Ramuntcho,—who had slept for a few hours, in a bad, tired sleep, in a small room of the new house of his friend Florentino, at Ururbil,—awakened as the day dawned.  
The night,—a night of tempest everywhere, a black and troubled night,—had been disastrous² for the smugglers. Near Cape³ 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, exhausted⁴, drenched⁵ and half drowned, he had knocked at the door of that isolated⁶ house, to ask from the good Florentino his aid and an asylum⁷.
 
And on awakening⁸, after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial storm, of the rain, of the groaning¹⁰ 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 tormented¹¹ 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 truce¹² and troubled; a rhythmic¹³ groan⁹, as might be the monstrous¹⁴ respiration¹⁵ of the sea in its sleep; a series of profound blows which seemed the blows of a battering¹⁶ ram¹ 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 desolate¹⁸ dawn.
 
A gray light emanating¹⁹ from a gray sky; everywhere the same immobility, tired and frozen, with uncertainties²⁰ of aspect derived²¹ from the night and from dreams. An opaque²² 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 underneath²³, mountains black brown; then Fontarabia in a morose²⁴ silhouette²⁵, 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 colloquy²⁶ of lassitude and of death, relating to one another, at the 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, standing²⁷ 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 c............