The Country of the Blind
Condensed
from the short story
by H.G. WELLS
LONG years ago, a handful of Peruvian families, fleeing from the
tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler, battled through frightful gorges and scaled
an icy pass to reach an isolated valley in the wilds of the Ecuadorian Andes.
They found all that man could desire - sweet water, pasture, an even climate,
slopes of rich brown soil. The settlers did well there. Their beasts
multiplied.
But a strange disease came upon them, and made all the children
born to them there - and indeed, several older children also - blind. And then
the old became blind so gradually that they scarcely noted their loss. They
guided the sightless youngsters, and when, at last, sight died out among them,
the race lived on. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things;
they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from
became mythical. Then it chanced that a man came into this community from the
outer world.
This is the story of that man.
NUNEZ was a mountaineer who had been taken on by a
party of Englishmen in Ecuador to climb Parascotopetk, the Matterhorn of the
Andes. The party worked a difficult and almost vertical way up to the foot of
the mountain's last and greatest precipice, where they built a night shelter
upon a little shelf of rock amidst the snow. In the morning they found Nunez
gone. They saw the traces of his fall. Far below he had struck a steep slope of
snow and plowed his way straight over the edge of a frightful precipice.
But Nunez survived, buried in a softening heap of snow. He worked himself
loose and struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb. He went down
the slope until he was on rock-strewn turf, then dropped beside a boulder and
instantly fell asleep...
He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below. After a rock
climb of no particular difficulty, he came to a steep slope of trees. Below lay
green meadows, among which he now glimpsed a cluster of stone huts. High up, and
ringing the valley, was a wall.
When at last he came into the sunlit plain,
the houses looked very strange to his eyes. Unlike the higgledy-piggledy of the
mountain villages he knew, the huts stood in a continuous row on either side of
a central street of astonishing cleanness. Here and there, their facade was
pierced by a door, but not one window broke their even frontage. Near at hand,
three men were carrying pails on yokes along a little path.
Nunez shouted. The men stopped and turned their faces this way and that. But
they did not appear to see him. "The fools must be blind," he said.
As Nunez approached, the three men stood with their ears directed toward him.
He could see their eyelids were closed and sunken, as though the very balls
beneath had shrunk away.
"A man," one said in hardly recognizable Spanish. "A man or a spirit - coming
down from the rocks."
Nunez advanced with confident steps. All the old stories of a lost valley and
the Country of the Blind came to his mind, and through his thoughts ran the old
proverb: In the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king. Very
civilly he gave them greeting.
"Where does he come from, Brother Pedro?" asked one.
"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "from near
Bogota, where there are a hundred thousand people, and where the city passes out
of sight."
"Sight?" muttered Pedro.
They starled him by a simultaneous movement toward him, each with a hand
outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread fingers, but they
clutched him neatly and felt him over. They found his eyes and their fluttering
lids very queer things.
"A strange creature, Correa," said Pedro. "Let us lead him to the elders."
"I can see," Nunez protested as Pedro took his hand.
"See?" said Correa.
"Yes, see," said Nunez, turning toward him, and stumbling 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.
IN THE village they thrust him through a doorway into a room as black as
pitch. Voices began to question him, and Nunez found himself trying to explain
the great world out of which he had fallen. But they would believe and
understand nothing he told them. For 14 generations these people had been blind
and cut off from the seeing world; the names for the things of sight had faded.
They had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky slopes
above their circling wall.
Slowly Nunez realized this. He subsided into listening as the eldest of the
blind men explained their life and philosophy and religion, including how time
had been divided into the warm and the cold, and how it was good to sleep in the
warm and work during the cold.
They brought him llama's milk in a bowl, and rough salted bread, and led him
to a place to slumber until the chill of the evening roused them to begin their
day again. But Nunez slumbered not at all.
"Ya ho there, Bogota!" a voice called to him from the village. "Come hither!"
He stood up and stepped outside, smiling. He would show these people what
sight would do for a man. He made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nunez stopped, amazed. The owner of the voice came running up. "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. "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. They led a simple, laborious
life. They had food and clothing' they made much of music and singing; and there
was love among them.
They went about their ordered world with confidence and precision. Their
senses had become marvelously acute. They could hear the beating of a man's
heart a dozen paces away. Their sense of smell could distinguish individuals as
readily as a dog can.
Nunez tried on several occasions to tell them of sight.
One morning he saw Pedro headed toward them, but still too far-off for hearing
or scent. "In a little while," he said, "Pedro will be here." But when Pedro
veered away and did not arrive, they all mocked Nunez. He thought of smiting one
of them to the earth in fair combat, therefore showing the advantage of eyes. He
seized his spade. They stood alert, their ears toward him for what he would do
next. Nunez felt a helpless horror and fled out of the village.
He went athwart one of the meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass, and
sat down. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks advancing
toward him, halting often to sniff the air and listen. "Bogota!" called one.
"Bogota! Where are you?"
Nunez called out, "I'm going to do what I like in this valley. Do you hear?"
They were moving in upon him, groping, yet moving rapidly. It was like
playing blindman's buff, with everyone blindfolded except one. He found himself
in the arc of a loose curve of pursuers. "I'll hurt you," Nunez said, sobbing
with emotion. "By heaven, I'll hurt you." He made for a gap in the cordon.
But then he heard steps behind him, and found a tall man rushing forward and
swiping at the sound of him. Nunez lost his nerve, whirled about and fled toward
a little doorway in the circumferential wall. He stumbled beyond the wall and
lay down among the rocks, sobbing for breath.
AND so his coup d'etat came to an end. He stayed outside the wall for two
nights and days without food or shelter. Finally, he crawled down to the wall,
shouting, until two blind men came to the gate and talked to him.
"I was mad," he said. "That was folly. The word see means nothing.
Give me some food or I shall die."
He expected dire punishments, but these people were capable of toleration. So
Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind. The world beyond the
mountains became more and more unreal. Here there was Yacob, his master, a very
kindly man when not annoyed. There was Pedro, Yacob's nephew. And Yacob's
youngest daughter, Medina-sarote. She was little esteemed because her closed
eyelids were not sunken, but looked as though they might open again at any
moment. She had long eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement.
Nunez thought her beautiful.
Once, at a rest-day gathering, as they sat side by side
in the dim starlight, his hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. She
returned his pressure. Presently, he asked for her of Yacob and the elders in
marriage.
There was great opposition because the people held Nunez as a being apart, an
incompetent thing. Then one of the elders had an idea. "Bogota's eyes are
diseased in such a way as to affect his brain," he said. "They are distended.
His eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a state of constant
irritation. All that we need to perform is a simple operation."
IT WAS Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"You do not want me to lose my gift of sight?" he said. "There are beautiful
things...the flowers, the sunsets and the stars...and you."
"I wish sometimes," she said, "you would not talk like that." She flung her
arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would consent," she sobbed, "if only
you would!"
For a week before the operation Nunez knew nothing of sleep. On his last day
of vision he had a few minutes with Medina-sarote.
"Tomorrow," he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear heart!" she answered. "They will hurt you but little. And you are going
through this pain, dear lover, for me." He looked on her sweet face for
the last time. "Good-by," he whispered.
He meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white
flowers, and remain there until the hour of his sacrifice. But as he lifted up
his eyes and saw the morning like an angel in golden armour, he went on, through
the wall and out upon the rocks. He began to climb...
When sunset came he was far and high. His clothes were torn, his limbs
bloodstained; he was bruised in many places, but he lay at ease, smiling. The
glow of the sunset passed, the night came, and still he lay contented under the
cold stars, satisfied to have escaped from the Valley of the Blind in which he
had thought to be king.
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