The next day, Friday, was organized the departure for this village where the festival was to take place on the following Sunday. It is situated¹ very far, in a shady region, at the turn of a deep gorge², at the foot of very high summits. Arrochkoa was born there and he had spent there the first months of his life, in the time when his father lived there as a brigadier of the French customs; but he had left too early to have retained the least memory of it.
 
In the little Detcharry carriage, Gracieuse, Pantchita and, with a long whip in her hand, Madame Dargaignaratz, her mother, who is to drive, leave together at the noon angelus to go over there directly by the mountain route.
 
Ramuntcho, Arrochkoa and Florentino, who have to settle smuggling³ affairs at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, go by a roundabout way which will bring them to Erribiague at night, on the train which goes from Bayonne to Burguetta. To-day, all three are heedless and happy; Basque caps never appeared above more joyful⁴ faces.
 
The night is falling when they penetrate⁵, by this little train of Burguetta, into the quiet, interior country. The carriages are full of a gay crowd, a spring evening crowd, returning from some festival, young girls with silk kerchiefs around their necks, young men wearing woolen⁶ caps; all are singing, laughing and kissing. In spite of the invading obscurity one may still distinguish the hedges, white with hawthorn⁷, the woods white with acacia flowers; into the open carriages penetrates⁸ a fragrance⁹ at once violent and suave¹⁰, which the country exhales¹¹. And on all this white bloom of April, which the night little by little effaces¹², the train throws in passing a furrow¹³ of joy, the refrain of some old song of Navarre, sung and resung infinitely¹⁴ by these girls and these boys, in the noise of the wheels and of the steam—
 
Erribiague! At the doors, this name, which makes all three start, is cried. The singing band had already stepped out, leaving them almost alone in the train, which had become silent. High mountains had made the night very thick—and the three were almost sleeping.
 
Astounded¹⁵, they jump down, in the midst of an obscurity which even their smugglers' eyes cannot pierce. Stars above hardly shine, so encumbered¹⁶ is the sky by the overhanging summits.
 
“Where is the village?” they ask of a man who is there alone to receive them.
 
“Three miles from here on the right.”
 
They begin to distinguish the gray trail of a road, suddenly lost in the heart of the shade. And in the grand silence, in the humid coolness of these valleys full of darkness, they walk without talking, their gaiety somewhat darkened by the black majesty¹⁷ of the peaks that guard the frontier here.
 
They come, at last, to an old, curved bridge over a torrent¹⁸; then, to the sleeping village which no light indicates. And the inn, where shines a lamp, is near by, leaning on the mountain, its base in the roaring water.
 
The young men are led into their little rooms which have an air of cleanliness in spite of their extreme oldness: very low, crushed by their enormous beams, and bearing on their whitewashed¹⁹ walls images of the Christ, the Virgin

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