e 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