is May.

In the little wagon, which the famous fast horse drags, they roll on the
shady mountain paths, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, toward that village of
Amezqueta. They roll quickly; they plunge into the heart of an infinite
region of trees. And, as the hour goes by, all becomes more peaceful
around them, and more savage; more primitive, the hamlets; more
solitary, the Basque land.

In the shade of the branches, on the borders of the paths, there are
pink foxgloves, silences, ferns, almost the same flora as in Brittany;
these two countries, the Basque and the Breton, resemble each other
by the granite which is everywhere and by the habitual rain; by the
immobility also, and by the continuity of the same religious dream.

Above the two young men who have started for the adventure, thicken
the big, customary clouds, the sombre and low sky. The route which they
follow, in these mountains ever and ever higher, is deliciously green,
dug in the shade, between walls of ferns.

Immobility of several centuries, immobility in beings and in
things,--one has more and more the consciousness of it as one penetrates
farther into this country of forests and of silence. Under this obscure
veil of the sky, where are lost the summits of the grand Pyrenees,
appear and run by, isolated houses, centenary farms, hamlets more and
more rare,--and they go always under the same vault of oaks, of ageless
chestnut trees, which twist even at the side of the path their roots
like mossy serpents. They resemble one another, those hamlets separated
from one another by so much forest, by so many branches, and inhabited
by an antique race, disdainful of all that disturbs, of all that
changes: the humble church, most often without a belfry, with a simple
campanila on its gray facade, and the square, with its wall painted for
that traditional ball-game wherein, from father to son, the men exercise
their hard muscles. Everywhere reigned the healthy peace of rustic
life, the traditions of which in the Basque land are more immutable than
elsewhere.

The few woolen caps which the two bold young men meet on their rapid
passage, incline all in a bow, from general politeness first, and from
acquaintance above all, for they are, Arrochkoa and Ramuntcho, the two
celebrated pelota players of the country;--Ramuntcho, it is true, had
been forgotten by many people, but Arrochkoa, everybody, from Bayonne to
San Sebastian, knows his face with healthy colors and the tu