[...] the people there were willing to trade eggs and cheese for gemstones. Martin loved that: he had a lot of gemstones stockpiled, and in the wee hours of the night he wondered if he was kidding himself about whether anyone would want them. You can't eat gems, and converting them to useful goods required something like a functioning civilization. The fact that these stoic Latino farmers were willing to take a little bag of rubies and sapphires for five big wheels of cheese and a promise of four dozen eggs per week for the next month meant that they, too, thought that civilization would come back.