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 But when the waters have withdrawn, as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 villa