H. G. Wells
47 The High Street
Bromley, Kent

                                                               9600 words
                                                         Disposable Copy

                        THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND
                             by H. G. Wells
      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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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"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.

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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."

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      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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/22
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.

                                                         Wells/BLIND/23
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/24
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?"

                                                         Wells/BLIND/25
      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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/26
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/27
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.

                                                         Wells/BLIND/28
      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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/29
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.

                                                         Wells/BLIND/30
      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,

                                                         Wells/BLIND/31
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/32
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/33
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

                                                   Wells/BLIND/34
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/35
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

                                                         Wells/BLIND/36
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.

                                                         Wells/BLIND/37
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,

                                                         Wells/BLIND/38
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.
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