hore, not far from a native
village. We were a party of men of different nationalities.

As we sat there, a blind man approached us. We learned afterwards that
he had gone blind from gazing too long and too persistently at the sun,
trying to find out what it is, in order to seize its light.

He strove a long time to accomplish this, constantly looking at the sun;
but the only result was that his eyes were injured by its brightness,
and he became blind.

Then he said to himself:

"The light of the sun is not a liquid; for if it were a liquid it would
be possible to pour it from one vessel into another, and it would be
moved, like water, by the wind. Neither is it fire; for if it were fire,
water would extinguish it. Neither is light a spirit, for it is seen
by the eye; nor is it matter, for it cannot be moved. Therefore, as the
light of the sun is neither liquid, nor fire, nor spirit, nor matter, it
is--nothing!"

So he argued, and, as a result of always looking at the sun and always
thinking about it, he lost both his sight and his reason. And when he
went quite blind, he became fully convinced that the sun did not exist.

With this blind man came a slave, who after placing his master in the
shade of a cocoanut tree, picked up a cocoanut from the ground, and
began making it into a night-light. He twisted a wick from the fibre
of the cocoanut: squeezed oil from the nut in the shell, and soaked the
wick in it.

As the slave sat doing this, the blind man sighed and said to him:

"Well, slave, was I not right when I told you there is no sun? Do you
not see how dark it is? Yet people say there is a sun.... But if so,
what is it?"

"I do not know what the sun is," said the slave. "That is no business of
mine. But I know what light is. Here I have made a night-light, by the
help of which I can serve you and find anything I want in the hut."

And the slave picked up the cocoanut shell, saying:

"This is my sun."

A lame man with crutches, who was sitting near by, heard these words,
and laughed:

"You have evidently been blind all your life," said he to the blind man,
"not to know what the sun is. I will tell you what it is. The sun is
a ball of fire, which rises every morning out of the sea and goes down
again among the mountains of our island each evening. We have all seen
this, and if you had had your eyesight you too would have seen it."

A fisherman, who had been listening to the conversation said:

"It i