Looking at the sketch that Aureli-ano Triste drew on the table and that was a direct descendent of the plans with which José Arcadio Buendía had illustrated his project for solar warfare, úrsula confirmed her impression that time was going in a circle. But unlike his forebear, Aureli-ano Triste did not lose any sleep or appetite nor did he torment anyone with crises of ill humor, but he considered the most harebrained of projects as immediate possibilities, made rational calculations about costs and dates, and brought them off without any intermediate exasperation. If Aureli-ano Segun-do had something of his great--grandfather in him and lacked something of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía, it was an absolute indifference to mockery, and he gave the money to bring the railroad with the same lighthearted air with which he had given it for his brother's absurd navigation project. Aureli-ano Triste consulted the calendar and left the following Wednesday, planning to return after the rains had passed. There was nomore news of him. Aureli-ano Centeno, overwhelmed by the abundance of the factory, had already begun to experiment with the production of ice with a base of fruit juices instead of water, and without knowing it or thinking about it, he conceived the essential fundamentals for the invention of sherbet. In that way he planned to diversify the production of an enterprise he considered his own, because his brother showed no signs of returning after the rains had passed and a whole summer had gone by with no news of him. At the start of another winter, however, a woman who was washing clothes in the river during the hottest time of the day ran screaming down the main street in an alarming state of commotion.
"It's coming," she finally explained. "Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it."
At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration. During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journey-man geniuses of Jerusalem. But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureli-ano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late. The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Ma-condo.