Ramuntcho | Page 2

road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or a
twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper, the
environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive voice
went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the oaks,
under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of autumn
and of night.
He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass at a
great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang
also; through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed
in shadows already nocturnal.
And soon they disappeared in a turn of the path, masked suddenly by
trees, as if they had vanished in an abyss. Then Ramuntcho felt the
grasp of an unexpected melancholy, unexplained like most of his
complex impressions, and, with an habitual gesture, while he resumed

his less alert march, he brought down like a visor on his gray eyes, very
sharp and very soft, the crown of his woolen Basque cap.
Why?--What had to do with him this cart, this singing cowboy whom
he did not even know? Evidently nothing--and yet, for having seen
them disappear into a lodging, as they did doubtless every night, into
some farm isolated in a lowland, a more exact realization had come to
him of the humble life of the peasant, attached to the soil and to the
native field, of those human lives as destitute of joy as beasts of burden,
but with declines more prolonged and more lamentable. And, at the
same time, through his mind had passed the intuitive anxiety for other
places, for the thousand other things that one may see or do in this
world and which one may enjoy; a chaos of troubling half thoughts, of
atavic reminiscences and of phantoms had furtively marked themselves
in the depths of his savage child's mind--
For Ramuntcho was a mixture of two races very different and of two
beings separated, if one may say it, by an abyss of several generations.
Created by the sad fantasy of one of the refined personages of our
dazzled epoch, he had been inscribed at his birth as the "son of an
unknown father" and he bore no other name than that of his mother. So,
he did not feel that he was quite similar to his companions in games
and healthy fatigues.
Silent for a moment, he walked less quickly toward his house, on the
deserted paths winding on the heights. In him, the chaos of other things,
of the luminous "other places", of the splendors or of the terrors foreign
to his own life, agitated itself confusedly, trying to disentangle
itself--But no, all this, being indistinct and incomprehensible, remained
formless in the darkness
At last, thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The
song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver
whose lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in
that mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems
incalculable and the origin of which remains unknown. And little by
little, under the influence of the ancient melody, of the wind and of the
solitude, Ramuntcho found himself as he was at the beginning of his

walk, a simple Basque mountaineer, sixteen or seventeen years old,
formed like a man, but retaining the ignorance and the candor of a little
boy.
Soon he perceived Etchezar, his parish, its belfry massive as the
dungeon of a fortress; near the church, some houses were grouped;
others, more numerous, had preferred to be disseminated in the
surroundings, among trees, in ravines or on bluffs. The night fell
entirely, hastily that evening, because of the sombre veils hooked to the
great summits.
Around this village, above or in the valleys, the Basque country
appeared, at that moment, like a confusion of gigantic, obscure masses.
Long mists disarranged the perspectives; all the distances, all the
depths had become inappreciable, the changing mountains seemed to
have grown taller in the nebulous phantasmagoria of night. The hour,
one knew not why, became strangely solemn, as if the shade of past
centuries was to come out of the soil. On the vast lifting-up which is
called the Pyrenees, one felt something soaring which was, perhaps, the
finishing mind of that race, the fragments of which have been preserved
and to which Ramuntcho belonged by his mother--
And the child, composed of two essences so diverse, who was walking
alone toward his dwelling, through