Animal Farm by George Orwell - Versión en Ingles

Part 6

All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work;

they grudged no eort or sacrice, well aware that everything that they did was

for the benet of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them,

and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings.

Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in

August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons

as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself

from it would have his rations reduced by half. Even so, it was found necessary

to leave certain tasks undone. The harvest was a little less successful than in

the previous year, and two elds which should have been sown with roots in

the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed

early enough. It was possible to foresee that the coming winter would be a hard

one.

The windmill presented unexpected diculties. There was a good quarry of

limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one

of the outhouses, so that all the materials for building were at hand. But the

problem the animals could not at rst solve was how to break up the stone into

pieces of suitable size. There seemed no way of doing this except with picks and

crowbars, which no animal could use, because no animal could stand on his hind

legs. Only after weeks of vain eort did the right idea occur to somebody |

namely, to utilise the force of gravity. Huge boulders, far too big to be used as

they were, were lying all over the bed of the quarry. The animals lashed ropes

round these, and then all together, cows, horses, sheep, any animal that could

lay hold of the rope | even the pigs sometimes joined in at critical moments |

they dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry,

where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. Transporting

the stone when it was once broken was comparatively simple. The horses carried

it o in cart-loads, the sheep dragged single blocks, even Muriel and Benjamin

yoked themselves into an old governess-cart and did their share. By late summer

a sucient store of stone had accumulated, and then the building began, under

the superintendence of the pigs.

But it was a slow, laborious process. Frequently it took a whole day of

exhausting eort to drag a single boulder to the top of the quarry, and sometimes

when it was pushed over the edge it failed to break. Nothing could have been

achieved without Boxer, whose strength seemed equal to that of all the rest of

the animals put together. When the boulder began to slip and the animals cried

out in despair at nding themselves dragged down the hill, it was always Boxer