The Door in the Wall And Other Stories
by
H. G. Wells.
Part 3 out of 3
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 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 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 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.
"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.
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."
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 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 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 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 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.
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
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 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 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. 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 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?"
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 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 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.
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 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.
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, 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 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
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
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 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
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. 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, 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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