Chapter 17 Summary

Through the years of rain Ursula drifts in and out of lucidity - after the rain stops she becomes more lucid but also more introspective. Her house of one hundred and more years is in ruins; the foundation cracked, the walls rotting and infested with termites, and the floors covered in thick mud and cobwebs. Jose Arcadio Segundo lives locked in the laboratory, trying to decipher Melquiades' ancient ciphers while Santa Sofia de la Piedad ghosts about the house providing for the bare essentials of a subsistence living. Ursula, blind and philosophical, comes to realize that time and events are a continuous circle that slowly revolves. Eventually Jose Arcadio Segundo succeeds in partially deciphering the ancient texts which have eluded so many Buendia ancestors.

Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes turn to raffling animals to eke out a meager living - most of their...