Ramuntcho
Loti, Pierre, 1850-1923
English
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Below is a summary of Ramuntcho
and David Widger, widger@cecomet.net
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 road as little mountaineers play, with a rock, a reed, or
a twig that one whittles while walking. The air was growing sharper, the
environment harsher, and already he ceased to hear the cries of the
curlews, their rusty-pulley cries, on the rivers beneath. But Ramuntcho
was singing one of those plaintive songs of the olden time, which are
still transmitted in the depths of the distant lands, and his naive voice
went through the mist or the rain, among the wet branches of the oaks,
under the grand shroud, more and more sombre, of isolation, of autumn and
of night.
He stopped for an instant, pensive, to see a cart drawn by oxen pass at a
great distance above him. The cowboy who drove the slow team sang also;
through a bad and rocky path, they descended into a ravine bathed in
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