Mter searching for it uselessly in the taste of earth, in the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband; she had found peace in that house where memories mate-rialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms.

In the center· of the chalk

"They can bring him out now," he ordered

But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the fir.st sign of disrespect."

COLONEL GERINELDO MARQUEZ was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war. In his position as civil and military leader of Macondo he would have telegraphic conversations twice a week with Colonel Aureliano Buendia. At first those exchanges would determine the course of a fiesh-and-blood war, the perfectly defined outlines of which told them at any moment the exact spot where it was and the prediction of its future direction. Although he never let himself be pulled into the. area of confidences, no.t even by his closest friends, Colonel Aureliano Buendia still had at that time the familiar tone that made it possible to identifY him at the other end of the wire. Many times he would prolong the talks beyond the expected limit and let them drift into comments of a domestic nature. Little by little, how-ever, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of u.nreality. The characteristics of his speech were more and more uncertain, and they came together and combined to form words that were gradually losing all mean-ing. Colonel Gerineldo Marquez limited himself then to just listen-ing, burdened by the impression that he was in telegraphic contact with a stranger from another world

At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.

as then that he decided that no human being, not even Ursula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center· of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal the fate of the world.

An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of the sun would not let him sleep for several months, until it became a habit.

Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories

He was never a greater soldier than at that time

The doctor listened with his steth

ABOUT THIS TIME an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say. , 'Mything to say about what?". inquired Gatsby politely. "Why-any statement to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hur-ried out "to see."

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself He was a son of God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end

The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing

"My God, 1 believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?" "She says she does want him." "She has a big dinner party and he won't know a soul there." He frowned. "1 wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, 1 may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses. "C "'d M Sl 'T'''' 1 "\Vl ' ome on, Sal r. oane to .lom, were ate. weve got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we couldn't wait, will you?

"These things excite me so)" she whispered. "If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I'm giving out green--"

We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault-Gatsby had been called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now. "How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?" The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes. "Wha'?" A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local dub to-morrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence: "Oh, she's all right now. When she's had five or six cock-tails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone." "I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused hollowly. "We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebody that needs your help, Doc.'" "She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, with-out gratitude, "but you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool." ''Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool," mumbled Miss Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey." "Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet. "Speak for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes. I wouldn't let you operate on me!"

tor and his Star. They were still under the white-plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale, thin ray of moon-light between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek. "I like her," said Daisy, "I think she's lovely."

watching the moving-picture direc-

It was dark here in front; only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: "I never loved you." After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be mar-ried from her house-just as if it were five years ago.

"1 wouldn't ask too much of her," 1 ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. ''I'm going to fIx everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see." He talked a lot about the past, and 1 gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but ifhe could once return to a cer-tain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could fInd out what that thing was ....

Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees-he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

Through all he said, even through his appalling senti-mentality, 1 was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that 1 had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what 1 had almost remem-bered was un communicable forever.

I pray to God that you won't have Aureliano in the house tonight," he said. "If it does happen that way, give him an embrace for me, because I don't expect ever to see him again."

She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the coundess men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure.

His pas-sion for Amaranta had been extin~ished without leaving any scars.

Aureliano and the last name. of the mother all the sons that the colonel had implanted up and down his theater of war: seven-teen

He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta

Ten days after a joint communique by the government and the opposition announced the end of the war, there was news of the first armed uprising of Colonel Aureliano Buendia on the western bor-der. His small and poorly armed force was scattered in less than a week. But during that year, while Liberals and Conservatives tried to make the country believe in reconciliation, he attempted seven other revolts.

Early one morning during the time when she refused Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, AurelianoJose awoke with the feeling that he could not breathe. He felt Amaranta's fingers search-ing across his stomach like warm and anxious little caterpillars. Pre-tending to sleep, he changed his position to make it easier, and then he felt the hand without the black bandage diving like a blind shell-fish into the algae of his anxiety. Although they seemed to ignore what both of them knew and what each one knew that the other knew, from that night on they were yoked together in an inviolable complicity.

A short time later, when ~e carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the wm-dow they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by

When he was alone, Jose Arca-dio Buendia consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door, and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mir-rors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room o

I'm not going to marry anyone," she told him, "much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can't marry him."

n the haze of convalescence, surrounded by Remedios' dusty dolls, Colonel Aureliano Buendia brought back the decisive periods of his existence by reading his poetry. He started writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death. Then his thoughts became so clear that he was able to examine them forward and backward.

Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher-shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.

"Yes." His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. "It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it."

A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family-he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

I walked out the back way-just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before-and ran for a huge black knotted tree, whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it was pouring, and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby's gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes.

I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair. "We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand. ''I'm sorry about the clock," he said.

Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone, before any words came through

Under the dripping bare lilac-trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy's face, tipped side-ways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

... old sport.

Jose Arcadio continued to profit from the usurped lands, the title to which was recognized by the Conservative gov-ernment. Every afternoon he could be seen returning on horseback, with his hunting dogs and his double-barreled shotgun and a string of rabbits hanging from his saddle

Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.

mation declared him victorious in Villanueva, defeated in Guaca-mayal, devoured by Motil6n Indians, dead in a village in the swamp, and up in arms again in Urumita. The Liberal leaders, who at that moment were negotiating for participation in the congress, branded him an adventurer who did not represent the party.

Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid after-noon, and he saw the ice

Gabriel Garcia Marquez not be grasped. On occasion they were so natural that he identified them as premonitions only after they had been fulfilled. Frequently they were nothing but ordinary bits of superstition.

"Don't be simple, Crespi." She smiled. "I wouldn't marry you even if I were dead."

His efforts to systematize his premonitions were useless. They would come suddenly in a wave of supernatural lucid-ity, like an absolute and momentaneous conviction, but they could

The houses, painted blue, then painted red, had ended up with an indefinable coloration. "What did you expect?" Ursula sighed. "Time passes." "That's how it goes," Aureliano admitted, "but not so much." In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.

From the moment in which she entered the room Ursula felt inhibited by the maturity of her son, by his aura of command, by the glow of authority that radiated from his skin

He looked paler to Ursula than when he had left, a little tailer, and more solitary than ever

HE WAR WAS OVER in May. Two weeks before the gov-ernment made the official announcement in a high-sounding proclamation, which promised merciless punishment for those who had started the rebellion, Colonel Aureliano Buendia fell prisoner just as he was about to reach the western frontier disguised as an Indian witch doctor. Of the twenty-one men who had followed him to war, fourteen fell in combat, six were wounded, and only one accompanied him at the moment of final defeat: Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.

"Bastards!" he shouted. "Long live the Liberal party!"

Ursula was in the doorway waiting, indif-ferent to the cannon shots that had opened up a hole in the front of the house next door. The rain was letting up, but the streets were as slippery and as smooth as melted soap, and one had to guess dis-tances in the darkness. Arcadio left Amaranta with Ursula and made an attempt to face two soldiers who had opened up with heavy firing from the corner. The old pistols that had been kept for many years in the bureau did not work. Protecting Arcadio with her body, Ursula tried to drag him toward the house. "Come along in the name of God," she shouted at him. "There's been enough madness!

COLONEL AURELIANO BUENDIA organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. He refused the Order of Merit, which the President of the Republic awarded him. He rose to be Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces, with jurisdiction and command from one border to the other, and the man most feared by the government, but he never let himself be photographed.

e passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the fa<rade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan, I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tight-ening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face.

It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn't think-ing of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, lim-ited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ven-tura road one night, and ripped a front wheel offhis car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken-she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

tragic nose

"The old Metropole," brooded Mr. Wolfsheim gloomily. "Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can't forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table, and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. 'All right,' says Rosy, and begins to get up, and I pulled him down in his chair.

the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger-with a cricket bat in his hand. Then it was all true

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them-with his smile. The smile comprehended Montene-gro's troubled history and sympathized with the brave strug-gles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this trib-ute from Montenegro's warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazine

I'd seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory, we started to town

He saw me looking with admiration at his1car

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that re~ourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American~that comes, 1 suppose, with the absence of lift-ing work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was· always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State sena-tor and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Qon S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. ("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly-they came to gamble, and when Fer-ret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.

All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.

"Not madness," Aurcliano said. "War. And don't call me Aure-lito anymore. Now I'm Colonel Aurcliano Buendia."

Aureliano Buendia, armed with table knives and sharpened tools, took the garrison by surprise, seized the weapons, and in the courtyard executed the captain and the four soldiers who had killed the woman.

They dragged out Dr. Noguera, tied him to a tree in the square, and shot him without any due process of law. Father Nicanor tried to impress the military authorities with the miracle of levitation and had his head split open by the butt of a soldier's ~ifle.

Since Aurcliano at that time had very confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and Liberals, his father-in-law gave him some schematic lessons.

Come here," he said. Rcbcca obeyed. She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat, fceling knots forming in her intestines, whilcJosc Arcadia stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers, then her calves, then her thighs, murmuring: "Oh, lit-tle sister, little sister." She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by thc waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in tile inconceivable pleas-ure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.

Only Rebeca succumbed to thc first impact.

He did not succeed in becoming incor-porated into the family

ompletely covered with tattoos of words in several languages intcr-hvincd in blue and red.

he link witll ti,e Buendias consolidated Don Apoli-nar Moscote's authority in the town

little Remedios woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair of twins crossed in her stomach

ose Arcadia Buendia would not accept, because according to him he could never under-stand the scnse of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules. Father Nicanor, who had never seen check-ers played that way, could not play it again.

One Saturday, not even having collected the price of the doors, he fell into a desperate confusion.

There was barely enough time to teach her how to wash herself, get dressed 'by her-selr, and understand the fundamental business of a home. They made her urinate over hot bricks in order to cure her of the habit of wetting her be

Viennese furniture, the Bohemian crystal, the table service [rom ,the Indies Company, the tablccloUls u'om Holland, and a rich variety or lamps and candle-sticks, hangings and drapes.

pianola,

When Ursula and Amaranta returned he was still tied to the trunk of t.he chestnut tree by his hands and feel, soaked with rain and in a state of total innocence. They spoke to him and he looked at them without recognizing them, saying things they did not understand. Ursula untied his wrists and ankles, lacerated by the pressure of the rope, and left him tied only by the waist. Later on they built him a shelter of palm branches to protect him from the sun and the rain.

That woman bothered him. The tan of her skin, her smell of smoke, the disorder of her laughter in the dark-room distracted his altcntion and made him bump into things.

He lived at that time in a par-adise of disemboweled animals, of mechanisms that had been taken apart in an attemplto perfect t.he~ with a system of perpetual motion based upon the principles of the pendulum

That day he went into the water at a bad spot and they did not find him until the rollowing day, a few miles downstream, washed up on a bright bend in the river and with a solitary vulture sitting on his stomach

I've come to sleep with you," he said

The house became full of love

Aureliano listened to it simply because everything, even music, reminded him of Remedios.

She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation

Finally Jose Arcadio Buendia managed, by mistake, to move a device that was stuck and the music came Qut, first in a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes. Beating against the strings that had been put in without order or concert and had been tuned with temerity, the hammers let go

Gabriel Garefn .:Marquez in his dress that in spite of the sulTocating heat he would work in his brocade vest and heavy coat of dark cloth. Soaked in sweat, keep-ing a reverent distance from the owners of the house, he spent sev-eral weeks shut up in the parlor with a dedication much like that of Aurcliano in his si1vcrwork.

The image of Remedios, the magistrate's younger daughter, who, because of her age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part or his body. It was a phys-ical sensaLion that almost bothered him when he walked, like a peb-ble in his shoe.

The magistrate," Ursula answered disconsolately. "They say he's an authority sent by the government."

at ten o'clock in the morning, when he reached Catarina's store, the girl had left town.

he would have years later as he faced the firing squad.

Melquiades.

But the system demanded so much vigi-lance and moral strength that many succumbed to Ule spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less prac-tical for Ulem but more comforting.

and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.

It was never established whelller it was the rhubarb or the beatings that had effect, or both of them together, but the truth was that in a few weeks Rebeca began to show signs of recovery

Somebody is coming," he told her

Arcadia and Amaranta, who had already begun to get their second teeth and still went about all day clutching at thc Indians' cloaks, stubborn in their decision not to speak Spanish but the Guajiro language. "You shouldn't com-plain," Ursula told her husband. "Children inherit their parents' mad-ness

rhey were wondrous clocks made of carved wood, which the Arabs had traded for macaws and whiehJosi: Arcadio Buendia had synchronized witl1 such precision that every half hour tl1e town grew merry with the progressive chords of the same so~g until it reached the climax of a noontime that was as exact and unanimous as a COfTIw plete waltz.

went back to being the cntcIprising man of earlier days when he had decided upon the layout of the streets and the location of the new houses so that no onc would enjoy privileges that everyone did not have. He acquired sllch authority among the new ~rr.ivals tl1at foundaLions were not laid or walls built without his being consulted, and it was decided that he shollid be the one in charge of the distribution of the land.

The people who had come with Ursula

Ursula had not ~aught up with the gypsies, but she had found the route that her husband had been unable to dis-cover in his frustrated search for the great invenlions

He's become a gypsy!"

Anxious for solitude, bitten by a virulent rancor against the world, one night he left his bed as usual, but he did not go to Pilar Ternera's house, but to mingle in the tumult of the fair.

and they sat down at the same lime on their pots eleven times in a single day,

gypsies returned. They were the same acrobats and jugglers that had brought the ice. Unlike Melquiades' tribe, they had shown ve,y quickly that

"Dog shit."

That was how they undertook the crossing of the mountains

One night, as UrsuJa went into the room where he was undressing to go to bed, she relt a mingled sense or shame and pity: he was the first man that she had seen naked arter her husband, and he was so well-equipped ror lirc that he seemed abnormal. Ursula, pregnant for the third time, relived her newlywed lerror.

had nothing to do with thc invisible power that taught him how to breathe {i'om within and con-trol his heartbeats, and that had permittcd him to understand why men are afraid of death.

hen he gave himself over to tl,at hand, and in a terrible state of exhaustion he let himself be led to a shapeless place where his clothes were taken 01T and he was heaved about like a sack of potalOes and thrown from onc side to the other in a bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to remember her face and found before hjm the face of Ursula, con-fusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long time he had wanted to do but tl,at he had imagined could really never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his reet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air or his inlestines, and fear, and the bewil-dered anxiety to Ace and at the same time stay forever in that exas-perated silence and tl,at fearful solitud

They were afraid that those two healthy products of two races that had interbred over the centuries would suffer the shame of breeding iguanas.

All right," he said. "Tell them to come help me take the things out of the boxes."

as an enormOliS Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull, covered witll an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole struc-ture seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion, protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds. Inside, where the expediLionaries explored with careful intent, there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.

Ursula replied with a soft firmness: "If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."

"God damn it!" he shouted. "1\1acondo is surrounded by water on aU sides."

Sir Francis Drake

"Not at aJl," Mc!quiades corrected her. "It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate."

Ursula lost her patience. ceir you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourselfl" she shouted. "But don't try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children."

ragged gypsies

The only thing he succeeded in doing was tq unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hoUow reson~nce of an enormous stone-f~led gourd. When Jose Arcadio Buendia and· the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck

He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws tJying to emerge, and even objects that had been lOSl for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in tur-bulent confusion behind Melquiadcs' magical irons.

a bed of polished stones, which were white and enor-mous, like prchistOl;c eggs. The world was so recent lhat many things lacked names, and in order to inrucatc them it was nccessaty to point.

J\1ANY YEARS LATER, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his Hlther look him to discover icc. At that Lime Macondo

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known

You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all." "I am careful." "No, you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an acciden t."

IZl"ading over what I have written so far,

"It came off," some one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At least a dozen men, some of them a little better ofT than ~1~ was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer J01l1ed by any physical bond. "Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the wheel's om" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said.

. looked around. Most of the remaining women were now ILlvII1g fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jor-,LlIl's p~rty, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dl\senslOn. One of the men was talking with curious inten-"Iy to a :ou~g ac~ress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh .11 I he S1t~atlon m a dignified and indifferen t way, broke ,I"wn entlrely and resorted to flank attacks-at intervals .11,' ;tpp~ared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and III"cd: You promised!" into his ear. Ihe reluctance to go home was not confined to way-II .11 d men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably ., ,11('1" men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were \ III pa thizing with each other in slightly raised voices

ndingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey

Your face is familiar" he s'lid poll't"ly "\vr' . . .. . ,c', ~. weren t you In Ihe Thu·d DIvIsIOn during the war?"

a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too-didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"

Cl'!" he cried triumphantly. "It's a bona-fide piece of I" 1IIICd matter. It fooled me, This fella's a regular Belasco. It'

Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-flve dollars.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's hou

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York-every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulp-less halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of rwo hundred oranges in half an hour if a

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the cham-pagne and the stars.

...

Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!" shouted Mrs. Wilson. 'Til say it whenever 1 want to! Daisy! Dai--" Making a short deft movement, 'I(JIll Buchanan hroke her nose with his open hand. Then there were bloody towels upon the hathroolll Hoor, and women's voices scolding, and high ovcr the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke frOIll his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone halfWay he turned around and stared at the scene-his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch, bleeding flu-ently, and trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.

Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. 1 was within and without, simul-taneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible vari-ety of life.

I thought he knew something about breed-ing, but he wasn't fit to lick my shoe."

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your hus-band, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. "George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump, or so

ABOUT HALF WAY between West Egg and New York

assertions became more violently affected moment by moment, and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her, until she seemed ro be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

he sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty, with a solid, sticky bob of red hair, and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste, and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when 1 asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel

he apartment was on the top floor-a small living-room, a small dining-room, a small bedroom, and a bath. The living-room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapes-tried furniture entirely too large for it, so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes ofladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance, however, the hen resolved itself into a bonnet, and the countenance of a stou t old lady beamed down into the room

"Is it a boyar a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

At the news-stand she bought a copy of Town 7iut/e and a moving-picture magazine, and in the station drug-store some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Up-stairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxicabs drive away bd()re shl' selected a new one, lavender-colored with gray upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and, leaning forward, tapped on the front glass

en I heard footsteps on a stairs and in Illoment the thickish figure of a woman blocked o~t the ligh: 110m the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and I.IIntly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as ',I IInc wome~ can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue : 111~',p~-de-chI~e, con~ained no fac~t or ~leam of beauty, but Ie was an ImmedIately perceptIble vItality about her as if ill(' nerves of her body were continually smouldering

The eyes of Doctor T. ]. Eckleburg ;Ire blue and gigantic-their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yel-luw spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roo£~ and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a per-sistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.

This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gar-dens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the pow-dery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invis-ible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who rep-resented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unhroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises oflife, as ifhe were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

"From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white--" "Did you give Nick a little heart-to-heart talk on the veranda?" demanded Tom suddenly. "Did I?" She looked at me. "I can't seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I'm sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing YOll know--" "Don't believe everything you he

You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so-the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated-God, I'm sophisticated!

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose.

he Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man God-dard?"

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away. It was sharply dif-ferent from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close, in a continually disap-pointed anticipation Of dse in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself

"Gatsby?" demanded Daisy. "What Gatsby?"

They are not perfect ovals-like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end-but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless :l more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size

I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright pas-sionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens-finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

t was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. "How do you get to West Egg village?" he asked helplessly. [ told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him-with special reference to the rather hard-boiled paint-ing that hangs in father's office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a cenrury after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thor-oughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day

I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snob-bishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

requently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon;