The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories
darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and
understand nothing whatever he told them, a thing quite outside his
expectation. They would not even understand many of his words. For
fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all the
seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and changed;
the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child's story; and
they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky
slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among
them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had brought
with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things as
idle fancies, and replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much of
their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for
themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and
finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised this; that his expectation of wonder
and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and
after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside as the
confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels of his
incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into listening to
their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to him life
and philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley) had
been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come, first,
inanimate things without the gift of touch, and llamas and a few other
creatures that had little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whom
one could hear singing and making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could
touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm and
the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was
good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for
his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said
Nunez must have been specially created to learn and serve the wisdom, they
had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and stumbling
behaviour he must have courage, and do his best to learn, and at that all
the people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said the night--for
the blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it behoved every one
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 snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every
side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from
that inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking
into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and he thanked
God from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had been given
him.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village. "Ya ho there,
Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up smiling. He would show these people once and for all
what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly, and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be
led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as _see_," said the blind man, after a pause.
"Cease this folly, and follow the sound of my feet."
Nunez followed, a little annoyed.
"My time will come," he said.
"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the
world."
"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-eyed Man is
King'?"
"What is blind?" asked the blind man carelessly over his shoulder.
Four days passed, and the fifth found the King of the Blind still
incognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had
supposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his _coup d'état,_
he did what he was told and learnt the manners and customs of the Country
of the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly
irksome thing, and he decided that that should be the first thing he would
change.
They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of
virtue and happiness, as these things can be understood by men. They
toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for
their needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of music
and singing, and there was love among them, and little children.
It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about their
ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their needs; each
of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant angle to the
others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its kerbing; all
obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been cleared
away; all their methods and procedure arose naturally from their special
needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear and
judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away--could hear the
very beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with
them, and touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was
as free and confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was
extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish individual differences as
readily as a dog can, and they went about the tending of the llamas, who
lived among the rocks above and came to the wall for food and shelter,
with ease and confidence. It was only when at last Nunez sought to assert
himself that he found how easy and confident their movements could be.
He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.
He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you
here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in
me."
Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces
downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to
tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids
less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost fancy she
was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He spoke of the
beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky and the sunrise,
and they heard him with amused incredulity that presently became
condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no mountains at all, but
that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was indeed the end of
the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe, from which the
dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the world had
neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were
wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it
seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the
smooth roof to things in which they believed--it was an article of faith
with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw
that in some manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter
altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. One
morning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards the
central houses, but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he told
them as much. "In a little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be here." An
old man remarked that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and then,
as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and went
transversely into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards the
outer wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards,
when he asked Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and
outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.
Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows
towards the wall with one complacent individual, and to him he promised to
describe all that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and
comings, but the things that really seemed to signify to these people
happened inside of or behind the windowless houses--the only things they
took note of to test him by--and of these 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 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 thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him and
out of the village.
He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass
behind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways.
He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning
of a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realise that you cannot even
fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to
yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks come
out of the street of houses, and advance in a spreading line along the
several paths towards him. They advanced slowly, speaking frequently to
one another, and ever and again the whole cordon would halt and sniff the
air and listen.
The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not
laugh.
One struck his trail in the meadow grass, and came stooping and feeling
his way along it.
For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his
vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up,
went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back
a little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should
he charge them?
The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blind
the One-eyed Man is King!"
Should he charge them?
He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable