.

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," 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 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