Aguirre listened coldly to these details. Happy Khiamull, who was departing thus! Fire, plenty of fire! Would that he could burn the town, and the near-by lands, and finally the whole world!...
At ten o'clock the transatlantic liner raised anchor. The Spaniard, leaning over the rail, saw the black mountain and the huge Rock, its base speckled with rows of lights, grow small as if sinking into the horizon. Its obscure ridge was silhouetted against the sky like a crouching monster toying with a swarm of stars between its paws.
The vessel rounded Europa Point and the lights disappeared. Now the cliff was visible from its Eastern face, black, imposing, bare, with no other light than that of the lighthouse at its extreme end.
Suddenly a new light arose,—a red line, a perpendicular flame,—at the foot of the mountain, as if it came out of the sea. Aguirre guessed what it was. Poor Khiamull! The flames were beginning to consume his body upon the beach. The bronze-faced men were at this moment gathered about the pyre, like priests of a remote civilization, hastening the disposal of their companion's remains.
Farewell, Khiamull! He had died with his hope placed in the Orient,—the land of love and perfumes, the abode of delights,—without having been able to realize his dreams. And here was Aguirre traveling thither with an empty heart, a paralyzed soul, wearied and bereft of strength, as if he had just emerged from the most terrible of ordeals.
"Farewell, melancholy and gentle Hindu, poor poet who dreamed of light and love as you sold your trinkets in that damp hole!..." His remains, purified by flame, were going to be lost in the bosom of the great mother. Perhaps his delicate, bird-like soul would survive in the sea-gulls that fluttered about the cliff; perhaps he would sing in the roaring foam of the submarine caverns, as an accompaniment to the vows of other lovers who would come there in their turn, on the impulse of the deceptive illusion, the sweet lie of love that gives us new strength to continue on our way.
END
[THE TOAD]
"IWAS spending the summer at Nazaret," said my friend Orduna, "a little fishermen's town near Valencia. The women went to the city to sell the fish, the men sailed about in their boats with triangular sails, or tugged at their nets on the beach; we summer vacationists spent the day sleeping and the night at the doors of our houses, contemplating the phosphorescence of the waves or slapping ourselves here and there whenever we heard the buzz of a mosquito,—that scourge of our resting hours.