Among the neighbouring peoples the secret of the cavern was a subject for jests mingled with fear. All the foreigners that had come into the kingdom to investigate the secret, either had not investigated at all, or had not returned home to recount what they saw because being conquered by the strange enchantment they had been lost in the cavern, or they had gone back without having even been able to enter the wood. The foreigner that did enter the wood and penetrate as far as the open space where it never rained, invariably went into the depths of the cavern. To this there was no exception.
Of the foreigners that were unable even to enter the wood—it caused them such repulsion—and who founded all their reports on what they heard said by persons who had never been in either, some pretended to take the whole affair as a joke, others shrugged their shoulders, and still others gave a symbolical explanation of the matter.
These explanations, however, the symbolical and allegorical, were the most discredited of all by those that knew anything whatever about the wood. It was no case of a symbol, but of a very real reality.
It is no case of a symbol, no: and not of an allegory either. It is not a case of abstract thought, of sociological reflections dressed in a concrete and allegorical form. Nothing of all that.
Yesterday, the eighth of this month of September, this month so charming in my Basque mountains, I walked past the castle of Butrôn along the banks of the river of the same name: which is the boundary of Gorliz beach. And I afterwards returned to Bilbao, to this Bilbao of mine, and went to bed in the very room I occupied as a boy. And I was slow in going to sleep, turning and turning in my bed, and preparing what I am to say the day after to-morrow in honour of the sculptor of Bilbao, Nemesio Mogrovejo, dead in the flower of his years.
Among Mogrovejo's works there is a relief representing the torment of the Count Ugolino, just as Dante so sculpturally relates it to us in the Divine Comedy. And last night I went to sleep, after turning many times, with the Divine Comedy in my mind.
Toward midnight I was awakened by a loud clap of thunder and a violent downpour. And on waking I discovered that I knew this tale of the secret of the cavern. And I knew it for the first
