 The Aggravation of Elmer by Robert Arthur. It was the darndest traffic jam I had ever seen in white planes. For two blocks ahead of me, Main Street was gutter to gutter with stalled cars, trucks, and buses. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to get back to the shop, I might have paid more attention. I might have noticed nobody was leaning on his horn, or that at least a quarter of the drivers were out peering under their hoods. But at the time it didn't register. I gave the tie-up a passing glance, and was turning up the side street toward Bill Tom Electronics. Bill Tom, get it? When I saw Marge threading her way to the curb, she was leading a small blonde girl of about eight, who clutched at child-sized hat-box in her hand. Marge was hot and exasperated, but small fry was as cool and composed as a vanilla cone. I waited. Being flushed and disheveled, Marge is a treat to look at. She is tall and slender, with brown eyes that match her hair, a smile that first crinkles around her eyes, then sneaks down and becomes a full-fledged grin. But I'm getting off the subject. Honestly, Bill, Marge said as she saw me, the traffic nowadays. We've been tied up for fifteen minutes. I finally decided to get off the bus and walk, even though it is about a hundred in the shade. Come along to the shop, I suggested. The reception room is air-conditioned, and you can watch the world's first baseball game, Telecast in Color, The Giants vs. the Dodgers, Carl Erskine, Pitching. Marge brightened. That'll be more fun than shopping. Won't it, Doreen? She asked, looking down at the kid. Bill, this is Doreen. She lives across the street from me. Her mother's at the dentist, and I'd said I'd look after her for the day. Hello, Doreen, I said. What have you got in the hat-box, doll-clothes? Doreen gave me a look of faint disgust. No. She piped in a high trouble. An unhappy genie. An unhappy—I did a double-take. Oh, an unhappy genie. Maybe he's unhappy because you won't let him out. Ha-ha! Even to myself I sounded idiotic. Doreen looked at me pityingly. It's not a he. It's a thing. Elmer made it. I knew when I was losing, so I quit. I hurried Marge and Doreen along toward our little two-story building. Once we got into the air-conditioned reception room, Marge sank down gratefully into the settee, and I switched on the television set with the big 24-inch tube Tom had built. Here Tom electronics makes TV components, computer parts, things like that. Tom Kennedy is the brains. Me, Bill Rawlins, I do the legwork, and tend to the business details. It's uncanny the way all those cars suddenly stopped when our bus broke down. Marge said, as we waited for the picture to come on, any day now this civilization of ours will get so complicated a bus breaking down some place will bring the whole thing to a halt. Then where will we be? Elmer says, Sillization is doomed. Doreen put in happily. The way she rolled the word out made me stare at her. Marge only nodded. That's what Elmer says? All right. She agreed. A trifle grim. Why does Elmer say, Sillization is doomed? I asked Doreen. Because it's getting hotter, the kid gave it to me straight. All the ice at the North Pole is going to melt. The ocean is going to rise two hundred feet. Then everybody who doesn't live on a hill is going to be drowned. That's what Elmer says, and Elmer isn't ever wrong. Doreen, they called her. Why not Cassandra? The stuff kids spout these days. I gave her a foolish grin. I wanted Marge to get the idea that I was really a family man at heart. That's very interesting, Doreen. Now look, there's the baseball game. Let's watch, shall we? We weren't very late at all. It was the top half of the second inning. The score one to one. Erskine in trouble with two men on, and only one down. The colors were beautiful. Marge and I were just settling back to watch when Doreen wrinkled her nose. I saw that game yesterday, she announced. You couldn't have sweetheart, I told her, because it's only being played today. The world's first ball game ever broadcast in color. There was a game on Elmer's TV, Doreen insisted. The picture was bigger, and the colors prettier too. Absolutely impossible. I was a little sore. I hate kids who tell fibs. There never was a game broadcast in color before. And anyway, you won't find a color tube this big any place outside of a laboratory. But it's true, Bill, Marge looked at me wide-eyed. Elmer only has a little seven-inch black-and-white set. His uncle gave him, but he's rigged up some kind of lens in front of it, and it projects a big color picture on a white screen. I saw that she was serious. My eyes bugged slightly. Listen, I said. Who is this Elmer character? I want to meet him. He's my cousin from South America, Doreen answered. He thinks grown-ups are stupid. She turned to Marge. I have to go to the bathroom, she said permanently. Through that door, Marge pointed, Doreen trotted out, clutching her hat-box. Elmer thinks grown-ups are stupid, I howled. Listen, how old is this character, who says sillization is zoomed, and can convert a black and white broadcast into color? He's thirteen, Marge told me. I goggled at her. Thirteen, she repeated. His father is some South American scientist. His mother died ten years ago. I sat down beside her. I lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. Tell me about him. All about him. Why, I don't know very much, Marge said. Last year Elmer was sick, some tropic disease. His father sent him up here to recuperate. Now Alice, that's his aunt, Doreen's mother, is at her wit's end. He makes her so nervous. I lit another cigarette before I realized I already had one. And he invents things. A boy genius, young Tom Edison, and all that? Marge frowned. I suppose you could say that, she conceited. He has the garage full of stuff he's made, or bought with the allowance his father sends him, and if you come within ten feet of it, without permission, you get an electric shock right out of thin air. But that's only part of it. It—she gave a helpless gesture. It's Elmer's effect on everybody—everybody over fifteen, that is. He sits there, a little dark, squinched up kid, wearing thick glasses, and talking about how climatic changes inside fifty years will flood half the world, causing the collapse of civilization. Wait a minute, I cut in. Scientists seem to think that's possible in a few thousand years, not fifty. Elmer says fifty, Marge stated flatly. From the way he talks, I suspect he's figured out a way to speed things up, and is going to try it some day, just to see if it works. Meanwhile, he fools around out there in the garage, snaring about the billions of dollars spent to develop color TV. He says his allowance will turn any ordinary broadcast into color for about twenty-five dollars. He says it's typical of the muddled thinking of our so-called scientists—I'm quoting now—to do everything backward and overlook fundamental principles. "'Brother,' I said. Doreen came trotting back in, then, with her hat-box. I'm tired of that game,' she said, giving the TV set a board-glance, and as she said it, the tube went dark. The sound cut off. "'Damn,' I swore, must be a power failure. I grabbed the phone and jiggled the hook. No dice. The phone was dead, too. "'You're funny,' Doreen giggled. It's just the unhappy genie. See?' She flicked over the catch on the hat-box, and the picture came back on. The sound started up. Swings and misses, for strike two. The air-conditioner began to hum. Marge and I stared, mouths open, wide. "'You did that, Doreen,' I asked it very carefully. "'You made the television stop and start again?' "'The unhappy genie did,' Doreen told me. Like this.' She flicked the catch back. The TV picture blacked out. The sound stopped in the middle of a word. The air-conditioner whispered into silence. Then she flipped the catch the other way. "'Vowels the second ball into the screen,' the announcer said. "'Picture OK. Air-conditioner operating. Everything normal except my pulse and respiration.' "'Doreen, sweetheart,' I took a step toward her. What's in that box? What is an unhappy genie?' "'Not unhappy. You know how scornful an eight-year-old can be.' Well, she was. Un-ha-p-n. It makes things un-ha-p-n. Anything that works by electricity, it stops. Elmer calls it his un-ha-p-n genie, just for fun. "'Oh, now I get it,' I said brightly. It makes electricity not work. Un-ha-p-n. Like television sets and air-conditioners and automobiles and bus engines,' Doreen giggled. "'Marge set bolt upright. Doreen, you caused that traffic jam? You and that gadget of Elmer's?' Doreen nodded. "'It made all the automobile engine stop, just like Elmer said. Elmer's never wrong.' Marge looked at me. I looked at Marge. "'A field of some kind,' I said. A field that prevents an electric current from flowing, meaning no combustion motor using an electric spark can operate, no electric motors, no telephones, no radio or TV.' "'Is that important?' Marge asked. "'Important!' I yelled. "'Think of the possibilities, just as a weapon. You could blank out a whole nation's transportation, its communications, its industry.' I got a hold of myself. I smiled at my best. I love children's smile. "'Doreen,' I said. "'Let me look at Elmer's unhappened genie.' The kid clutched the box. Elmer told me not to let anybody look at it. He said he'd stratify me if I did. He said nobody would understand it anyway. He said he might show it to Mr. Einstein, but not anybody else. "'That's Elmer all right,' Marge muttered. I found myself breathing hard. I edged toward Doreen, and put my hand on the hat-box. "'Just one quick look, Doreen,' I said. "'No one will ever know.' She didn't answer. Just pulled the box away. I pulled it back. She pulled. I pulled. "'Bill,' Marge called warningly, too late. The lid of the hat-box came off in my hands. There was a bright flash, the smell of insulation burning, and the unhappened genie fell out and scattered all over the floor. Doreen looked smug. "'Now Elmer will be angry at you. Maybe he'll disintegrate you, or paralyze you, and stratify you. Forever.' "'He might have that, Bill,' Marge shuddered. I wouldn't put anything past him. I wasn't listening. I was scrambling after the mess of tubes, condensers, and power-packs scattered over the rug. Some of them were still wired together, but most of them had broken loose. Elmer was certainly one heck of a sloppy workman. Hadn't even soldered the connections. Just twisted the wires together. I looked at the stuff in my hands. It made as much sense as a radio run over by a truck. "'We'll take it back to Elmer,' I told Doreen, speaking very carefully. I'll give him lots of money to build another. He can come down here and use our shop. We have lots of nice equipment he'd like.' Doreen tossed her head. "'I don't think he'll want to. He'll be mad at you. Anyway, Elmer is busy working on aggravation now.' "'That's for sure,' Marge said in heartfelt tones. "'Agravation, Ag.' I grinned like an idiot. "'Well, well. I'll bet he's good at it. But let's go see him right away.' "'Bill,' Marge signaled, made to one side. "'Maybe you'd better not try to see Elmer,' she whispered. I mean, if he can build a thing like this in his garage, maybe he can build a disintegrator, or paralysis array, or something. There's no use taking chances.' "'You read too many comics,' I laughed it off. "'He's only a kid, isn't he? What do you think he is, a superman?' "'Yes,' Marge said flatly. "'Look, Marge,' I said in feverish excitement. "'I've got to talk to Elmer. I've got to get the rights to that TV-color lens and this electricity interrupter and anything else he may have developed.' Marge kept trying to protest. But I simply grabbed her and Doreen and hustled them out to my car. Doreen lived in a wooded, hilly section a little north of White Plains. I made it in ten minutes.' Marge had said Elmer worked in the garage. I kept going up the driveway, swung sharp around the big house, and slammed on the brakes. Marge screamed. We skidded to a stop with our front end hanging over what looked like a bomb crater in the middle of the driveway. I swallowed my heart down again, while I backed away fast. We had almost plunged into a hole forty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle. The hole was perfectly round, like half a section of grapefruit. "'What's this?' I asked. "'Where's the garage?' "'That's where the garage should be,' Marge looked as. "'But it's gone!' I took another look at that hole, scooped out with geometrical precision, and turned to Doreen. "'What did you say Elmer was working on?' "'Agg—' She sobbed. "'Agg—ag—aggravation!' She began to bawl in earnest. "'Now he's gone. He's mad. He won't ever come back. I betcha.' "'That's a fact,' I muttered. He may not have been mad, but he certainly was aggravated. Marge, listen, this is a mystery. We've just got to let it stay a mystery. We don't know anything, understand? The cops will finally decide Elmer blew himself up, and will leave it at that. One thing I'm pretty sure about. He's not coming back.' So that's how it was. Tom Kennedy keeps trying and trying to put Elmer's unhappened genie back together again. And every time he fails, he takes it out on me, because I didn't get to Elmer sooner. But you can see perfectly well he's way off base. Trying to make out I could have done a thing to prevent what happened. Is it my fault if the dumb kid didn't know enough to take the proper precautions when he decided to develop anti-gravitation and got shot off garage and all someplace into outer space? What do they teach kids nowadays, anyway? End of The Aggravation of Elmer by Robert Andrew Arthur Blessed are the meek by J. C. Edmondson This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Bologna Times Blessed are the meek by J. C. Edmondson Every strength is a weakness, and every weakness is a strength. And when the strong start smashing each other's strength, the weak may turn out to be, instead, the wise. The strangers landed just before dawn, incinerating a goodly of bottom land in the process. Their machines were already busily digging up this topsoil. The old one watched, squinting into the morning sun. His side hitched up his saffron robes and started walking down toward the strangers. Griffin turned, not trying to conceal his excitement. You're the linguist. See what you can get out of him. I might, Kang Soo ventured sourly. If you'd go weed the air machine or something, this is going to be hard enough without a lot of kibitzers cramping my style and scaring old prune-phase here half to death. I see your point, Griffin answered. He turned and started back toward the diggings. Let me know if you make any progress with the local language. He stopped whistling and strove to control the jauntiness of his gate. Must be the lower gravity. An extra oxygen, he thought. I haven't bounced along like this for thirty years. Nice place to settle down if some promoter doesn't turn it into an old folks' home. He sighed and glanced over the diggings. The rammed earth walls were nearly obliterated by now. Nothing lost, he reflected. It's all on tape, and they're no different from a thousand others at any rate. Griffin opened a door in the transparent bubble from which Albanez was operating the diggers. Anything, he inquired. Nothing so far, Albanez reported. What's the score on this job? I missed the briefing. How'd you make it out on three, by the way? Same old stuff, parlor reshards, and the usual junk. See it once, and you've seen it all. Well, Griffin began. It looks like the same thing here again. We've pretty well covered this system, and you know how it is. Rammed earth walls, here and there. Pottery shards, flint, bronze, and iron artifacts. And that's it. They got to the Iron Age on every planet, and then blowy. Artifacts all made for humanoid hands, I suppose. I wonder if they were close enough to have crossbred with humans. I couldn't say. I couldn't say, Griffin observed Raleigh. From the looks of old Prune Face, I doubt if we'll ever find a human female with sufficiently detached attitude to find out. Who's Prune Face? He came ambling down, out of the hills this morning, and walked into camp. You mean you've actually found a live humanoid? There's got to be a first time for everything. Griffin opened the door, and started climbing the hill toward Kung-Su and Prune Face. Well, have you gotten beyond the Me-Charlie stage yet? Griffin inquired at breakfast two days later. Kung-Su gave an inscrutable East Los Angeles smile. As a matter of fact, I'm a little farther along, Joe is amazingly cooperative. Joe? Spell it Chow if you want to be exotic. It still pronounced Joe, and that's his name. The language is monosyllabic and tonal. I happen to know a similar language. You mean this humanoid speaks Chinese? Griffin was never sure whether Kung was ribbing him or not. Not Chinese. The vocabulary is different, but the syntax and phonemes are nearly identical. I'll speak it perfectly in a week. It's just a question of memorizing two or three thousand new words. Incidentally, Joe wants to know why you're digging up his bottom land. He was all set to flood it today. Don't tell me he plants rice, Griffin exclaimed. I don't imagine it's rice, but it needs flooding, whatever it is. Ask him how many humanoids there are on this planet. I'm way ahead of you, Griffin. He says there are only a few thousand left. The rest were all destroyed in a war with barbarians. Barbarians? They're extinct. How many races were there? I'll get to that if you'll stop interrupting, Kung rejoined testedly. Joe says there are only two kinds of people, his own dark, straight-haired kind, and the barbarians. They have curly hair, white skin, and round eyes. You'd pass for a barbarian, according to Joe. Only you don't have a face full of hair. He wants to know how things are going on the other planets. I suppose that's my cue to break into a cold sweat and feel a premonition of disaster. Griffin tried to smile and almost made it. Not necessarily, but it seems our Iron Age man is fairly well informed in extra-planetary affairs. I guess I'd better start learning the language. Thanks to the spadework Kung Su had done in preparing hypno-recordings, Griffin had a working knowledge of the rational people's language. Eleven days later, when he sat down to drink herb-infused hot water with Joe and other old ones in the low-roofed wooden building around which clustered a village of two hundred humanoids, he fidgeted through interminable ritualistic cups of hot water. Eventually Joe hid his hands in the sleeves of his robe and turned with an air of polite inquiry. Now we get down to business, Griffin thought. Joe, you know by now why we're digging up your bottom land. We'll recompense you in one way or another. Meanwhile could you give me a little local history? Joe smiled like a well-nourished bodhisattva. Approximately how far back would you like me to begin? At the beginning. How long is a year on your planet? Joe inquired. Your year is eight and a half days longer. Our day is three hundred heartbeats longer than yours. Joe nodded in thanks. More water? Griffin declined, suppressing a shudder. Five million years ago we were limited to one planet. Joe began. The court astronomer had a vision of our planet in flames. I imagine you'd say our son was about to nova. The empress was disturbed and ordered a convocation of seers. One fasted over long and saw an answer. As the dying seer predicted, the sun of heaven came with fire-breathing dragons. The fairest of maidens and the strongest of our young men were taken to serve his warriors. We served them honestly and faithfully. A thousand years later their empire collapsed, leaving a scatter to cross the universe. Three thousand years later a new race of barbarians conquered our planets. We surrendered naturally and soon were serving our new masters. Five hundred years passed and they destroyed themselves. This has been the pattern of our existence from that day to this. You mean you've been slaves for five million years? Griffin was incredulous. Servitude has ever been a refuge for the scholar and the philosopher. But what point is there in such a life? Why do you continue living this way? What is the point in any way of life? Continued existence, personal immortality, is neither desirable nor possible. We settled for perpetuation of the race. But what about self-determination? You know enough astronomy to understand Nova. Surely you realize it could happen again. What would you do without a technology to build spaceships? Many stars have gone Nova during our history. Usually the barbarians came in time when they didn't. You mean you don't really care? All barbarians ask that sooner or later, Joe smiled. Sometimes toward the end they even accuse us of destroying them. We don't. Every technology bears the seeds of its own destruction. The stars are older than the machinery that explores them. You use technology to get from one system to another. We used it, but we were never part of it. When machines fail, their people die. We have no machines. What would you do if the sun were to Nova? We can serve you. We are not unintelligent. We are willing to work your way around the galaxy, but what if we refuse to take you? The race would go on. Kung-su tells me there is no life on planets of the system, but there are other systems. You're whistling in the dark, Griffin scoffed. How do you know if any of the rational people survive? How far back does your history go? Joe inquired. It's hard to say exactly, Griffin replied. Our earliest written records date back some seven thousand years. You are all of one race? No. You may have noticed Kung-su is slightly different from the rest of us. Yes, Griffin. I have noticed. When you return, ask Kung-su for the legend of creation. More hot water? Joe stirred, and Griffin guessed the interview was over. He drank another ritual cup, made his farewells, and walked thoughtfully back to camp. Kung, Griffin asked over coffee next afternoon. How well up are you on Chinese mythology? Oh, fair, I guess. It isn't my field, but I remember some of the stories my grandfather used to tell me. What is your legend of creation? Griffin persisted. It's pretty well garbled, but I remember something about the Son of Heaven bringing the early settlers from a land of two moons on the back of his fire-breathing dragon. The dragon got sick and died, so they couldn't ever get back to heaven again. There's a lot of stuff about devils, too. What about devils? I don't remember too well, but they were supposed to do terrible things to you, and even to your unborn children, if they ever caught you. They must have been pretty stupid, though. They couldn't turn corners. My grandfather's door had devil screens at all the doors, so you had to turn a corner to get in. The first time I saw the lead baffles at the pile-chamber doors on the ship, it reminded me of Home Sweet Home. By the way, some young men from the village were around today. They want to work passage to the next planet. What do you think? Griffin was silent for a long time. Well, what do you say? We can use some hand labour for the delicate dicking. Want to put them on? Might as well, Griffin answered. There's a streetcar every millennium anyway. What do you mean by that? You wouldn't understand. You sold your birthright to the barbarians. End of Blessed are the Meek by J.C. Edmondson. Recording by Faith Van Horn. Celebrity by James McKimmy Jr. June 19, 1978, Celebrity Day. The city stretched. Empty streets glistened from the bath of a water truck. Dew-wet grass winked at the fresh peeping sun, like millions of shimmering diamonds. A bird chirped. Another. The city yawned. Rose of houses lay like square ivory beads on patches of green felt. A boy drove his bicycle down the middle of an elm-bordered avenue, whistling loudly, while tightly rolled newspapers arched from his hand and slapped against porches. Lights snapped on in a thousand windows, shining yellowly against the cool whiteness of dawn. Men blinked and touched beard-stubbled chins. Women moved sleepily toward porcelain in chrome kitchens. A truck roared and garbage pails rattled. There was a smell of sour orange rinds and wet leaves and unfolding flowers. Over this came the smell of toasting bread and frying bacon. Doors swung open, slippered feet padded across porches and hands groped for the rolled newspapers. The air was stricken with the blaring sound of transcribed music, and the excited voices of commercial announcers. The doors swung shut and the sounds were muted. A million people shifted and stretched and scratched. The sun rose above the horizon. Celebrity Day. Doors slammed again, and half-consumed cups of coffee lay cooling behind. Children wiped at sleepy eyes and mothers swept crumbs, touching self-conscious fingers at their own bed-ruffled hair. Laborers and clerks and lawyers and doctors strode down sidewalks and climbed into automobiles and buses and sleek-nosed elevated trains. The city moved. To the center of the city, where the tall buildings stretched to the lighting sky, came the horde like thousands of ants toward a comb of honey. Wheels sang in wind, horns blasted, whistles blew. And wading, strung above the wide streets between the cold marquise and the dead neon tubes, were the banners and the flags and the bunting. The air warmed and the sun brightened. Voices chattered, elbows nudged. Mouths smiled, teeth shone, and there was the sound of laughter, rising over the pushing throngs. The city was happy. The bunting dipped and the banners fluttered and the flags whipped. At the edge of the city, the airport tightened itself. Waiting, waiting for the silver and blue rocket, the rocket of the celebrity. A large hotel towering above the pulsing streets began the quiver of activity. As though a great electric current had been run through its cubes and shafts and hollows, the hotel crackled. Desk clerks clicked bells and bellboys hopped. Elevators rose and fell. In the cellar, wine bottles were dusted by quick nervous hands. In the kitchen, a towering cake was frosted and decorated. Orders cracked. Hands flew and feet chattered against tile. In one rich expanse of sweet, a giant hoop of multicolored flowers was placed in the center of a room. It was in the air. Laughter, awe, worship, excitement. Ropes went up and stretched between lamp posts. Blue-coated men on horses began blocking streets. Old women with wooden boxes, children with flashing eyes, men in rich suits and tattered suits began filling the sidewalks. Curbs became lined with people. Bars threw up indoors and fresh air met stale air. Men with fat faces, thin faces, white faces, red faces, twitching with the anticipation of holiday freedom, gulped jiggers raw whiskey and shuttered happily. Children giggled and yelled and sprinted in crazy zigzags. Men in white caps hustled in front of the lined curbs, shouting, carrying their boxes of ice cream. Men with buttons, men with penance, men with balloons joined the shouting, and the sound rose in the air and the city smiled and shifted and its heart pounded. The hotel world inside itself, the airport tensed, and searched the sky. Time moved and the swelling throngs jammed the sidewalks, raising their strengthening sound between the tall buildings. Windows popped open and faces beamed. Tentative showers of confetti drifted down through the air. The city waited its pulse thumping. The rocket was a black point in the sky. It grew. White-suited men scattered over the landing strip. Photographers crouched. Bulbs snapped into reflectors. Cameras pointed. The rocket landed. A door snapped open. Blue uniforms converged and flashbulbs popped. There were shouts and orders and men running. Gates swung and there was a blue-rimmed movement to a black open car. Sirens moaned, screamed, and the black car was moving swiftly into the city. Beneath the buildings, marching bands, and red and blue and yellow uniforms stood assembled. Girls in short skirts and tasseled hats spun silver batons into the warm air. Bare legs kicked, black boots flashed. The crowd swayed against the ropes, and there was laughter and sweating and squinting. The black car reached the heart of the city. Sirens died. Rows of men snapped to attention. Policemen aligned their motorcycles. A baton shimmered high against the sun and came down. A symbol crashed. Drums cracked. Music blared, and there was a movement down the street. The black car rolled along while tapes swept down from the buildings and long swirling ribbons. There was a snow of confetti. And from the throats of the people came the first roar. It grew, building, building in volume, and the city thundered its welcome to the man sitting upon the back of the open car. The small man who tipped his hat and smiled and blinked behind his glasses. Joseph S. Stettison, BA, BS, MS, MD, PhD, LM, Honorable, FRCOG. End of Celebrity by James McKimmy Jr. Recording by Faith Van Horn, faithvianhorn.blogspot.com In the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes there lies that mysterious mountain valley cut off from 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 Mindubamba when it was night in Quito for seventeen days and the water was boiling at Jaguachi 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 forever from the exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers had a chance 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, and even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great haggig 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 glaciers 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 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 mired their happiness, yet it was enough to mire 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 lie 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, sunburned, 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 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 today. And amidst a little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley, the disease ran its course. The old became groping and purblind, the young saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them saw never at all. But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briars, 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 noted their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither, until they knew the whole valley marvelously, 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 civilization, but with something of a tradition of the arts of the 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 color and uncertain. In all things save sight, they were strong and able, and presently the chance of birth and heredity 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. 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. Thereabouts it chance 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 Parascatopital, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world. The story of the accident has been written a dozen times. Pointer's narrative is the best. He tells how the party worked 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 Nunes 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 plowed 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 the disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was called away to the wall before he could make another attack. To this day Parascatopital lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles and visited amidst the snows. And a 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 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 the 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 Mount Neers 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 sea, exaggerated by the ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. For a while he lay, gazing blankly at that vast pale cliff towering above, rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of darkness. Its fantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and then he was seized with the 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 moonlit and practicable slope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn turf. He struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went downward until he was under turf, and there dropped, rather than lay beside a boulder, drunk 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 the little alp at the foot of a vast precipice that was grooved by 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 and massive 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 Taylor's, 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 front 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 center of the valley, and this was enclosed on either side by a walled 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 curb at the side, ran hither and dither in an orderly manner. The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain village he knew. They stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness. Here and there their party-colored facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were party-colored with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes gray, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-colored 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 channeled at round about the valley, near where the latter sprouted 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 remote part of the meadow, and nearer the village a number of recumbent children, and then nearer at hand three men carrying pales and yokes along a little path that ran from the encircling wall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments of llama-clothes 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 recognizable 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. 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 curiously 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 lama's hair. Raffy is, as the rocks that begot him, said Correa, investigating Nunez and Shavenchin 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. Ah, 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, halfway 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. Let us lead him to the elders, said Pedro. Shout first, 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 pale. 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 taxed 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 nearer to it, and the smeared plasterings queerer, and the 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 effective 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 is hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech. A little boy nipped his hand. Bogota, he said mockingly, I, 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 Korea, stumbled twice as we came hither. Bring him to the elders. And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as pitch, save at the end their faintly glowed afire. 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, he 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 Korea 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 of understanding 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 Nunes found himself trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and mountains and sight 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 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 has 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 a reason 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 shriveled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and fingertips. Slowly Nunes realized 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 a 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 Nunes greatly, until he thought of the birds. He went on to tell Nunes how this time had been divided into the warm and 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 Nunes must have been specially created to learn and serve the wisdom they had acquired, and for that all his mental incoherency and stumbling behavior 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 called their day, night, was now far gone, and it behoved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunes if he knew how to sleep, and Nunes said he did, but that before sleep he wanted food. They brought him food, llamas milk in the 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 Nunes 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 sense as 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. Nunes 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 the 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, Yehuda, 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. Trumple not on the grass, Bogota, that is not allowed. Nunes 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? Nunes laughed. I can see it, he said. There is no such word at sea, said the blind man, after a pause. Cease this folly, and follow the sound of my feet. Nunes followed a little annoyed. My time will come, he said. You 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 learned 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 marvelous 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 curbing. 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 marvelously 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 Nunes 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 hear, you people, he said. There are things you do not understand in me. One saw 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, then sprung 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 toward the outer wall. They mocked Nunesce when Pedro did not arrive, and afterwards when he asked Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro denied and out-faced 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 seem 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 its spade, and then he discovered a new thing about himself, and that was that it was impossible for him to hit the blind man in cold blood. He hesitated, and found them all aware that he 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 a thwart 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 buoyancy that came to all men in the beginning of the fight, but more perplexity. He began to realize 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 under 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 toward 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 run into the rhythm of, the story of the blind, the one-night man is king. Should he charge them? He looked back at the high and unclimable wall behind, unclimable because of its smooth plastering, but with all 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 every unblindfolded 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. Put down that spade and come off with us. 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 gap was wide and the men on the 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 sort of terror. 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 at his 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 lama 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-night man is king. He thought chiefly of ways of fighting and conquering these people and it grew clear for him no practicable way was possible. He had no weapons and now it would be hard to get one. The canker of civilization 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 along 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 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 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 about the world of rock and very, very 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 the rock that covered the cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of seeing it overhead. So Nunes became a citizen of the country of the blind and these people ceased to be a generalized people and became individualities and familiar to him while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal. There was Jacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed. There was Pedro, Jacob's nephew and there was Medina Sarote who was the youngest daughter of Jacob. 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 a blind man's ideal of feminine beauty. But Nunes 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 and she had long eyelashes which were considered a grave disfigurement and her voice was strong and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley's wanes so that she had no lover. There came a time when Nunes 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 the 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 its chance 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 all and she had never before 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 in sunlight seemed no more than a fairy tale he would someday 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 intelligence. 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 Jacob and the elders in marriage but she became fearful and it was one of her elder sisters who first told Jacob that Medina Sarote and Nunes were in love. There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunes and Medina Sarote not so much because they valued her as because they held him as a being a part, an idiot, incompetent thing below the permissible level of a man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing discredit on them all and old Jacob, though he had formed a sort of liking for this 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 Nunes. 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 Jacob 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 and he loves me and father. I love him. Old Jacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable and besides what made it more distressing he liked Nunes for many things. So he went and sat in the windowless council chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of the walk and said at the proper time he's better than he was. Very likely someday we shall find him as sane as ourselves. Then afterwards one of the elders who thought deeply had an idea. He was the great doctor among these people, their medicine man and he had a very philosophical and inventive mind and the idea of curing Nunes of his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Jacob was present he returned to the topic of Nunes. I have examined Bogota, he said, and a case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured. That is what I have always hoped, said old Jacob. His brain is affected, said the blind doctor. The elders murmured ascent. Now, what affects it? Ah, said old Jacob. This, said the doctor, answering his own question, those queer things that are called the eyes in which exist to make an agreeable soft depression in the face of disease in the case of Bogota 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 destruction. Yes, said old Jacob. Yes. And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that in order to cure him completely all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation of 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 Jacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunes of his happy hopes. But Nunes' manner of receiving the good-nudes 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 Nunes 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 among the rocks, the lightness and softness on the piece of fur, the far sky with its drifting down 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 one, 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 the roof of rock and stone and darkness, that horrible roof under which I am stooped. 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, said he, a little apprehensively. I wish sometimes you would not talk like that. Like what? I know it's pretty. It's your imagination. And 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, indeed, 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 intensely 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, Nunes knew nothing of sleep and all through the warm sunlit hours while the others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wondered 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 Sarota before she went apart to sleep. Tomorrow, he said, I shall see no more. Dear heart, she answered, impressed 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 a 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. Goodbye, he whispered at the dear sight. Goodbye. 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 had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the medos were beautiful with white narcissists, and there remained until the hour of his sacrifice should come. But as he went he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armor marching down the steeps. He saw him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the valley and his love and all were no more than the 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 designed for ever. He thought of that great free world 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 street 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 its thousands islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeys 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 scrutinized the great curtain of the mountains with a minor 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 run round in a sort of shelf and road still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then that talus might be managed, then perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the precipice that came below the snow, and if that chimney failed farther to the east might serve its 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. He glanced back at the village then turned right round and regarded it steadfastly. 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 to climb. When sunset came he was no longer climbing but he was far and high. He had been higher but he was still very 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 nearly a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow though the mountain summits around him were things of light and fire and the little details of the rocks near at hand were drenched with subtle beauty a vein of green mineral piercing the grey the flash of crystal faces here and there a minute minutely beautiful orange lichen close beside his face. There were deep mysterious shadows blue deepening into purple and purple into a luminous darkness and overhead was the limitable vastness of the sky but he heeded these things no longer but lay quite inactive there smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the blind in which he had thought to be king. The glow of the sunset passed and the night came and still he lay peacefully contented under the cold stars.