CHAPTER II.
Several hours later, at the first uncertain flush of dawn, at the instant
when shepherds and fisherman awake, they were returning joyously, the
smugglers, having finished their undertaking.
Having started on foot and gone, with infinite precautions to be silent,
through ravines, through woods, through fords of rivers, they were
returning, as if they were people who had never anything to conceal from
anybody, in a bark of Fontarabia, hired under the eyes of Spain's custom
house officers, through the Bidassoa river.
All the mass of mountains and of clouds, all the sombre chaos of the
preceding night had disentangled itself almost suddenly, as under the
touch of a magic wand. The Pyrenees, returned to their real proportions,
were only average mountains, with slopes bathed in a shadow still
nocturnal, but with peaks neatly cut in a sky which was already clearing.
The air had become lukewarm, suave, exquisite, as if the climate or the
season had suddenly changed,--and it was the southern wind which was
beginning to blow, the delicious southern wind special to the Basque
country, which chases before it, the cold, the clouds and the mists,
which enlivens the shades of all things, makes the sky blue, prolongs the
horizons infinitely and gives, even in winter, summer illusions.
The boatman who was bringing the smugglers back to France pushed the
bottom of the river with his long pole, and the bark dragged, half
stranded. At this moment, that Bidassoa by which the two countries are
separated, seemed drained, and its antique bed, excessively large, had
the flat extent of a small desert.
The day was decidedly breaking, tranquil and slightly pink. It was the
first of the month of November; on the Spanish shore, very distant, in a
monastery, an early morning bell rang clear, announcing the religious
solemnity of every autumn. And Ramuntcho, comfortably seated in the bark,
softly cradled and rested after the fatigues of the night, breathed the
new breeze with well-being in all his senses. With a childish joy, he saw
the assurance of a radiant weather for that All-Saints' Day which was to
bring to him all that he knew of this world's festivals: the chanted high
mass, the game of pelota before the assembled village, then, at last, the
dance of the evening with Gracieuse, the fandango in the moon-light on
the church square.
He lost, little by little, the consciousness of his physical life,
Ramuntcho, after his sleepless night; a sort of torpor, benevolent under
the breath of the virgin morning, benumbed his youthful body, leaving his
mind in a dream. He knew well such impressions and sensations, for the
return at the break of dawn, in the security of a bark where one sleeps,
is the habitual sequel of a smuggler's expedition.
And all the details of the Bidassoa's estuary were familiar to him, all
its aspects, which changed with the hour, with the monotonous and regular
tide.--Twice every day the sea wave comes to this flat bed; then, between
France and Spain there is a lake, a charming little sea with diminutive
blue waves--and the barks float, the barks go quickly; the boatmen sing
their old time songs, which the grinding and the shocks of the cadenced
oars accompany. But when the waters have withdrawn, as at this moment,
there remains between the two countries only a sort of lowland, uncertain
and of changing color, where walk men with bare legs, where barks drag
themselves, creeping.
They were now in the middle of this lowland, Ramuntcho and his band, half
dozing under the dawning light. The colors of things began to appear, out
of the gray of night. They glided, they advanced by slight jerks, now
through yellow velvet which was sand, then through a brown thing, striped
regularly and dangerous to walkers, which was slime. And thousands of
little puddles, left by the tide of the day before, reflected the dawn,
shone on the soft extent like mother-of-pearl shells. On the little
yellow and brown desert, their boatman followed the course of a thin,
silver stream, which represented the Bidassoa at low tide. From time to
time, some fisherman crossed their path, passed near them in silence,
without singing as the custom is in rowing, too busy poling, standing in
his bark and working his pole with beautiful plastic gestures.
While they were day-dreaming, they approached the French shore, the
smugglers. On the other side of the strange zone which they were
traversing as in a sled, that silhouette of an old city, which fled from
them slowly, was Fontarabia; those highlands which rose to the sky with
figures so harsh, were the Spanish Pyrenees. All this was Spain,
mountainous Spain, eternally standing there in the face of them and
incessantly preoccupying their minds: a country which one must reach in
silence, in dark nights, in nights without moonlight, under the rain of
winter; a country which is the perpetual aim of dangerous expeditions; a
country which, for the men of Ramuntcho's village, seems always to close
the southwestern horizon, while it changes in appearance according to the
clouds and the hours; a country which is the first to be lighted by the
pale sun of mornings and which masks afterward, like a sombre screen the
red sun of evenings.--
He adored his Basque land, Ramuntcho,--and this morning was one of the
times when this adoration penetrated him more profoundly. In his after
life, during his exile, the reminiscence of these delightful returns at
dawn, after the nights of smuggling, caused in him an indescribable and
very anguishing nostalgia. But his love for the hereditary soil was not
as simple as that of his companions. As in all his sentiments, as in all
his sensations, there were mingled in it diverse elements. At first the
instinctive and unanalyzed attachment of his maternal ancestors to the
native soil, then something more refined coming from his father, an
unconscious reflection of the artistic admiration which had retained the
stranger here for several seasons and had given to him the caprice of
allying himself with a girl of these mountains in order to obtain a
Basque descendance.--
