Marianela. Benito Pérez Galdós
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sieves began to revolve with hideous groaning; the water rushed from one to the other, pulverizing the dark earth which tumbled on in muddy eddies and cataracts, from trough to trough, till it settled at last in a fine chocolate-brown powder. The sound was as of a thousand hungry jaws chewing grit and sand; the play of light on water and soil made it as dazzling as a kaleidoscope, and the clatter was like some enormous hollow drum, filled with pebbles and potsherds. It was impossible to look on without turning giddy at the incessant whirl of a vast skein, as it were, of threads of water, some clear and transparent, others stained red by the ferruginous clay; nor could any human brain that was not accustomed to the spectacle, picture to itself this mad struggle of toothed wheels which never ceased biting at each other, of cogs, that met, and caught, and rolled away again, of screws which, as they turned, shrieked in pitiless clamor for oil.
The washing was all done in the open air. The connecting belts came humming down from the machinery sheds; other belts began to revolve, and at the same time a rhythmical stamping was heard, a slow and awful tramp like a giant's step, or a fearful throbbing inside mother earth. This was the great hammer which had begun to beat; its stupendous blows moulded the iron like a paste, and those huge wheels, and beams, which look as if made to last forever, began to twist and writhe like the limbs of men in torment, while the hammer, with its monotonous impact, created new forms as strong as the rocks which are the work of ages. For the results of labor have a strange resemblance to the results of patience.
Men so black, that they look like hewn and animated coal, gathered round the fiery objects that were taken from the forges, and seizing them with those prolonged hands known as tongs, set to work to hammer them. It is a strange kind of sculpture, this, which has fire for its inspiring genius and a steam-hammer for its chisel. Wheels and axle-trees for thousands of trucks, and the damaged portions of the washing-machinery, were repaired here, and picks, spades and barrows were made. At the back of the workshops saws hissed through blocks of timber, and the iron, which had been formed for labor by fire of wood, now cut through the sturdy fibre of trees hewn by the axe from their native spot.
Meanwhile, the mules had been harnessed to long trains of trucks which carried off the waste earth to add it to the slopes already made, or fetched the mineral to be washed. They looked like immense reptiles, crawling up and down to meet each other, and always passing close but without any jar or collision. They crept into the mouths of the tunnels, and their resemblance was really perfect to the wriggling creatures that shelter in such damp clefts and caves; and when the recalcitrant mules kicked and shied in the bowels of the earth, it was easy to fancy the Saurians were fighting and screaming at each other. In the deepest recesses of all, hundreds of men were tearing up the earth with picks, inch by inch, to win the hidden treasure; these were the sculptors of the strange and enormous figures which stood in awful gravity and silence to confront the man who should venture to invade their mysterious domain. The miners hewed down here, bored holes there, dug farther on in one place, scraped down the wall in another, broke up the limestone, chipped out the pretty flakes of mica and shale, pounded down the calcareous clay, picked out the hematite and pyrites, crushed the fine, white marble—rolling and stirring it incessantly till it should yield zinc silicate—for zinc may be called the silver of Europe, which, being a metal of which you cannot make saucepans, is destined to become the fount of wealth and civilization. Is it not on zinc that Belgium has hoisted her standard of moral and political greatness? Aye, tin even has its epic!
The sky was clear and bright; the sun rose unclouded on the scene, and the wide settlement of Socartes flashed from dark neutrality into redness. The sculptured rocks, the heaps of ore, the hillocks of waste soil that rose on every side like Babylonian mounds, were red; the ground, the trucks and carts, the machinery, the water and the laborers that gave life to Socartes. The brick-colored tone was universal, with faint shades of difference in the earth and the houses, the metal and the people's garments. The women at work at the washing looked like a crowd of nymphs, come down in the world, and cast in red ironstone. A rivulet of crimson fluid ran through the bottom conduit to join a crimson river—you might fancy it the sweat of these toiling men and machines, of muscles and of iron.
Nela stepped out of the house. Even she, though she did not work in the mines, was faintly tinged with the universal ruddle, for the finely-powdered metal spared no one. In her hand she held a hunch of bread which Señana had given her for breakfast, and as she ate it she walked on quickly, lost in thought and not lingering to amuse herself. She had soon passed the workshops and, going up the inclined plane and the steps before mentioned, she reached the houses of Aldeacorba. The first of these was a handsome and stately mansion, large, well-built, and cheerful looking, but lately restored and painted; with stone boundary walls, decorated eaves and a broad escutcheon surrounded by granite foliage. And the escutcheon itself would be less missed than the climbing vine, whose long and leafy branches looked like whiskers—growing, as whiskers do, on each side of a face, of which the two windows served as eyes, while the escutcheon was the nose and the long balcony the mouth, always widely grinning. And to complete this whimsical air of personality, a beam stuck out from the balcony intended to attach a rope to support an awning, and with this addition the face was seen as smoking a cigar. The roof was in the shape of a cap and in it there was a window that might represent the tassel. The chimneys could only be the ears. It was one of those faces in which a physiognomist reads plainly, peace of mind, ease of circumstance and a quiet conscience.
In front of it was a little court-yard enclosed by a wall of adobe, and on one side was a pretty orchard. As Nela went in she met the cows coming out to pasture, and after exchanging a few words with their driver—a formidable youth, about four feet high and ten years old—she went straight up to a stout gentleman, whiskered, grey-haired and florid, with a kind face and pleasant smile, and a half-military and half-rustic air; he was in his shirt sleeves and braces, and his hairy arms were bared to the elbow. Before the little girl addressed him, he looked up at the house and called out: "Here is Nela, my boy!"
A lad at once made his appearance, remarkably tall, grave and erect, his head held somewhat stiffly and his eyes fixed and vacant like lenses. His face was like marble, carved with exquisite sharpness, and his skin was as fine and soft as a girl's; there was not a feature or a line which was not of that supremely beautiful type of manliness which was the outcome of a thousand years of Hellenic thought. Those eyes even, so purely sculpturesque in their lack of sight, were large, grand and brilliant. Their fixity lost its strangeness when you remembered that behind them all was night. In the absence of the faculty which is the cause and origin of facial expression, this blind Antinous had the cold serenity of marble, endowed with form by the genius of sculpture and with life by a vital spark. A breath, a ray of warmth, a mere sensation would suffice to animate the beautiful stone which, while it possessed every charm of form, was devoid of that consciousness of its own beauty, which is born of the faculty of seeing it.
He looked about twenty, and his strong and graceful frame was in every respect worthy of the incomparable head that crowned it. Never was a more lamentable injustice done by Nature, than to this perfect example of humanity as to beauty, blest, on one hand, with every gift, and bereft, on the other, of the sense by which man has most in common with his fellow-man and gains familiarity with all the marvels of creation at large. The injustice was such, that these splendid gifts were useless—it was as though after creating all things the Creator had left them in darkness, so that he could not himself take pleasure in his works. And to make the privation more conspicuous, the young man had mental lights of the highest order and a very superior intelligence. To have this and to lack the faculty of conceiving the idea of visibility, of form as distinct from mere matter, and at the same time to be as beautiful as an angel; to have all the faculties of a man and be as blind as a vegetable! It was strange and hard. We, alas! know not the secret of these terrible injustices; if we did, then indeed the gates would be open to us which hide the primordial secrets of moral and physical duty; we should understand the fathomless mysteries of inherited woe, of evil and of death, and might take measure of the dark shadow which always haunts life and all that is good in it.
Don Francisco Penáguilas, the young man's father, was more than good, he was admirable; judicious, kind, genial, honorable and magnanimous, and well educated too. No one disliked him; he was the most respected of all the rich land-owners in the country side, and more than one delicate question had been settled by