XXXII.
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND.
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snowsof Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies thatmysterious mountain valley, cut off from the world of men, the Country ofthe Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world thatmen might come at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass intoits equable meadows; and thither indeed men came, a family or so ofPeruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanishruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was nightin Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and allthe fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along thePacific slopes there were land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods,and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came down inthunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the exploringfeet of men. But one of these early settlers had chanced to be on thehither side of the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself,and he perforce had to forget his wife and his child and all the friendsand possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in thelower world. He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and hedied of punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a legend thatlingers along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which hehad first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, whenhe was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of mancould desire--sweet water, pasture, and even climate, slopes of rich brownsoil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit, and on one sidegreat hanging forests of pine that held the avalanches high. Far overhead,on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were capped by cliffs ofice; but the glacier stream came not to them but flowed away by thefarther slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses fell on the valleyside. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed, but the abundantsprings gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation would spread over allthe valley space. The settlers did well indeed there. Their beasts didwell and multiplied, and but one thing marred their happiness. Yet it wasenough to mar it greatly. A strange disease had come upon them, and hadmade all the children born to them there--and indeed, several olderchildren also--blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against thisplague of blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and difficultyreturned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not thinkof germs and infections but of sins; and it seemed to him that the reasonof this affliction must lie in the negligence of these priestlessimmigrants to set up a shrine so soon as they entered the valley. Hewanted a shrine--a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine--to be erected in thevalley; he wanted relics and such-like potent things of faith, blessedobjects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar ofnative silver for which he would not account; he insisted there was nonein the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. Theyhad all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having little need forsuch treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill.I figure this dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious,hat-brim clutched feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lowerworld, telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before thegreat convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with piousand infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay withwhich he must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had oncecome out. But the rest of his story of mischances is lost to me, save thatI know of his evil death after several years. Poor stray from thatremoteness! The stream that had once made the gorge now bursts from themouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor, ill-told story set goingdeveloped into the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there"one may still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valleythe disease ran its course. The old became groping and purblind, the youngsaw but dimly, and the children that were born to them saw never at all.But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world,with neither thorns nor briars, with no evil insects nor any beasts savethe gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up thebeds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. Theseeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noted theirloss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until theyknew the whole Valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out amongthem the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves to theblind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone. Theywere a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightlytouched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a traditionof the arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followedgeneration. They forgot many things; they devised many things. Theirtradition of the greater world they came from became mythical in colourand uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and able, andpresently the chance of birth and heredity sent one who had an originalmind and who could talk and persuade among them, and then afterwardsanother. These two passed, leaving their effects, and the little communitygrew in numbers and in understanding, and met and settled social andeconomic problems that arose. Generation followed generation. Generationfollowed generation. There came a time when a child was born who wasfifteen generations from that ancestor who went out of the valley with abar of silver to seek God's aid, and who never returned. Thereabouts itchanced that a man came into this community from the outer world. And thisis the story of that man.
He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been downto the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an original way,an acute and enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party ofEnglishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace oneof their three Swiss guides who had fallen ill. He climbed here and heclimbed there, and then came the attempt on Parascotopetl, the Matterhornof the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world. The story of theaccident has been written a dozen times. Pointer's narrative is the best.He tells how the little party worked their difficult and almost verticalway up to the very foot of the last and greatest precipice, and how theybuilt a night shelter amidst the snow upon a little shelf of rock, and,with a touch of real dramatic power, how presently they found Nunez hadgone from them. They shouted, and there was no reply; shouted andwhistled, and for the rest of that night they slept no more.
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossiblehe could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknownside of the mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, andploughed his way down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track wentstraight to the edge of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everythingwas hidden. Far, far below, and hazy with distance, they could see treesrising out of a narrow, shut-in valley--the lost Country of the Blind. Butthey did not know it was the lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish itin any way from any other narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by thisdisaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer wascalled away to the war before he could make another attack. To this dayParascotopetl lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumblesunvisited amidst the snows.
And the man who fell survived.
At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in themidst of a cloud of snow upon a snow slope even steeper than the oneabove. Down this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without abone broken in his body; and then at last came to gentler slopes, and atlast rolled out and lay still, buried amidst a softening heap of the whitemasses that had accompanied and saved him. He came to himself with a dimfancy that he was ill in bed; then realised his position with amountaineer's intelligence, and worked himself loose and, after a rest orso, out until he saw the stars. He rested flat upon his chest for a space,wondering where he was and what had happened to him.
He explored hislimbs, and discovered that several of his buttons were gone and his coatturned over his head. His knife had gone from his pocket and his hat waslost, though he had tied it under his chin. He recalled that he had beenlooking for loose stones to raise his piece of the shelter wall. Hisice-axe had disappeared.
He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by theghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. Fora while he lay, gazing blankly at that vast pale cliff towering above,rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of darkness. Itsphantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and then he was seizedwith a paroxysm of sobbing laughter...
After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the loweredge of the snow. Below, down what was now a moonlit and practicableslope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn turf. Hestruggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb, got down painfullyfrom the heaped loose snow about him, went downward until he was on theturf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a boulder, drank deep fromthe flask in his inner pocket, and instantly fell asleep...
He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vastprecipice, that was grooved by the gully down which he and his snow hadcome. Over against him another wall of rock reared itself against the sky.The gorge between these precipices ran east and west and was full of themorning sunlight, which lit to the westward the mass of fallen mountainthat closed the descending gorge. Below him it seemed there was aprecipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he found a sortof chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water down which a desperate man mightventure. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at last to anotherdesolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular difficulty to asteep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his face up thegorge, for he saw it opened out above upon green meadows, among which henow glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliarfashion. At times his progress was like clambering along the face of awall, and after a time the rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge,the voices of the singing birds died away, and the air grew cold and darkabout him. But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter forthat. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted--for he wasan observant man--an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of thecrevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed itsstalk and found it helpful.
About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the plainand the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the shadow of arock, filled up his flask with water from a spring and drank it down, andremained for a time resting before he went on to the houses.
They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of thatvalley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The greaterpart of its surface was lush green meadow, starred with many beautifulflowers, irrigated with extraordinary care, and bearing evidence ofsystematic cropping piece by piece. High up and ringing the valley aboutwas a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential water-channel, fromwhich the little trickles of water that fed the meadow plants came, and onthe higher slopes above this flocks of llamas cropped the scanty herbage.Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for the llamas, stood againstthe boundary wall here and there. The irrigation streams ran together intoa main channel down the centre of the valley, and this was enclosed oneither side by a wall breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality tothis secluded place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact thata number of paths paved with black and white stones, and each with acurious little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an orderlymanner. The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual andhiggledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; theystood in a continuous row on either side of a central street ofastonishing cleanness; here and there their particoloured facade waspierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage.They were particoloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with asort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimesslate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the sight of this wild plasteringfirst brought the word "blind" into the thoughts of the explorer. "Thegood man who did that," he thought, "must have been as blind as a bat."
He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ranabout the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus contentsinto the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. Hecould now see a number of men and women resting on piled heaps of grass,as if taking a siesta, in the remoter part of the meadow, and nearer thevillage a number of recumbent children, and then nearer at hand three mencarrying pails on yokes along a little path that ran from the encirclingwall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments of llama clothand boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of cloth with back andear flaps. They followed one another in single file, walking slowly andyawning as they walked, like men who have been up all night. There wassomething so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in their bearing thatafter a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously aspossible upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed roundthe valley.
The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were lookingabout them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nunezgesticulated with freedom. But they did not appear to see him for all hisgestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards the mountains faraway to the right, they shouted as if in answer. Nunez bawled again, andthen once more, and as he gestured ineffectually the word "blind" came upto the top of his thoughts. "The fools must be blind," he said.
When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream by alittle bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached them, hewas sure that they were blind. He was sure that this was the Country ofthe Blind of which the legends told. Conviction had sprung upon him, and asense of great and rather enviable adventure. The three stood side byside, not looking at him, but with their ears directed towards him,judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood close together like men alittle afraid, and he could see their eyelids closed and sunken, as thoughthe very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an expression near aweon their faces.
"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish--"a man it is--a man ora spirit--coming down from the rocks."
But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters uponlife. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the Blindhad come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old proverb,as if it were a refrain--
"In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King."
"In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is King."
And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used hiseyes.
"Where does he come from, brother Pedro?" asked one.
"Down out of the rocks."
"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyondthere--where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundredthousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight."
"Sight?" muttered Pedro. "Sight?"
"He comes," said the second blind man, "out of the rocks."
The cloth of their coats Nunez saw was curiously fashioned, each with adifferent sort of stitching.
They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a handoutstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers.
"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion andclutching him neatly.
And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until theyhad done so.
"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thoughtthat organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went overit again.
"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel thecoarseness of his hair. Like
a llama's hair."
"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigatingNunez's unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps hewill grow finer." Nunez struggled a little under their examination, butthey gripped him firm.
"Carefully," he said again.
"He speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."
"Ugh!" said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
"And you have come into the world?" asked Pedro.
"_Out_ of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over abovethere, half-way to the sun. Out of the great big world that goes down,twelve days' journey to the sea."
They scarcely seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may bemade by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of thingsand moisture, and rottenness--rottenness."
"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid... This is amarvellous occasion."
So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to leadhim to the houses.
He drew his hand away. "I can see," he said.
"See?" said Correa.
"Yes, see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro'spail.
"His senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He stumbles,and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."
"As you will," said Nunez, and was led along, laughing.
It seemed they knew nothing of sight.
Well, all in good time he would teach them.
He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering togetherin the middle roadway of the village.
He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated, thatfirst encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind. The placeseemed larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer,and a crowd of children and men and women (the women and girls, he waspleased to note, had some of them quite sweet faces, for all that theireyes were shut and sunken) came about him, holding on to him, touching himwith soft, sensitive hands, smelling at him, and listening at every wordhe spoke. Some of the maidens and children, however, kept aloof as ifafraid, and indeed his voice seemed coarse and rude beside their softernotes. They mobbed him. His three guides kept close to him with an effectof proprietorship, and said again and again, "A wild man out of the rock."
"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."
"A wild man--using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear that--_Bogota_? His mind is hardly formed yet. He has only the beginningsof speech."
A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said mockingly.
"Ay! A city to your village. I come from the great world--where men haveeyes and see."
"His name's Bogota," they said.
"He stumbled," said Correa, "stumbled twice as we came hither."
"Bring him to the elders."
And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black aspitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed inbehind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before hecould arrest himself he had fallen headlong over the feet of a seated man.His arm, outflung, struck the face of someone else as he went down; hefelt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of anger, and for amoment he struggled against a number of hands that clutched him. It was aone-sided fight. An inkling of the situation came to him, and he layquiet.
"I fell down," he said; "I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."
There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understandhis words. Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly formed. Hestumbles as he walks and mingles words that mean nothing with his speech."
Others also said things about him that he heard or understood imperfectly.
"May I sit up?" he asked, in a pause. "I will not struggle against youagain."
They consulted and let him rise.
The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himselftrying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the skyand mountains and sight and such-like marvels, to these elders who sat indarkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe andunderstand nothing whatever he told them, a thing quite outside hisexpectation. They would not even understand many of his words. Forfourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all theseeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed;the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child's story; andthey had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rockyslopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen amongthem and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had broughtwith them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things asidle fancies, and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much oftheir imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made forthemselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears andfinger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised this; that his expectation of wonderand reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; andafter his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside as theconfused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of hisincoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening totheir instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to him lifeand philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley) hadbeen first an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come, first,inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas and a few othercreatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whomone could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom no one couldtouch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm andthe cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it wasgood to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but forhis advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He saidNunez must have been specially created to learn and serve the wisdom, theyhad acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and stumblingbehaviour he must have courage, and do his best to learn, and at that allthe people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said the night--forthe blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it behoved every oneto go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep, and Nunezsaid he did, but that before sleep he wanted food.
They brought him food--llama's milk in a bowl, and rough salted bread--andled him into a lonely place, to eat out of their hearing, and afterwardsto slumber until the chill of the mountain evening roused them to begintheir day again. But Nunez slumbered not at all.
Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbsand turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and overin his mind.
Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement, and sometimeswith indignation.
"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they'vebeen insulting their heaven-sent king and master. I see I must bring themto reason. Let me think--let me think."
He was still thinking when the sun set.
Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that theglow upon the snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on everyside was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went fromthat inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinkinginto the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and he thankedGod from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had been givenhim.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village. "Ya ho there,Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up smiling. He would show these people once and for allwhat sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly, and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is
not allowed."
Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you beled like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as _see_," said the blind man, after a pause."Cease this folly, and follow the sound of my feet."
Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
"My time will come," he said.
"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in theworld."
"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man isKing'?"
"What is blind?" asked the blind man carelessly over his shoulder.
Four days passed, and the fifth found the King of the Blind stillincognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he hadsupposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his _coup d'etat,_he did what he was told and learnt the manners and customs of the Countryof the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularlyirksome thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he wouldchange.
They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements ofvirtue and happiness, as these things can be understood by men. Theytoiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient fortheir needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of musicand singing, and there was love among them, and little children.
It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about theirordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; eachof the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to theothers, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; allobstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been clearedaway; all their methods and procedure arose naturally from their specialneeds. Their senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear andjudge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away--could hear thevery beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression withthem, and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork wasas free and confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell wasextraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences asreadily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of the llamas, wholived among the rocks above and came to the wall for food and shelter,with ease and confidence. It was only when at last Nunez sought to asserthimself that he found how easy and confident their movements could be.
He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look youhere, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand inme."
Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with facesdowncast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best totell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelidsless red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy shewas hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He spoke of thebeauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise,and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently becamecondemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, butthat the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end ofthe world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which thedew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world hadneither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts werewicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them itseemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of thesmooth roof to things in which they believed--it was an article of faithwith them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He sawthat in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matteraltogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. Onemorning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards thecentral houses, but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he toldthem as much. "In a little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be here." Anold man remarked that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and then,as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and wenttransversely into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards theouter wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards,when he asked Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro denied andoutfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.
Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadowstowards the wall with one complacent individual, and to him he promised todescribe all that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings andcomings, but the things that really seemed to signify to these peoplehappened inside of or behind the windowless houses--the only things theytook note of to test him by--and of these he could see or tell nothing;and it was after the failure of this attempt, and the ridicule they couldnot repress, that he resorted to force. He thought of seizing a spade andsuddenly smiting one or two of them to earth, and so in fair combatshowing the advantage of eyes. He went so far with that resolution as toseize his spade, and then he discovered a new thing about himself, andthat was that it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood.
He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the spade.They stood alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards himfor what he would do next.
"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror. Hecame near obedience.
Then he thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him andout of the village.
He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grassbehind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways.He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginningof a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realise that you cannot evenfight happily with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis toyourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks comeout of the street of houses, and advance in a spreading line along theseveral paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently toone another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff theair and listen.
The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did notlaugh.
One struck his trail in the meadow grass, and came stooping and feelinghis way along it.
For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then hisvague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up,went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went backa little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Shouldhe charge them?
The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blindthe One-eyed Man is King!"
Should he charge them?
He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbablebecause of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many littledoors, and at the approaching line of seekers. Behind these others werenow coming out of the street of houses.
Should he charge them?
"Bogota!" called one. "Bogota! where are you?"
He gripped his spade still tighter, and advanced down the meadows towardsthe place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him."I'll hit them if they touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll hit."He called aloud, "Look here, I'm going to do what I like in this valley.Do you hear? I'm going to do what I like and go where I like!"
They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It waslike playing blind man's buff, with everyone blindfolded except one. "Gethold of him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose curve ofpursuers. He felt suddenly he must be active and reso
lute.
"You don't understand," he cried in a voice that was meant to be great andresolute, and which broke. "You are blind, and I can see. Leave me alone!"
"Bogota! Put down that spade, and come off the grass!"
The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust ofanger.
"I'll hurt you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll hurt you.Leave me alone!"
He began to run, not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the nearestblind man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and then made adash to escape from their closing ranks. He made for where a gap was wide,and the men on either side, with a quick perception of the approach of hispaces, rushed in on one another. He sprang forward, and then saw he mustbe caught, and _swish_! the spade had struck. He felt the soft thudof hand and arm, and the man was down with a yell of pain, and he wasthrough.
Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blindmen, whirling spades and stakes, were running with a sort of reasonedswiftness hither and thither.
He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushingforward and swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled hisspade a yard wide at his antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairlyyelling as he dodged another.
He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there wasno need to dodge, and in his anxiety to see on every side of him at once,stumbling. For a moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far away inthe circumferential wall a little doorway looked like heaven, and he setoff in a wild rush for it. He did not even look round at his pursuersuntil it was gained, and he had stumbled across the bridge, clambered alittle way among the rocks, to the surprise and dismay of a young llama,who went leaping out of sight, and lay down sobbing for breath.
And so his _coup d'etat_ came to an end.
He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the Blind for two nights anddays without food or shelter, and meditated upon the unexpected. Duringthese meditations he repeated very frequently and always with a profoundernote of derision the exploded proverb: "In the Country of the Blind theOne-Eyed Man is King." He thought chiefly of ways of fighting andconquering these people, and it grew clear that for him no practicable waywas possible. He had no weapons, and now it would be hard to get one.
The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could notfind it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, ifhe did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of assassinatingthem all. But--sooner or later he must sleep!...
He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable underpine boughs while the frost fell at night, and--with less confidence--tocatch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill it--perhaps by hammeringit with a stone--and so finally, perhaps, to eat some of it. But thellamas had a doubt of him and regarded him with distrustful brown eyes,and spat when he drew near. Fear came on him the second day and fits ofshivering. Finally he crawled down to the wall of the Country of the Blindand tried to make terms. He crawled along by the stream, shouting, untiltwo blind men came out to the gate and talked to him.
"I was mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."
They said that was better.
He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and theytook that as a favourable sign.
They asked him if he still thought he could "_see_"
"No," he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing--less thannothing!"
They asked him what was overhead.
"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the world--of rock--and very, very smooth." ... He burst again into hystericaltears. "Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I shall die."
He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable oftoleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of hisgeneral idiocy and inferiority; and after they had whipped him theyappointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone todo, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he wastold.
He was ill for some days, and they nursed him kindly. That refined hissubmission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was agreat misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the wickedlevity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his doubts aboutthe lid of rock that covered their cosmic casserole that he almost doubtedwhether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing itoverhead.
So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these peopleceased to be a generalised people and became individualities and familiarto him, while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remoteand unreal. There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed;there was Pedro, Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was theyoungest daughter of Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of theblind, because she had a clear-cut face, and lacked that satisfying,glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal of feminine beauty; butNunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most beautifulthing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids were not sunken and redafter the common way of the valley, but lay as though they might openagain at any moment; and she had long eyelashes, which were considered agrave disfigurement. And her voice was strong, and did not satisfy theacute hearing of the valley swains. So that she had no lover.
There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would beresigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services, andpresently he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gatheringthey sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet. Hishand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. Then very tenderly shereturned his pressure. And one day, as they were at their meal in thedarkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as it chanced thefire leapt then and he saw the tenderness of her face.
He sought to speak to her.
He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlightspinning. The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down ather feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemedto him. He had a lover's voice, he spoke with a tender reverence that camenear to awe, and she had never before been touched by adoration. She madehim no definite answer, but it was clear his words pleased her.
After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. Thevalley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains wheremen lived in sunlight seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some daypour into her ears. Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.
Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to hisdescription of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-litbeauty as though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not believe, shecould only half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted, and itseemed to him that she completely understood.
His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demandingher of Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful anddelayed. And it was one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob thatMedina-sarote and Nunez were in love.
There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunezand Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because theyheld him as a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below thepermissible level of a man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringingdiscredit on them all; and old Yacob, though he had formed a sort ofliking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his head and said the thingcould not be. The young men were all angry at the idea of corrupting therace, and one went so far as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck back.Then for the first time he found an advantage in seeing, even by twilight,and after that fight was over no one was disposed to raise a hand againsthim. But they still found his marriage impossible.
Old Yacob
had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grievedto have her weep upon his shoulder.
"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anythingright."
"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's gettingbetter. And he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder thanany I other man in the world. And he loves me--and, father, I love him."
Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and, besides--what made it more distressing--he liked Nunez for many things. So he wentand sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other elders andwatched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time, "He's betterthan he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as sane asourselves."
Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He wasthe great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a veryphilosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of hispeculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he returnedto the topic of Nunez.
"I have examined Bogota," he said, "and the case is clearer to me. I thinkvery probably he might be cured."
"That is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
"His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
The elders murmured assent.
"Now, _what_ affects it?"
"Ah!" said old Yacob.
"_This_," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queerthings that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable softdepression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Bogota, in such a wayas to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, andhis eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constantirritation and distraction."
"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"
"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to curehim completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgicaloperation--namely, to remove these irritant bodies."
"And then he will be sane?"
"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tellNunez of his happy hopes.
But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold anddisappointing.
"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take, that you did not carefor my daughter."
It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"_You_ do not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"
She shook her head.
"My world is sight."
Her head drooped lower.
"There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the flowers,the lichens among the rocks, the lightness and softness on a piece of fur,the far sky with its drifting down of clouds, the sunsets and the stars.And there is _you_. For you alone it is good to have sight, to seeyour sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your dear, beautiful handsfolded together... It is these eyes of mine you won, these eyes that holdme to you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you, hear you,and never see you again. I must come under that roof of rock and stone anddarkness, that horrible roof under which your imagination stoops...No; you would not have me do that?"
A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped, and left the thing aquestion.
"I wish," she said, "sometimes----" She paused.
"Yes," said he, a little apprehensively.
"I wish sometimes--you would not talk like that."
"Like what?"
"I know it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but _now_----"
He felt cold. "_Now_?" he said faintly.
She sat quite still.
"You mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps-----"
He was realising things very swiftly. He felt anger, indeed, anger at thedull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding--asympathy near akin to pity.
"_Dear_," he said, and he could see by her whiteness how intenselyher spirit pressed against the things she could not say. He put his armsabout her, he kissed her ear, and they sat for a time in silence.
"If I were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was verygentle.
She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," shesobbed, "if only you would!"
* * * * *
For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitudeand inferiority to the level of a blind citizen, Nunez knew nothing ofsleep, and all through the warm sunlit hours, while the others slumberedhappily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mindto bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he had given his consent,and still he was not sure. And at last work-time was over, the sun rose insplendour over the golden crests, and his last day of vision began forhim. He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote before she went apart tosleep.
"To-morrow," he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.
"They will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through thispain--you are going through it, dear lover, for _me_... Dear, if awoman's heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, mydearest with the tender voice, I will repay."
He was drenched in pity for himself and her.
He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers, and looked on hersweet face for the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered at that dear sight,"good-bye!"
And then in silence he turned away from her.
She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythmof them threw her into a passion of weeping.
He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows werebeautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of hissacrifice should come, but as he went he lifted up his eyes and saw themorning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down thesteeps...
It seemed to him that before this splendour he, and this blind world inthe valley, and his love, and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on, and passedthrough the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyeswere always upon the sunlit ice and snow.
He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to thethings beyond he was now to resign for ever.
He thought of that great free world he was parted from, the world that washis own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyonddistance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a gloryby day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and fountains andstatues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. Hethought how for a day or so one might come down through passes, drawingever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of theriver journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster worldbeyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushingriver day by day, until its banks receded and the big steamers camesplashing by, and one had reached the sea--the limitless sea, with itsthousand islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly faraway in their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world.And there, unpent by mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a discas one saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps inwhich the circling stars were floating...
His eyes scrutinised the great curtain of the mountains with a keenerinquiry.
For example, if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, thenone might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sortof shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge.And then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might befound to take him up to the precipice that came below the snow; and ifthat chimney failed, then another farther to the east might serve hispurpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit snowthere, and half-way up to the c
rest of those beautiful desolations.
He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded itsteadfastly.
He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
He turned again towards the mountain wall, down which the day had come tohim.
Then very circumspectly he began to climb.
When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. Hehad been higher, but he was still very high. His clothes were torn, hislimbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as ifhe were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.
From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly amile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountainsummits around him were things of light and fire. The mountain summitsaround him were things of light and fire, and the little details of therocks near at hand were drenched with subtle beauty--a vein of greenmineral piercing the grey, the flash of crystal faces here and there, aminute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There weredeep mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into purple, andpurple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastnessof the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but lay quite inactivethere, smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from thevalley of the Blind in which he had thought to be King.
The glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he laypeacefully contented under the cold clear stars.