Page:Karl Gjellerup - Minna, A novel - 1913.djvu/77

 face for a moment with a familiar nod, while a smaller man of a gnome-like appearance, and covered with dirty rags, scowled furtively at us as he moved away some tools. A few yards away a couple of workmen were hammering small wedge-shaped iron poles into a big stone which was to be split. Farther away one heard the sound of pickaxes and crow-bars.

The man in the check trousers stepped back from the stone; then we noticed a thick cord, hanging like the tail of an animal which had crept into a hole. It hung hardly four feet from the ground on a projecting part of the blasting surface, some twenty feet in height. The projection had already, by a narrow rent, loosened itself from the rock wall. This ascended bare and yellow-tinted for some hundred feet or so, until dark, rough shapes of rock appeared with shrubs and fir trees on all prominent points and in every fissure, giving the mountain the appearance of an enormous moss-grown tree which had been stripped of its bark and split at the base.

The landlord recommended us to go up the nearest stone bank, which lay on the side of the blasting operations. He waved away a man, who came from the smithy with a couple of pick-axes on his shoulder, and having put his hands to his mouth, he shouted: "Beware!" After this he knocked some ashes out of his pipe, puffing vigorously as he went towards the stone, where he put the end of the slow-match into the bowl of his pipe, which he did not take out of his mouth, and then sauntered quietly towards us, still smoking, and with his hands tucked under his leather apron. The spark of the slow-match that for one moment had been visible, disappeared; a thin smoke oozed out of the stone. Minna and I looked at each other with a strange smile of nervous anxiety, expecting a terrific