mind is no longer simple enough to accept
blindly dogmas and observances, and, as all becomes incoherence and
disorder in his young head, so strangely prepared, the course of which
nobody is leading, he does not know that it is wise to submit, with
confidence in spite of everything, to the venerable and consecrated
formulas, behind which is hidden perhaps all that we may ever see of the
unknowable truths.

Therefore, these bells of Easter which the year before had filled him
with a religious and soft sentiment, this time had seemed to him to be
a music sad and almost vain. And now that they have just hushed, he
listens with undefined sadness to the powerful noise, almost incessant
since the creation, that the breakers of the Bay of Biscay make and
which, in the peaceful nights, may be heard in the distance behind the
mountains.

But his floating dream changes again.--Now the estuary, which has
become quite dark and where one may no longer see the mass of human
habitations, seems to him, little by little, to become different; then,
strange suddenly, as if some mystery were to be accomplished in it; he
perceives only the great, abrupt lines of it, which are almost eternal,
and he is surprised to think confusedly of times more ancient, of an
unprecise and obscure antiquity.--The Spirit of the old ages, which
comes out of the soil at times in the calm nights, in the hours when
sleep the beings that trouble us in the day-time, the Spirit of the old
ages is beginning, doubtless, to soar in the air around him; Ramuntcho
does not define this well, for his sense of an artist and of a seer,
that no education has refined, has remained rudimentary; but he has the
notion and the worry of it.--In his head, there is still and always
a chaos, which seeks perpetually to disentangle itself and never
succeeds.--However, when the two enlarged and reddened horns of the
moon fall slowly behind the mountain, always black, the aspect of things
takes, for an inappreciable instant, one knows not what ferocious and
primitive airs; then, a dying impression of original epochs which had
remained, one knows not where in space, takes for Ramuntcho a precise
form in a sudden manner, and troubles him until he shivers. He dreams,
even without wishing it, of those men of the forests who lived here in
the ages, in the uncalculated and dark ages, because, suddenly, from a
point distant from the shore, a long Basque cry rises from the darkness
in a lugubr