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 frightful¹ gorges³ and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither⁴ indeed men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust⁵ 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 crest⁷ 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 begot⁸ 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 lashed⁹ 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 tangles¹⁰ of a shrub¹¹ that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine that held the avalanches¹² high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier¹⁴ 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 marred¹⁵ their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar¹⁶ 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 antidote¹⁷ against this plague of blindness that he had with fatigue¹⁸ and danger and difficulty returned down the gorge². 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 lie in the negligence¹⁹ of these priestless immigrants to set up a shrine²⁰ so soon as they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine—a handsome, cheap, effectual shrine—to be erected²¹ in the valley; he wanted relics²² and such-like potent²³ 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 insistence²⁴ of an inexpert liar²⁵. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments²⁶ 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 feverishly²⁷, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world, telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive²⁸ priest before the great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious²⁹ 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 isolated³⁰ 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 lugged³¹ and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind³² 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 civilisation³⁴, 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 mythical³⁵ 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 narrative³⁶ is the best. He tells how the little party worked their difficult and almost vertical³⁷ way up to the very foot of the last and greatest precipice³⁸, 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 eastward³⁹ 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 avalanche¹³. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and hazy⁴⁰ 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 streak⁴¹ 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 crumbles⁴² 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, stunned⁴³ 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 softening⁴⁴ 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 decided⁴⁵ 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 subsiding⁴⁶ tide of darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing⁴⁷ laughter . . . .
 
After a great interval⁴⁸ 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 joint⁴⁹ 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 boulder⁵⁰, drank deep from the flask⁵¹ in his inner pocket, and instantly fell asleep . . . .
 
He was awakened⁵² 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 precipices⁵³ ran east and west and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward⁵⁴ the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending⁵⁵ 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 desolate⁵⁶ 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 unfamiliar⁵⁷ 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 noted⁵⁸—for he was an observant man—an unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices⁵⁹ with intense green hands. He picked a frond⁶⁰ or so and gnawed⁶¹ 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, irrigated⁶³ with extraordinary care, and bearing evidence of systematic⁶⁴ cropping piece by piece. High up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential⁶⁵ water channel, from which the little trickles⁶⁶ of water that fed the meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas cropped the scanty⁶⁷ herbage. Sheds, apparently⁶⁸ 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 secluded⁶⁹ 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 agglomeration⁷⁰ 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 facade⁷¹ was pierced by a door, and not a solitary⁷² window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared⁷³ 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 descended⁷⁴ a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran about the valley, near where the latter spouted⁷⁵ out its surplus contents into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade⁷⁶. He could now see a number of men and women resting on piled heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta⁷⁸, 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 yokes⁸⁰ 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 reassuringly⁸¹ prosperous and respectable in their bearing that after a moment’s hesitation⁸² Nunez stood forward as conspicuously⁸³ as possible upon his rock, and gave vent⁶ to a mighty⁸⁴ 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 bawled⁸⁶ 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 wrath⁸⁷, 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 eyelids⁸⁹ closed and sunken, as though the very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an expression near awe⁶² 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 neatly⁹⁰.
 
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 glaciers⁹¹; 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 heed⁹² 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 gathering⁹³ 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, touching⁹⁴ him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at him, and listening at every word he spoke⁹⁵. Some of the maidens⁹⁶ and children, however, kept aloof⁹⁷ 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 proprietorship⁹⁸, and said again and again, “A wild man out of the rocks.”
 
“Bogota,” he said. “Bogota. Over the mountain crests⁹⁹.”
 
“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 doorway¹⁰⁰ 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 glimmer¹⁰¹ 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,” he 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 mingles¹⁰² 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 marvels¹⁰⁴, 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 shreds¹⁰⁵ 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 saner¹⁰⁷ 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 reverence¹⁰⁸ 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 subsided¹⁰⁹, a little dashed, into listening to their instruction. And the eldest¹¹⁰ 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 advent⁸⁸, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said Nunez must have been specially¹¹¹ 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 behooved¹¹² 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 slumber¹¹³ until the chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again. But Nunez slumbered¹¹⁴ 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 inaccessible¹¹⁵ glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into the twilight¹¹⁶, 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 ............