Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART FIRST: THE SILVER OF THE MINE 8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

But not for long. Dona Emilia would be gone "up to the mountain"
in a day or two, and her sleek carriage mules would have an easy
time of it for another long spell. She had watched the erection
of the first frame-house put up on the lower mesa for an office
and Don Pepe's quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful
emotion the first wagon load of ore rattle down the then only
shoot; she had stood by her husband's side perfectly silent, and
gone cold all over with excitement at the instant when the first
battery of only fifteen stamps was put in motion for the first
time. On the occasion when the fires under the first set of
retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did not
retire to rest on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet
bare frame-house till she had seen the first spongy lump of
silver yielded to the hazards of the world by the dark depths of
the Gould Concession; she had laid her unmercenary hands, with an
eagerness that made them tremble, upon the first silver ingot
turned out still warm from the mould; and by her imaginative
estimate of its power she endowed that lump of metal with a
justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but
something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression
of an emotion or the emergence of a principle.

Don Pepe, extremely interested, too, looked over her shoulder
with a smile that, making longitudinal folds on his face, caused
it to resemble a leathern mask with a benignantly diabolic
expression.

"Would not the muchachos of Hernandez like to get hold of this
insignificant object, that looks, por Dios, very much like a
piece of tin?" he remarked, jocularly.