“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.
This cry is given at festivals, or for calls of persons at night in the mountains, and especially to celebrate some joy, some unexpected good fortune, a miraculous hunt or a happy catch of fish in the rivers.
And they are amused, the smugglers, at this game of the ancestors; they give their voices to glorify the success of their undertaking, they yell, from the physical necessity to be compensated for their silence of a moment ago.
But Ramuntcho remains mute and without a smile. This sudden savagery chills him, although he has known it for a long time; it plunges him into dreams that worry and do not explain themselves.
And then, he has felt to-night once more how uncertain and changing is his only support in the world, the support of that Arrochkoa on whom he should be able to count as on a brother; audacity and success at the ball-game will return that support to him, doubtless, but a moment of weakness, nothing, may at any moment make him lose it. Then it seems to him that the hope of his life has no longer a basis, that all vanishes like an unstable chimera.