Excerpt from The Stones Awake: A Novel of Mexico She had woven straw mats all her life. Formerly she could weave half a dozen a day; now - since a cataract had grown over one eye and her bony fingers were more tremulous - only one. But even the four cents profit could not be scorned these hard times. She peered at her work, her reddish eyelids puffy as those of a horny lizard. Her head ached a good deal, so she had pasted green medicinal leaves on her temples and had drawn her blue 7617o tightly about her loose nut-brown cheeks by running the ends crosswise over her flat bosom and under her skinny armpits. The two women did not speak often. The girl - shapely seven teen - was barefoot. She wore only a simple black slip that made her olive skin seem lighter; and her soft coal-black hair, evenly parted, was drawn back severely from her temples. Her only adornments were long bright red pendants and an aluminum Vir gin, suspended about her neck by a red cord. Occasionally she touched the image and smiled sweetly, her big black eyes gentle but lively with youth. She looked up from her work at the two lofty snow peaks, Ixtaccihuatl, the Woman in White, and Popocatepetl, the Smoke Mountain, faintly blue and rose in the late afternoon light. The crest of the first, above great forests of pine, was a vast sweep of snow and ice, with the unmistakable outlines of the head, breasts and feet of a white-draped sleeping woman; the second rose sheer and swift, a perfect cone. A long wisp of white cloud hung utterly motionless near its summit. The two god-like vol canoes filled Esperanza's heart with grandeur and tranquillity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.