The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
flight, and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry cupboard or the
blackboard easel. His heels struck ground, and he staggered and fell
heavily into a sitting position on something soft and firm. For a moment
the concussion stunned him. He became aware at once of a vivid scent of
singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice of Lidgett asking for him.
You will understand that for a time his mind was greatly confused.
At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the
class-room. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and the
entry of Mr. Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did not
hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of the
experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint, but his mind
explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the explosion had
engendered a huge volume of dark smoke. Through the dimness the figures of
Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and silent as ghosts. Plattner's face
still tingled with the stinging heat of the flash. He, was, he says, "all
muddled." His first definite thoughts seem to have been of his personal
safety. He thought he was perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs
and face in a gingerly manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he
was astonished to miss the old familiar desks and other schoolroom
furniture about him. Only dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place
of these. Then came a thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his
stunned faculties to instant activity. _Two of the boys, gesticulating,
walked one after the other clean through him_! Neither manifested the
slightest consciousness of his presence. It is difficult to imagine the
sensation he felt. They came against him, he says, with no more force than
a wisp of mist.
Plattner's first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been
brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he was a
little surprised to find his body still about him. His second conclusion
was that he was not dead, but that the others were: that the explosion had
destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every soul in it except
himself. But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory. He was thrown back upon
astonished observation.
Everything about him was profoundly dark: at first it seemed to have an
altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The only touch
of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge of the sky in
one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of undulating black
hills. This, I say, was his impression at first. As his eye grew
accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a faint quality of
differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient night. Against this
background the furniture and occupants of the class-room, it seems, stood
out like phosphorescent spectres, faint and impalpable. He extended his
hand, and thrust it without an effort through the wall of the room by the
fireplace.
He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention. He
shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and fro.
He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as an
Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the
sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it, was an
extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings, not inaptly,
to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever he made a
motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him, he found an
invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse.
He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the
medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the
green powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel about
him. Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety
moss. The dark country about him he was unable to see, the faint, misty
picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a feeling (due
perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that a
steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge of
the sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity. He stood up, rubbing
his eyes.
It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and then
stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of rock to
watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was absolutely
silent. It was as still as it was dark, and though there was a cold wind
blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing of the boughs
that should have accompanied it, were absent. He could hear, therefore, if
he could not see, that the hillside upon which he stood was rocky and
desolate. The green grew brighter every moment, and as it did so a faint,
transparent blood-red mingled with, but did not mitigate, the blackness of
the sky overhead and the rocky desolations about him. Having regard to
what follows, I am inclined to think that that redness may have been an
optical effect due to contrast. Something black fluttered momentarily
against the livid yellow-green of the lower sky, and then the thin and
penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the black gulf below him. An
oppressive expectation grew with the growing light.
It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the
strange green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading slowly,
in flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew, the spectral
vision of _our_ world became relatively or absolutely fainter.
Probably both, for the time must have been about that of our earthly
sunset. So far as his vision of our world went, Plattner, by his few steps
downhill, had passed through the floor of the class-room, and was now, it
seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom downstairs. He saw the
boarders distinctly, but much more faintly than he had seen Lidgett. They
were preparing their evening tasks, and he noticed with interest that
several were cheating with their Euclid riders by means of a crib, a
compilation whose existence he had hitherto never suspected. As the time
passed, they faded steadily, as steadily as the light of the green dawn
increased.
Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far down its
rocky sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss was now broken
by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow-worm. And almost
immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing green rose over
the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and the monstrous
hill-masses about him came out gaunt and desolate, in green light and
deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a vast number of ball-shaped
objects drifting as thistledown drifts over the high ground. There were
none of these nearer to him than the opposite side of the gorge. The bell
below twanged quicker and quicker, with something like impatient
insistence, and several lights moved hither and thither. The boys at work
at their desks were now almost imperceptibly faint.
This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe
rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the
Other-World night it is difficult to move about, on account of the
vividness with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a
riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this world catch no
glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the comparatively
vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes the midday
of the Other-World, at its brightest, as not being nearly so bright as
this world at full moon, while its night is profoundly black.
Consequently, the amount of light, even in an ordinary dark room, is
sufficient to render the things of the Other-World invisible, on the
same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in the
profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story, to see
something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a
photographer's dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly
the form of greenish slopes and rocks, but only, I must admit, very
indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly be more successful. Plattner
tells me that since his return he has dreamt and seen and recognised
places in the Other-World, but this is probably due to his memory
of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with unusually
keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse of this strange Other-World
about us.
However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of
black buildings became perceptible, though only darkly and indistinctly,
in the gorge, and after some hesitation, Plattner began to clamber down
the precipitous descent towards them. The descent was long and exceedingly
tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary steepness, but also by
reason of the looseness of the boulders with which the whole face of the
hill was strewn. The noise of his descent--now and then his heels struck
fire from the rocks--seemed now the only sound in the universe, for the
beating of the bell had ceased. As he drew nearer, he perceived that the
various edifices had a singular resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and
monuments, saving only that they were all uniformly black instead of being
white, as most sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of the
largest building, very much as people disperse from church, a number of
pallid, rounded, pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions
about the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and
reappearing upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the
small black buildings which lined the way.
At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped,
staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had
the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He
was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed, of strangeness,
to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards him, in front of the
chill wind that was blowing uphill, much as soap-bubbles drive before a
draught. And as he looked at the nearest of those approaching, he saw it
was indeed a human head, albeit with singularly large eyes, and wearing
such an expression of distress and anguish as he had never seen before
upon mortal countenance. He was surprised to find that it did not turn to
regard him, but seemed to be watching and following some unseen moving
thing. For a moment he was puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this
creature was watching with its enormous eyes something that was happening
in the world he had just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too
astonished to cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came
close to him. Then it struck his face with a gentle pat--its touch was
very cold--and drove past him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.
An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner's mind that this head
had a strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention to the
other heads that were now swarming thickly up the hill-side. None made the
slightest sign of recognition. One or two, indeed, came close to his head
and almost followed the example of the first, but he dodged convulsively
out of the way. Upon most of them he saw the same expression of unavailing
regret he had seen upon the first, and heard the same faint sounds of
wretchedness from them. One or two wept, and one rolling swiftly uphill
wore an expression of diabolical rage. But others were cold, and several
had a look of gratified interest in their eyes. One, at least, was almost