Now comes the "convoy", which comes out of the church and passes by them,
so black in this feast of light, and so archaic, with the envelope of its
capes, of its caps and of its veils. They are expressive of the Middle
Age, these people, while they pass in a file, the Middle Age whose shadow
the Basque country retains. And they express, above all, death, as the
large funereal slabs, with which the nave is paved, express it, as the
cypress trees and the tombs express it, and all the things in this place,
where the men come to pray, express it: death, always death.--But a death
very softly neighboring life, under the shield of the old consoling
symbols--for life is there marked also, almost equally sovereign, in the
warm rays which light up the cemetery, in the eyes of the children who
play among the roses of autumn, in the smile of those beautiful brown
girls who, the mass being finished, return with steps indolently supple
toward the village; in the muscles of all this youthfulness of men, alert
and vigorous, who shall soon exercise at the ball-game their iron legs
and arms.--And of this group of old men and of boys at the threshold of a
church, of this mingling, so peacefully harmonious, of death and of life,
comes the benevolent lesson, the teaching that one must enjoy in time
strength and love; then, without obstinacy in enduring, submit to the
universal law of passing and dying, repeating with confidence, like these
simple-minded and wise men, the same prayers by which the agonies of the
ancestors were cradled.--

It is improbably radiant, the sun of noon in this yard of the dead. The
air is exquisite and one becomes intoxicated by breathing it. The
Pyrenean horizons have been swept of their clouds, their least vapors,
and it seems as if the wind of the south had brought here the limpidities
of Andalusia or of Africa.