ramuntcho,—who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in a small room of the new house of his friend florentino, at ururbil,—awakened as the day dawned.
the night,—a night of tempest everywhere, a black and troubled night,—had been disastrous for the smugglers. near cape figuier, in the rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles, they had been pursued with gunshots, compelled to throw away their loads, losing everything, some fleeing to the mountain, others escaping by swimming among the breakers, in order to reach the french shore, in terror of the prisons of san sebastian.
at two o'clock in the morning, exhausted, drenched and half drowned, he had knocked at the door of that isolated house, to ask from the good florentino his aid and an asylum.
and on awakening, after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial storm, of the rain, of the groaning branches, twisted and broken, he perceived that a grand silence had come. straining his ear, he could hear no longer the immense breath of the western wind, no longer the motion of all those things tormented in the darkness. no, nothing except a far-off noise, regular, powerful, continued and formidable; the roll of the waters in the depth of that bay of biscay—which, since the beginning, is without truce and troubled; a rhythmic groan, as might be the monstrous respiration of the sea in its sleep; a series of profound blows which seemed the blows of a battering ram on a wall, continued every time by a music of surf on the beaches.—but the air, the trees and the surrounding things were immovable; the tempest had finished, without reasonable cause, as it had begun, and the sea alone prolonged the complaint of it.
to look at that land, that spanish coast which he would perhaps never see again, since his departure was so near, he opened his window on the emptiness, still pale, on the virginity of the desolate dawn.
a gray light emanating from a gray sky; everywhere the same immobility, tired and frozen, with uncertainties of aspect derived from the night and from dreams. an opaque sky, which had a solid air and was made of accumulated, small, horizontal layers, as if one had painted it by superposing pastes of dead colors.
and underneath, mountains black brown; then fontarabia in a morose silhouette, its old belfry appearing blacker and more worn by the years. at that hour, so early and so freshly mysterious, when the ears of most men are not yet open, it seemed as if one surprised things in their heartbreaking colloquy of lassitude and of death, relating to one another, at the first flush of dawn, all that they do not say when the day has risen.—what was the use of resisting the storm of last night? said the old belfry, sad and weary, standing in the background in the distance; what was the use, since other storms will come, eternally others, other storms and other tempests, and since i will pass away, i whom men have elevated as a signal of prayer to remain here for incalculable years?—i am already only a spectre, come from some other time; i continue to ring ceremonies and illusory festivals; but men will soon cease to be lured by them; i ring also knells, i have rung so many knells for thousands of dead persons whom nobody remembers! and i remain here, useless, under the effort, almost eternal, of all those western winds which blow from the sea—
at the foot of the belfry, the church, drawn in gray tints, with an air of age and abandonment, confessed also that it was empty, that it was vain, peopled only by poor images made of wood or of stone, by myths without comprehension, without power and without pity. and all the houses, piously grouped for centuries around it, avowed that its protection was not efficacious against death, that it was deceptive and untruthful—
and especially the clouds, the clouds and the mountains, covered with their immense, mute attestation what the old city murmured beneath them; they confirmed in silence the sombre truths: heaven empty as the churches are, serving for accidental phantasmagoria, and uninterrupted times rolling their flood, wherein thousands of lives, like insignificant nothings, are, one after another, dragged and drowned.—a knell began to ring in that distance which ramuntcho saw whitening; very slowly, the old belfry gave its voice, once more, for the end of a life; someone was in the throes of death on the other side of the frontier, some spanish soul over there was going out, in the pale morning, under the thickness of those imprisoning clouds—and he had almost the precise notion that this soul would very simply follow its body in the earth which decomposes—
and ramuntcho contemplated and listened. at the little window of that basque house, which before him had sheltered only generations of simple-minded and confident people, leaning on the wide sill which the rubbing of elbows had worn, pushing the old shutter painted green, he rested his eyes on the dull display of that corner of the world which had been his and which he was to quit forever. those revelations which things made, his uncultured mind heard them for the first time and he lent to them a frightened attention. an entire new labor of unbelief was going on suddenly in his mind, prepared by heredity to doubts and to worry. an entire vision came to him, sudden and seemingly definitive, of the nothingness of religions, of the nonexistence of the divinities whom men supplicate.
and then—since there was nothing, how simple it was to tremble still before the white virgin, chimerical protector of those convents where girls are imprisoned—!
the poor agony bell, which exhausted itself in ringing over there so puerilely to call for useless prayers, stopped at last, and, under the closed sky, the respiration of the grand waters alone was heard in the distance, in the universal silence. but the things continued, in the uncertain dawn, their dialogue without words: nothing anywhere; nothing in the old churches venerated for so long a time; nothing in the sky where clouds and mists amass; but always, in the flight of times, the eternal and exhausting renewal of beings; and always and at once, old age, death, ashes—
that is what they were saying, in the pale half light, the things so dull and so tired. and ramuntcho, who had heard, pitied himself for having hesitated so long for imaginary reasons. to himself he swore, with a harsher despair, that this morning he was decided; that he would do it, at the risk of everything; that nothing would make him hesitate longer.
