The plain, silent and scowling, had said good-bye to them for ever.
They were more alone than if they had been in the midst of a desert; the solitude of hatred was a thousand times worse than that of Nature.
They must flee from there; they must begin another life, with hunger ever treading at their heels: they must leave behind them the ruin of their work, and the small body of one of their own, the poor little fellow who was rotting in the earth, an innocent victim of the mad battle.
And all of them, with Oriental resignation, seated themselves upon the bank, and there awaited the day, their shoulders chilled with cold, but toasted from the front by the bed of live coals, which tinged their stupefied faces with the reflection of blood; following with the unchangeable passivity of fatalism the course of the fire, which was devouring all their efforts, and changing them into embers as fragile and tenuous as their old illusions of work and peace.
THE END
FOOTNOTES:
[A] Get up!
[B] A huerta is a cultivated district divided usually into tiny, fertile, truck-garden and fruit farms.
[C] Translator's Note:—Asensis Nebot, a Franciscan monk, surnamed El Fraile (The Friar), leader of a band of foot soldiers and cavalry in the War of Independence (1810-12): he waged a guerilla warfare against the French around Valencia until the city was taken.
[D] Barrete means "a round hat without a visor." Translator's note.