e 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, 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." ... 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 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 wo