III.
It has rained all night; but this morning a brisk wind has dried the earth; and I have come along the coast to Saint-Jean-de-Luz.
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Everywhere the wasted cliffs drop perpendicularly down; dreary hillocks, crumbling sand; miserable grasses that strike their filaments into the moving soil; streamlets that vainly wind and are choked, pushed back by the sea; tortured inlets, and naked strands. The ocean tears and depopulates its beach. Everything suffers from the neighborhood of the old tyrant. As you contemplate here its aspect and its work, the antique superstitions seem true. It is a melancholy and hostile god, forever thundering, sinister, sudden in caprice, whom nothing appeases, nothing subdues, who chafes at being kept back from the land, embraces it impatiently, feels it and shakes it, and to-morrow may recapture it or break it in pieces. Its violent waves start convulsively and twist themselves, clashing like the heads of a great troop of wild horses; a sort of grizzling mane streams on the edge of the black horizon; the gulls scream; they are seen darting down into the valley that is scooped out between two surges, then reappearing; they turn and look strangely at you with their pale eyes. One would say that they are delighted with this tumult and are awaiting a prey.
A little farther on, a poor hut hides itself in a bay. Three children ragged, with naked legs, were playing there in a stream that was overflown. A great moth, clogged by the rain, had fallen into a hole. They conducted the water to it with their feet, and dabbled in the cold mud; the rain fell in showers on the poor creature, which vainly beat its wings; they laughed boisterously, stumbling about and holding on to each other with their red hands. At that age and amidst such privation nothing more was wanting to make them happy.
The road ascends and descends, winding on high hills which denote the neighborhood of the Pyrenees. The sea reappears at each turn, and it is a singular spectacle, this suddenly lowered horizon, and that greenish triangle broadening toward heaven. Two or three villages stretch along the route, their houses dropping down the heights like flights of stairs. From the white houses the women come out in black gown and veil to go to mass. The sombre color announces Spain. The men, in velvet vests, crowd to the public house and drink coffee in silence. Poor houses, a poor country; under a shed I have seen them cooking, in the guise of bread, cakes of maize and barley. This destitution is always touching. What is it that a day-laborer has gained by our thirty centuries of civilization? Yet he has gained, and when we accuse ourselves, it is because we forget history. He no longer has the small-pox, or the leprosy; he no longer dies of hunger, as in the sixteenth century, under Montluc; he is no longer burned as a witch, as happened indeed under Henry IV. here in this very place; he can, if he is a soldier, learn to read, become an officer; he has coffee, sugar, linen. Our descendants will say that that is but little; our fathers would have said that it is a good deal.
St. Jean-de-Luz is a little old city with narrow streets, to-day silent and decaying; its mariners once fought the Normans for the king of England; thirty or forty ships went out every year for the whale-fishery. Now-a-days the harbor is empty; this terrible Biscayan sea has thrice broken down its dike. Against this roaring surge, heaped up all the way from America, no work of man holds out. The water was engulfed in the channel and came like a race-horse high as the quays, lashing the bridges, shaking its crests, grooving its wave; then it thundered heavily into the basins, sometimes with leaps so abrupt that it fell over the parapets like a mill-dam, and flooded the lower part of the houses. One poor boat danced in a corner at the end of a rope; no seamen, no rigging, no cordage; such is this celebrated harbor. They say, however, that half a league away, there are five or six barks in a creek.
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From the dike the tumult of the high tide was visible. A massive wall of black clouds girt the horizon; the sun blazed through a crevice like a fire through the mouth of a furnace, and overflowed upon the billow its conflagration of ferruginous flames. The sea leaped like a maniac at the entrance of the harbor, smitten by a band of invisible rocks, and joined with its white line the two horns of the coast. The waves came up fifteen feet high against the beach, then, undermined by the falling water, fell head foremost, desperate, with frightful howling; they returned however to the assault, and mounted each minute higher, leaving on the beach their carpet of snowy foam, and fleeing with the slight shivering of a swarm of ants foraging among dry leaves. Finally one of them came wetting the feet of the men who were watching from the top of the dike. Happily, it was the last; the city is twenty feet below, and would be only a mass of ruins if some great tide were urged on by a hurricane.
