She had thought that this marriage, of all marriages, would be an adventure. Not that the man himself was exactly magical to her. A little, wiry, twisted fellow, twenty years older than herself, with brown eyes and greying hair, who had come to America a scrap¹ of a wastrel², from Holland, years ago, as a tiny boy, and from the gold-mines of the west had been kicked south into Mexico, and now was more or less rich, owning silver-mines in the wilds of the Sierra Madre: it was obvious that the adventure lay in his circumstances, rather than his person. But he was still a little dynamo of energy, in spite of accidents survived, and what he had accomplished³ he had accomplished alone. One of those human oddments there is no accounting⁴ for.

When she actually SAW what he had accomplished, her heart quailed⁵. Great green-covered, unbroken mountain-hills, and in the midst of the lifeless isolation⁶, the sharp pinkish mounds⁷ of the dried mud from the silver-works. Under the nakedness of the works, the walled-in, one-storey adobe⁸ house, with its garden inside, and its deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides. And when you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio⁹, you saw the huge pink cone¹⁰ of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery¹¹ of the extracting plant against heaven above. No more.

To be sure, the great wooden doors were often open. And then she could stand outside, in the vast open world. And see great, void, tree-clad hills piling behind one another, from nowhere into nowhere. They were green in autumn time. For the rest, pinkish,

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