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 th