"Forever. Look over there." Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being unwound from a cocoon. "That band of dark rock is mineral-bearing. We could get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft parallel to the face of the deposit . . ." Then Dengo would get into the act and decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.