The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904Various
General
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904
Various
English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nuñez greatly until he thought of
the birds.
He went on to tell Nuñez how this time had been divided into the warm and
the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how it was
good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now, but for
his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep. He said
Nuñez must have been specially created to learn and serve the wisdom they
had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and stumbling
behaviour he must have courage and do his best to learn, and at that all
the people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said the night--for
the blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it behoved everyone
to go back to sleep. He asked Nuñez if he knew how to sleep, and Nuñez said
he did, but that before sleep he wanted food. They brought him food,
llama's milk in a bowl and rough salted bread, and led him into a lonely
place to eat out of their hearing, and afterwards to slumber until the
chill of the mountain evening roused them to begin their day again. But
Nuñez slumbered not at all.
Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his limbs
and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over and over in
his mind.
Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with
indignation.
"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've been
insulting their Heaven-sent King and master....
"I see I must bring them to reason.
"Let me think.
"Let me think."
He was still thinking when the sun set.
Nuñez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the
glow upon the snow-fields and glaciers that rose about the valley on every
side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went from that
inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast sinking into
the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and he thanked God
from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had been given him.
He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.
"Yaho there, Bogota! Come hither!"
At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for all
what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find him.
"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.
He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.
"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."
Nuñez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.
The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.
He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be
led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"
Nuñez laughed. "I can see it," he said.
"There is no such word as _see_," said the blind man, after a pause. "Cease
this folly and follow the sound of my feet."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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