opened on the immense darkness,--and recited piously the Pater for them,
while they went into the dark night, into the rain, into the chaos of the
mountains, toward the obscure frontier.



CHAPTER II.

Several hours later, at the first uncertain flush of dawn, at the instant
when shepherds and fisherman awake, they were returning joyously, the
smugglers, having finished their undertaking.

Having started on foot and gone, with infinite precautions to be silent,
through ravines, through woods, through fords of rivers, they were
returning, as if they were people who had never anything to conceal from
anybody, in a bark of Fontarabia, hired under the eyes of Spain's custom
house officers, through the Bidassoa river.

All the mass of mountains and of clouds, all the sombre chaos of the
preceding night had disentangled itself almost suddenly, as under the
touch of a magic wand. The Pyrenees, returned to their real proportions,
were only average mountains, with slopes bathed in a shadow still
nocturnal, but with peaks neatly cut in a sky which was already clearing.
The air had become lukewarm, suave, exquisite, as if the climate or the
season had suddenly changed,--and it was the southern wind which was
beginning to blow, the delicious southern wind special to the Basque
country, which chases before it, the cold, the clouds and the mists,
which enlivens the shades of all things, makes the sky blue, prolongs the
horizons infinitely and gives, even in winter, summer illusions.