their old time songs, which the grinding and the shocks of the cadenced
oars accompany. But when the waters have withdrawn, as at this moment,
there remains between the two countries only a sort of lowland, uncertain
and of changing color, where walk men with bare legs, where barks drag
themselves, creeping.

They were now in the middle of this lowland, Ramuntcho and his band, half
dozing under the dawning light. The colors of things began to appear, out
of the gray of night. They glided, they advanced by slight jerks, now
through yellow velvet which was sand, then through a brown thing, striped
regularly and dangerous to walkers, which was slime. And thousands of
little puddles, left by the tide of the day before, reflected the dawn,
shone on the soft extent like mother-of-pearl shells. On the little
yellow and brown desert, their boatman followed the course of a thin,
silver stream, which represented the Bidassoa at low tide. From time to
time, some fisherman crossed their path, passed near them in silence,
without singing as the custom is in rowing, too busy poling, standing in
his bark and working his pole with beautiful plastic gestures.

While they were day-dreaming, they approached the French shore, the
smugglers. On the other side of the strange zone which they were
traversing as in a sled, that silhouette of an old city, which fled from
them slowly, was Fontarabia; those highlands which rose to the sky with
figures so harsh, were the Spanish Pyrenees. All this was Spain,
mountainous Spain, eternally standing there in the face of them and
incessantly preoccupying their minds: a country which one must reach in
silence, in dark nights, in nights without moonlight, under the rain of
winter; a country which is the perpetual aim of dangerous expeditions; a
country which, for the men of Ramuntcho's village, seems always to close
the southwestern horizon, while it changes in appearance according to the