The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking about them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nuñez 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. Nuñez 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, Nuñez 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 recognisable Spanish. "A man it is--a man or a spirit--coming down from the rocks." But Nuñez 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." "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 Nuñez, "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 Nuñez 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 Nuñez 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 llama's hair." "Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating Nuñez's unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he will grow finer."