Ramuntcho

Pierre Loti
Ramuntcho, by Pierre Loti

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Title: Ramuntcho
Author: Pierre Loti
Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9616] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 10,

2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
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RAMUNTCHO ***

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RAMUNTCHO
BY
PIERRE LOTI

Translated by
Henri Pene du Bois

RAMUNTCHO

PART I.
CHAPTER I.
The sad curlews, annunciators of the autumn, had just appeared in a
mass in a gray squall, fleeing from the high sea under the threat of

approaching tempests. At the mouth of the southern rivers, of the
Adour, of the Nivelle, of the Bidassoa which runs by Spain, they
wandered above the waters already cold, flying low, skimming, with
their wings over the mirror-like surfaces. And their cries, at the fall of
the October night, seemed to ring the annual half-death of the
exhausted plants.
On the Pyrenean lands, all bushes and vast woods, the melancholy of
the rainy nights of declining seasons fell slowly, enveloping like a
shroud, while Ramuntcho walked on the moss-covered path, without
noise, shod with rope soles, supple and silent in his mountaineer's tread.
Ramuntcho was coming on foot from a very long distance, ascending
the regions neighboring the Bay of Biscay, toward his isolated house
which stood above, in a great deal of shade, near the Spanish frontier.
Around the solitary passer-by, who went up so quickly without trouble
and whose march in sandals was not heard, distances more and more
profound deepened on all sides, blended in twilight and mist.
The autumn, the autumn marked itself everywhere. The corn, herb of
the lowlands, so magnificently green in the Spring, displayed shades of
dead straw in the depths of the valleys, and, on all the summits, beeches
and oaks shed their leaves. The air was almost cold; an odorous
humidity came out of the mossy earth and, at times, there came from
above a light shower. One felt it near and anguishing, that season of
clouds and of long rains, which returns every time with the same air of
bringing the definitive exhaustion of saps and irremediable death,--but
which passes like all things and which one forgets at the following
spring.
Everywhere, in the wet of the leaves strewing the earth, in the wet of
the herbs long and bent, there was a sadness of death, a dumb
resignation to fecund decomposition.
But the autumn, when it comes to put an end to the plants, brings only a
sort of far-off warning to man, a little more durable, who resists several
winters and lets himself be lured several times by the charm of spring.

Man, in the rainy nights of October and of November, feels especially
the instinctive desire to seek shelter at home, to warm himself at the
hearth, under the roof which so many thousand years amassed have
taught him progressively to build.--And Ramuntcho felt awakening in
the depths of his being the old ancestral aspirations for the Basque
home of the country, the isolated home, unattached to the neighboring
homes. He hastened his steps the more toward the primitive dwelling
where his mother was waiting for him.
Here and there, one perceived them in the distance, indistinct in the
twilight, the Basque houses, very distant from one another, dots white
or grayish, now in the depth of some gorge steeped in darkness, then on
some ledge of the mountains with summits lost in the obscure sky.
Almost inconsequential are these human habitations, in the immense
and confused entirety of things; inconsequential and even annihilated
quite, at this hour, before the majesty of the solitude and of the eternal
forest nature.
Ramuntcho ascended rapidly, lithe, bold and young, still a child, likely
to play on his
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