fish Lake. Highlanders called the lean, slow-growing fish famine trout, for the living they scraped out of it. In winter the basin fills with snow and the lake freezes solid, which draws the year's biggest crowds, though nobody may walk on it. The lake was fought over for decades, when the old frontier was left undrawn. On 14 September 1902 a court in Graz ruled it Polish, remembered ever since as a victory in a century when the country was not on the map.