“They are there,” he continues. “Let us go near them!” And Ramuntcho takes his oarsman's seat with temples heated by anger, with trembling hands--no--he is Gracieuse's brother; all would be lost if Ramuntcho fought with him; because of her he will bend the head and say nothing. Now their bark runs away by force of oars, carrying them all; the trick has been played. It was time; two Spanish voices vibrate on the black shore: two carbineers, who were sleeping in their cloaks and whom the noise has awakened!--And they begin to hail this flying, beaconless bark, not perceived so much as suspected, lost at once in the universal, nocturnal confusion. “Too late, friends,” laughs Itchoua, while rowing to the uttermost. “Hail at your ease now and let the devil answer you!” The current also helps them; they go into the thick obscurity with the rapidity of fishes. There! Now they are in French waters, in safety, not far, doubtless, from the slime of the banks. “Let us stop to breathe a little,” proposes Itchoua. And they raise their oars, halting, wet with perspiration and with rain. They are immovable again under the cold shower, which they do not seem to feel. There is heard in the vast silence only the breathing of chests, little by little quieted, the little music of drops of water falling and their light rippling. But suddenly, from this bark which was so quiet, and which had no other importance than that of a shadow hardly real in the midst of so much night, a cry rises, superacute, terrifying: it fills the emptiness and rents the far-off distances--It has come from those elevated notes which belong ordinarily to women only, but with something hoarse and powerful that indicates rather the savage male; it has the bite of the voice of jackals and it preserves, nevertheless, something human which makes one shiver the more; one waits with a sort of anguish for its end, and it is long, long, it is oppressive by its inexplicable length--It had begun like a stag's bell of agony and now it is achieved and it dies in a sort of laughter, sinister and burlesque, like the laughter of lunatics-- However, around the man who has just cried thus in the front of the bark, none of the others is astonished, none budges. And, after a few seconds of silent peace, a new cry, similar to the first, starts from the rear, replying to it and passing through the same phases,--which are of a tradition infinitely ancient. And it is simply the “irrintzina”, the great Basque cry which has been transmitted with fidelity from the depth of the abyss of ages to the men of our day, and which constitutes one of the strange characteristics of that race whose origins are enveloped in mystery. It resembles the cry of a being of certain tribes of redskins in the forests of America; at night, it gives the notion and the unfathomable fright of primitive ages, when, in the midst of the solitudes of the old world, men with monkey throats howled.