e in French waters, in safety, not far, doubtless,
from the slime of the banks.

"Let us stop to breathe a little," proposes Itchoua.

And they raise their oars, halting, wet with perspiration and with rain.
They are immovable again under the cold shower, which they do not
seem to feel. There is heard in the vast silence only the breathing of
chests, little by little quieted, the little music of drops of water
falling and their light rippling. But suddenly, from this bark which was
so quiet, and which had no other importance than that of a shadow hardly
real in the midst of so much night, a cry rises, superacute, terrifying:
it fills the emptiness and rents the far-off distances--It has come from
those elevated notes which belong ordinarily to women only, but with
something hoarse and powerful that indicates rather the savage male;
it has the bite of the voice of jackals and it preserves, nevertheless,
something human which makes one shiver the more; one waits with a sort
of anguish for its end, and it is long, long, it is oppressive by its
inexplicable length--It had begun like a stag's bell of agony and now it
is achieved and it dies in a sort of laughter, sinister and burlesque,
like the laughter of lunatics--

However, around the man who has just cried thus in the front of the
bark, none of the others is astonished, none budges. And, after a few
seconds of silent peace, a new cry, similar to the first, starts from
the rear, replying to it and passing through the same phases,--which are
of a tradition infinitely ancient.

And it is simply the "irrintzina", the great Basque cry which has been
transmitted with fidelity from the depth of the abyss of ages to the men
of our day, and which constitutes one of the strange characteristics of
that race whose origins are enveloped in mystery. It resembles the cry
of a being of certain tribes of redskins in the forests of America;
at night, it gives the notion and the unfathomable fright of primitive
ages, when, in the midst of the solitudes of the old world, men with
monkey throats howled.

This cry is given at festivals, or for calls of persons at night in the
mountains, and especially to celebrate some joy, some unexpected good
fortune, a miraculous hunt or a happy catch of fish in the rivers.

And they are amused, the smugglers, at this game of the ancestors; they
give their voices to glorify the success of their undertaking, they
yell, from the physical necessity to