two o'clock in the morning
Ramuntcho , -- who had slept for a few hours , in a bad , tired sleep , in a small room of the new house of his friend Florentino , at Ururbil , -- awakened as the day dawned . The night , -- a night of tempest everywhere , a black and troubled night , -- had been disastrous for the smugglers . Near Cape Figuier , in the rocks where they had just landed from the sea with silk bundles , they had been pursued with gunshots , compelled to throw away their loads , losing everything , some fleeing to the mountain , others escaping by swimming among the breakers , in order to reach the French shore , in terror of the prisons of San Sebastian . At two o'clock in the morning , exhausted , drenched and half drowned , he had knocked at the door of that isolated house , to ask from the good Florentino his aid and an asylum . And on awakening , after all the nocturnal noise of the equinoctial storm , of the rain , of the groaning branches , twisted and broken , he perceived that a grand silence had come . Straining his ear , he could hear no longer the immense breath of the western wind , no longer the motion of all those things tormented in the darkness . No , nothing except a far-off noise , regular , powerful , continued and formidable ; the roll of the waters in the depth of that Bay of Biscay -- which , since the beginning , is without truce and troubled ; a rhythmic groan , as might be the monstrous respiration of the sea in its sleep ; a series of profound blows which seemed the blows of a battering ram on a wall , continued every time by a music of surf on the beaches .