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+\documentclass[submission]{sffms}
+\author{H. G. Wells}
+\surname{Wells}
+\title{The Country of the Blind}
+\runningtitle{Blind}
+\wordcount{9600}
+% copyright lapsed in the United States of America
+\disposable
+\begin{document}
+
+
+
+Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the
+snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there
+lies that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of
+men, the Country of the Blind.  Long years ago that valley lay so far
+open to the world that men might come at last through frightful gorges
+and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed men
+came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and
+tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of
+Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the
+water was boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as
+far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were
+land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of
+the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the
+Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring feet of men. But one
+of these early settlers had chanced to be on the hither 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 friends and
+possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the
+lower world. He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and
+he died of punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a
+legend that lingers 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 he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale
+of gear, when he was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that
+the heart of man could desire---sweet water, pasture, an even climate,
+slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an
+excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine that
+held the avalanches high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of
+grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream
+came not to them, but flowed away by the farther slopes, and only now
+and then huge ice masses fell on the valley side. In this valley it
+neither rained nor snowed, but the abundant springs gave a rich green
+pasture, that irrigation would spread over all the valley space. The
+settlers did well indeed there.  Their beasts did well and multiplied,
+and but one thing marred their happiness.  Yet it was enough to mar it
+greatly. A strange disease had come upon them and had made all the
+children born to them there---and, indeed, several older children
+also---blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against this plague
+of blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and difficulty
+returned down the gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not
+think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it seemed to him that
+the reason of this affliction must he in the negligence of these
+priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as they entered the
+valley. He wanted a shrine---a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine---to be
+erected in the valley; he wanted relics and such-like potent things of
+faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his
+wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account;
+he insisted there was none in the valley with something of the
+insistence of an inexpert liar. They had all clubbed their money and
+ornaments together, having little need for such 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 lower world, telling
+this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great
+convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious
+and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay
+with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had
+once come out. But the rest of his story of mischances is lost to me,
+save that I know of his evil death after several years. Poor stray
+from that remoteness! The stream that had once made the gorge now
+bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor,
+ill-told story set going developed 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
+valley the disease ran its course. The old became groping, the young
+saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them never saw at
+all. But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the
+world, with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any
+beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and
+followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which
+they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they
+scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters
+hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and
+when at last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had
+even time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they
+made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people
+at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish
+civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts of old
+Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation. They
+forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the
+greater world they came from became mythical in colour and
+uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong and able, and
+presently chance sent one who had an original mind and who could talk
+and persuade among them, and then afterwards another. These two
+passed, leaving their effects, and the little community grew in
+numbers and in understanding, and met and settled social and economic
+problems that arose.  Generation followed generation. Generation
+followed generation. There came a time when a child was born who was
+fifteen generations from that ancestor who went out of the valley with
+a bar of silver to seek God's aid, and who never returned. Thereabout
+it chanced that a man came into this community from the outer
+world. And this is the story of that man.
+
+He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been
+down to 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 of Englishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to
+replace one of their three Swiss guides who had fallen ill. He climbed
+here and he climbed there, and then came the attempt on Parascotopetl,
+the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer
+world. The story of that accident has been written a dozen
+times. Pointer's narrative is the best. He tells how the little party
+worked their difficult and almost vertical way up to the very foot of
+the last and greatest precipice, and how they built 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 had gone from
+them. They shouted, and there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and
+for the rest of that night they slept no more.
+
+As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems
+impossible he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward
+towards the unknown side of the mountain; far below he had struck a
+steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down it in the midst of a
+snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful
+precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and
+hazy with distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow,
+shut-in valley---the lost Country of the Blind. But they did not know
+it was the lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish it in any way
+from any other narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by this
+disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer
+was called away to the war before he could make another attack. To
+this day Parascotopetl lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's
+shelter crumbles unvisited amidst the snows.
+
+And the man who fell survived.
+
+At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the
+midst of a cloud of snow upon a snow-slope even steeper than the one
+above. Down this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a
+bone broken in his body; and then at last came to gentler slopes, and
+at last rolled out and lay still, buried amidst a softening heap of
+the white masses that had accompanied and saved him. He came to
+himself with a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then realized his
+position with a mountaineer's intelligence and worked himself loose
+and, after a rest or so, 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 his limbs, and discovered that several of
+his buttons were gone and his coat turned over his head. His knife had
+gone from his pocket and his hat was lost, though he had tied it under
+his chin. He recalled that he had been looking for loose stones to
+raise his piece of the shelter wall. His ice-axe had disappeared.
+
+He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by
+the ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had
+taken. For a while he lay, gazing blankly at the vast, pale cliff
+towering above, rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of
+darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and
+then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter . . . .
+
+After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the
+lower edge of the snow. Below, down what was now a moon-lit and
+practicable slope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of
+rock-strewn turf He struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and
+limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went
+downward until he was on the turf, and there dropped rather than lay
+beside a boulder, drank deep from the 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 vast
+precipice that sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his
+snow had come. 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 the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward the
+mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it
+seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the
+gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down
+which a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it
+seemed, and came at last to another desolate alp, and then after a
+rock climb of no particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He
+took his bearings and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw it
+opened out above upon green meadows, among which he now glimpsed quite
+distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times his
+progress was like clambering along the face of a wall, 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 dark about him.
+But the distant valley with its houses was all the brighter for
+that. He came presently to talus, and among the rocks he noted---for he
+was an observant man---an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of
+the crevices with intense green hands. He picked a frond or so and
+gnawed its stalk, and found it helpful.
+
+About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the
+plain and the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the
+shadow of a rock, filled up his flask with water from a spring and
+drank it down, and remained for a time, resting before he went on to
+the houses.
+
+They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of
+that valley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more
+unfamiliar. The greater part of its surface was lush green meadow,
+starred with many beautiful flowers, irrigated with extraordinary
+care, and bearing evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece. High
+up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a
+circumferential water channel, from which the little trickles of water
+that fed the meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this
+flocks of llamas cropped the scanty herbage. Sheds, apparently
+shelters or feeding-places for the llamas, stood against the boundary
+wall here and there. The irrigation streams ran together into a main
+channel down the centre of the valley, and this was enclosed on either
+side by a wall breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality to
+this secluded place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact
+that a number of paths paved with black and white stones, and each
+with a curious little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an
+orderly manner.  The houses of the central village were quite unlike
+the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain
+villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a
+central street of astonishing cleanness, here and there their
+parti-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window
+broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary
+irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey,
+sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the
+sight of this wild plastering first brought the word "blind" into the
+thoughts of the explorer. "The good 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
+ran about the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus
+contents into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of
+cascade. He could 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 the village a number of recumbent children, and
+then nearer at hand three men carrying pails on yokes along a little
+path that ran from the encircling wall towards the houses. These
+latter were clad in garments of llama cloth and boots and belts of
+leather, and they wore caps of cloth with back and ear flaps. They
+followed one another in single file, walking slowly and yawning as
+they walked, like men who have been up all night. There was something
+so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in their bearing that after
+a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously as possible
+upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed round the
+valley.
+
+The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were
+looking about them. They turned their faces this way and that, and
+Nunez gesticulated with freedom. But they did not appear to see him
+for all his gestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards
+the mountains far away to the right, they shouted as if in
+answer. Nunez bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured
+ineffectually the word "blind" came up to 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 a little bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached
+them, he was sure that they were blind. He was sure that this was the
+Country of the Blind of which the legends told. Conviction had sprung
+upon him, and a sense of great and rather enviable adventure. The
+three stood side by side, not looking at him, but with their ears
+directed towards him, judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood
+close together like men a little afraid, and he could see their
+eyelids closed and sunken, as though the very balls beneath had shrunk
+away. There was an expression near awe on their faces.
+
+"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish. "A man it is---a man
+or a spirit---coming down from the rocks."
+
+But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon
+life. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the
+Blind had 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 his
+eyes.
+
+"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 beyond
+there---where men can see. From near Bogota---where there are a hundred
+thousands 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 curious fashioned, each with a
+different sort of stitching.
+
+They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a
+hand outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread
+fingers.
+
+"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion and
+clutching him neatly.
+
+And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until
+they had done so.
+
+"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they
+thought that organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in
+him. They went over it again.
+
+"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel the
+coarseness of his hair. Like a llama's hair."
+
+"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating
+Nunez's unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he
+will grow finer."
+
+Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they 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 above
+there, 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 be
+made by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of
+things, and moisture, and rottenness---rottenness."
+
+"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
+
+"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a
+marvellous occasion."
+
+So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to
+lead him 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's pail.
+
+"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
+together in the middle roadway of the village.
+
+He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated,
+that first encounter with the population of the Country of the
+Blind. The place seemed 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 was pleased to note had, some of them, quite sweet
+faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken) came about him,
+holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling
+at him, and listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and
+children, however, kept aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice
+seemed coarse and rude beside their softer notes. They mobbed him. His
+three guides kept close to him with an effect of proprietorship, and
+said again and again, "A wild man out of the rocks."
+
+"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."
+
+"A wild man---using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear
+that---"BOGOTA? His mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the
+beginnings of speech."
+
+A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said mockingly.
+
+"Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world---where men
+have eyes and see."
+
+"His name's Bogota," they said.
+
+"He stumbled," said Correa---" stumbled twice as we came hither."
+
+"Bring him in to the elders."
+
+And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as
+pitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed
+in behind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and
+before he could 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; he felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of
+anger, and for a moment he struggled against a number of hands that
+clutched him. It was a one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation
+came to him and he lay quiet.
+
+"I fell down," be said; I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."
+
+There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to
+understand his words. Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly
+formed. He stumbles 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 you
+again."
+
+They consulted and let him rise.
+
+The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found
+himself trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen,
+and the sky and mountains and such-like marvels, to these elders who
+sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe
+and understand nothing whatever that he told them, a thing quite
+outside his expectation. They would not even understand many of his
+words. For fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut
+off from all the seeing 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; and they had ceased to concern themselves
+with anything beyond the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind
+men of genius had arisen among them and questioned the shreds of
+belief and tradition they had brought with them from their seeing
+days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies and replaced
+them with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had
+shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new
+imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and
+finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised this: that his expectation of
+wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne
+out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set
+aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the
+marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed,
+into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men
+explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world
+(meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the rocks,
+and then had come first inanimate things without the gift of touch,
+and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then
+men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making
+fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch 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
+and the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and
+how it was good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that
+now, but for his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been
+asleep. He said Nunez must have been specially created to learn and
+serve the wisdom they had acquired, and that for all his mental
+incoherency and stumbling behaviour he must have courage and do his
+best to learn, and at that all the people in the door-way murmured
+encouragingly. He said the night---for the blind call their day
+night---was now far gone, and it behooved everyone to go back to
+sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep, and Nunez said he did,
+but that before sleep he wanted food.  They brought him food, llama's
+milk in a bowl and rough salted bread, and led him into a lonely place
+to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to slumber until the chill
+of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again.  But
+Nunez slumbered not at all.
+
+Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his
+limbs and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over
+and over in his mind.
+
+Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes
+with indignation.
+
+"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've
+been insulting their Heaven-sent King and master . . . . .
+
+"I see I must bring them to 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
+the glow upon the snow-fields and glaciers that rose about the valley
+on every side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes
+went from that inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields,
+fast sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took
+him, and he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that the power of
+sight had been given him.
+
+He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
+
+"Yaho there, Bogota! Come hither!"
+
+At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for
+all what 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 be led 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 the
+world."
+
+"Has no one told you, `In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
+King?'"
+
+"What is blind?"\ asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
+
+Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still
+incognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
+
+It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had
+supposed, 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 Country
+of the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly
+irksome thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he
+would change.
+
+They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements
+of virtue and happiness as these things can be understood by men. They
+toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient
+for their needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of
+music and singing, and there was love among them and little
+children. It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they
+went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to
+fit their needs; each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a
+constant angle to the others, and was distinguished by a special notch
+upon its kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow
+had long since been cleared away; all their methods and procedure
+arose naturally from their special needs. Their senses had become
+marvellously acute; they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of
+a man a dozen paces away---could hear the very beating of his
+heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them, and touches
+gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and
+confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was
+extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences as
+readily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of llamas, who
+lived 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
+assert himself 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
+you here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not
+understand in me."
+
+Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces
+downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his
+best to tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl,
+with eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could
+almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to
+persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the
+mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused
+incredulity that presently became condemnatory. They told him there
+were indeed no mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where
+the llamas grazed was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a
+cavernous roof of the universe, from which the dew and the avalanches
+fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor
+roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far
+as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to
+them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth
+roof to things in which they believed---it was an article of faith with
+them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw
+that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the
+matter altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of
+sight. One morning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and
+coming towards the central houses, but still too far off for hearing
+or scent, and he told them as much. "In a little while," he
+prophesied, "Pedro will be here." An old man remarked that Pedro had
+no business on path Seventeen, and then, as if in confirmation, that
+individual as he drew near turned and went transversely into path Ten,
+and so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall. They mocked
+Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro
+questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and
+was afterwards hostile to him.
+
+Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows
+towards the wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he
+promised to describe all that happened among the houses. He noted
+certain goings and comings, but the things that really seemed to
+signify to these people happened inside of or behind the windowless
+houses---the only things they took note of to test him by---and of those
+he could see or tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this
+attempt, and the ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to
+force. He thought of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting one or two
+of them to earth, and so in fair combat showing the advantage of
+eyes. He went so far with that resolution as to seize his spade, and
+then he discovered a new thing about himself, and that 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 all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent
+ears towards him for what he would do next.
+
+"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless
+horror. He came near obedience.
+
+Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past
+him and out of the village.
+
+He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled
+grass behind 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 beginning of a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realise
+that you cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a
+different mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a number of men
+carrying spades and sticks come out of the street of houses and
+advance in a spreading line along the several paths towards him. They
+advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and
+again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.
+
+The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not
+laugh.
+
+One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling
+his way along it.
+
+For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then
+his vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He
+stood up, went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned,
+and went back a little way.  There they all stood in a crescent, still
+and listening.
+
+He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both
+hands. Should he charge them?
+
+The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the
+Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."
+
+Should he charge them?
+
+He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind---unclimbable
+because of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little
+doors and at the approaching line of seekers. Behind these others were
+now 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
+towards the 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
+was like playing blind man's buff with everyone blindfolded except
+one. "Get hold of him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a
+loose curve of pursuers. He felt suddenly he must be active and
+resolute.
+
+"You don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be
+great and resolute, 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 of
+anger.  "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
+nearest blind man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and
+then made a dash 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 his paces, rushed in on one another. He sprang
+forward, and then saw he must be caught, and SWISH!  the spade had
+struck. He felt the soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down
+with a yell of pain, and he was through.
+
+Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and
+blind men, whirling spades and stakes, were running with a reasoned
+swiftness hither and thither.
+
+He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing
+forward and swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his
+spade a yard wide of this antagonist, and whirled about and fled,
+fairly yelling as he dodged another.
+
+He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there
+was no 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 in the circumferential wall a little doorway looked
+like Heaven, and he set off in a wild rush for it. He did not even
+look round at his pursuers until it was gained, and he had stumbled
+across the bridge, clambered a little 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
+and days without food or shelter, and meditated upon the
+Unexpected. During these meditations he repeated very frequently and
+always with a profounder note of derision the exploded proverb: "In
+the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King." He thought chiefly
+of ways of fighting and conquering these people, and it grew clear
+that for him no practicable way was 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
+not find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of
+course, if he did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of
+assassinating them all. But---Sooner or later he must sleep! . . . .
+
+He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable
+under pine boughs while the frost fell at night, and--- with less
+confidence---to catch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill
+it---perhaps by hammering it with a stone---and so finally, perhaps, to
+eat some of it. But the llamas 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 of shivering. Finally he crawled down to
+the wall of the Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms. He
+crawled along by the stream, shouting, until two 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
+they took 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 than
+nothing!"
+
+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. So smooth---so beautifully
+smooth . . "He burst again into hysterical tears. "Before you ask me
+any more, give me some food or I shall die!"
+
+He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of
+toleration.  They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his
+general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they
+appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone
+to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he
+was told.
+
+He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his
+submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a
+great misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the
+wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his
+doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic casserole that
+he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of
+hallucination in not seeing it overhead.
+
+So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these
+people ceased to be a generalised people and became individualities to
+him, and familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became
+more and more remote and 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 the youngest daughter of Yacob. She was little
+esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face
+and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man's
+ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first,
+and presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her
+closed eyelids were not sunken and red after the common way of the
+valley, but lay as though they might open again at any moment; and she
+had long eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement. And
+her voice was weak and did not satisfy the acute 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
+be resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.
+
+He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services
+and presently he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day
+gathering they sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music
+was sweet. His hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. Then very
+tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day, as they were at their
+meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as
+it chanced the fire 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 moonlight
+spinning.  The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat
+down at her feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful
+she seemed to him. He had a lover's voice, he spoke with a tender
+reverence that came near to awe, and she had never before been touched
+by adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it was clear his
+words pleased her.
+
+After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The
+valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains
+where men lived by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some
+day pour 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
+his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet
+white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not
+believe, she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously
+delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely understood.
+
+His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding
+her of Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and
+delayed. And it was one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob that
+Medina-sarote and Nunez were in love.
+
+There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of
+Nunez and Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as
+because they held him as a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing
+below the permissible level of a man.  Her sisters opposed it bitterly
+as bringing discredit on them all; and old Yacob, though he had formed
+a sort of liking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his head and
+said the thing could not be. The young men were all angry at the idea
+of corrupting the race, 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 against him. But they still found his
+marriage impossible.
+
+Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was
+grieved to have her weep upon his shoulder.
+
+"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do
+anything right."
+
+"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's
+getting better.  And he's strong, dear father, and kind---stronger and
+kinder than any 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 went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the
+other elders and watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the
+proper time, "He's better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall
+find him as sane as ourselves."
+
+Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He
+was a great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had
+a very philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez
+of his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present
+he returned to the topic of Nunez. "I have examined Nunez," he said,
+"and the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be
+cured."
+
+"This 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 queer
+things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable
+depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a
+way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has
+eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a
+state of constant irritation and distraction."
+
+"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"
+
+"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to
+cure him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy
+surgical operation---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
+tell Nunez of his happy hopes.
+
+But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold
+and disappointing.
+
+"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not
+care for 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 amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a
+piece of fur, the far sky with its drifting dawn of clouds, the
+sunsets and the stars. And there is YOU.  For you alone it is good to
+have sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your
+dear, beautiful hands folded together. . . . . It is these eyes of
+mine you won, these eyes that hold me 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 and darkness, that horrible
+roof under which your imaginations stoop . . . NO; YOU would not have
+me do that?"
+
+A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing
+a question.
+
+"I wish," she said, "sometimes---" She paused.
+
+"Yes?" he said, 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 perhaps, anger at
+the dull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of
+understanding---a sympathy near akin to pity.
+
+"DEAR," he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her
+spirit pressed against the things she could not say. He put his arms
+about 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
+very gentle.
+
+She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she
+sobbed, "if only you would!"
+
+For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his
+servitude and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew
+nothing of sleep, and all through the warm, sunlit hours, while the
+others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly,
+trying to bring his mind to 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 in splendour over the golden
+crests, and his last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes
+with Medina-sarote before she went apart to sleep.
+
+"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
+this pain, you are going through it, dear lover, for ME . . . . Dear,
+if a woman's heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest
+one, my dearest 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
+her sweet face for the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to 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
+rhythm of them threw her into a passion of weeping.
+
+He walked away.
+
+He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were
+beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his
+sacrifice should come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw
+the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down
+the steeps . . . .
+
+It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in
+the 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 passed
+through the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his
+eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.
+
+He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to
+the things beyond he was now to resign for ever!
+
+He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world
+that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes,
+distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous
+stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place
+of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying
+beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one
+might come down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its
+busy streets and ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day,
+from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and
+villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by day,
+until its banks receded, and the big steamers came splashing by and
+one had reached the sea---the limitless sea, with its thousand islands,
+its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their
+incessant journeyings round and about that greater world. And there,
+unpent by mountains, one saw the sky---the sky, not such a disc as one
+saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in
+which the circling stars were floating . . . .
+
+His eyes began to scrutinise the great curtain of the mountains with a
+keener inquiry.
+
+For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there,
+then one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round
+in a sort of 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 be found to take him up to the precipice that came below
+the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east
+might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon
+the amber-lit snow there, and half-way up to the crest of those
+beautiful desolations. And suppose one had good fortune!
+
+He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded
+it with folded arms.
+
+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
+to him.
+
+Then very circumspectly he began his climb.
+
+When sunset came he was not longer climbing, but he was far and
+high. His clothes were torn, his limbs were bloodstained, he was
+bruised in many places, but he lay as if he 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 a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though
+the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The
+mountain summits around him were things of light and fire, and the
+little things in the rocks near at hand were drenched with light and
+beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small
+crystal here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen
+close beside his face. There were deep, mysterious shadows in the
+gorge, blue deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous
+darkness, and overhead was the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he
+heeded these things no longer, but lay quite still there, smiling as
+if he were content now merely to have escaped from the valley of the
+Blind, in which he had thought to be King. And the glow of the sunset
+passed, and the night came, and still he lay there, under the cold,
+clear stars.
+
+
+
+\end{document}
+