The Country of the Blind

High in the wildest peaks of the Andes, cut off from the rest of the world, lay a valley that people had almost forgotten. Long ago, settlers had found their way in and built a happy little community there. But then a great landslide sealed the only pass, and a strange sickness came, and one by one the people lost their sight. Children were born blind, then their children, until after fifteen generations no one in the valley could see at all — and no one even remembered what "seeing" had ever meant. They had, quite simply, adapted. Their houses had no windows; their paths were smooth and known by touch; their hearing and sense of smell had grown so keen that they moved through their world with perfect ease.

Into this hidden place, by pure accident, fell a mountaineer named Nunez. He was climbing a great peak nearby when he slipped on the ice and went tumbling down a vast snow-slope, half-buried, bruised, but alive. When at last he found his feet, he made his way down and discovered — to his astonishment — the isolated valley and its people. And as he looked at their strange, unseeing faces and their eyes that never met his, one old saying rose in his mind, bright and confident: "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Here he was, a man who could see, among people who could not. Surely, he thought, he would soon be their master.

It did not go as Nunez had planned. When he spoke of the mountains he had seen, of the sky, of light and colour and distant things, the villagers only frowned. To them these were meaningless words — the babble of a man newly made, whose mind was not yet formed. They had a whole explanation for him: he was a wild creature who had come over the rocks, and his talk of "seeing" was simply nonsense, the sign of a poor, deluded brain. In their world, built entirely without sight, the very idea was madness. The more Nunez insisted, the more certain they became that something was wrong with him.

His "gift" turned out to be no help at all. In the pitch dark of their windowless houses he was clumsy and lost, while they moved with total confidence. They knew every path by heart; they could hear him coming from far off; they worked by touch faster than he could by sight. When he boasted of his eyes, they set him simple tasks and watched him fail. Bit by bit, Nunez was forced to see the truth: far from being a king, he was the slowest, the most helpless, the most ignorant person in the valley — an outsider whose one advantage counted for nothing. And slowly he began to resent it, and then to accept it, and to learn their ways as a child learns, hoping only to be allowed to stay.

In time, Nunez fell in love with a young woman of the valley named Medina-saroté, and she with him. But her family and the elders were troubled. To them he was a strange, defective man, full of odd notions about "seeing," and they could not give her to someone so plainly disordered. At last the wise men of the community found what they believed was the answer. They had studied him and decided that the cause of all his trouble — his restlessness, his strange talk, his failure to settle — lay in the two odd, moving things in his face. If those were simply removed, they said, he would be cured, calmed, made whole, and then he could marry and live among them as a normal man.

They asked him, gently and reasonably, to give up his eyes. And for a while, out of love, Nunez almost agreed. But on the morning fixed for it, he walked out alone and looked — really looked — at the world: the sunrise gold on the rock, the deep blue of the sky, the great white peaks far above the valley walls. He understood then that he could not trade all of that away, not even for her. So instead he began to climb. He climbed up and out of the valley, toward the light and the mountains and the wide world beyond, leaving behind the only place that had ever offered to keep him — if only he would agree to stop seeing.