The Country of the Blind

More than three hundred miles from the nearest railway, in the wildest part of the Ecuadorian Andes, there lies a mysterious mountain valley, cut off from the world of men. Long ago, the story goes, a small group of settlers crossed the terrible mountains and found this valley, where the streams were sweet, the soil was rich, and the climate was kind. There they made their homes.

Things prospered with them, and presently more came. Then one day a great earthquake shook the mountains, and a vast wall of rock came down across the only pass, sealing the valley off from the rest of mankind forever. No one could climb out, and no one ever found the way in.

But the settlers who were trapped inside lived on, and the valley remained green and good. There was only one trouble. A strange disease had come among them, and it had made all the children born there blind. It was to escape this disease that one man had crossed the mountains in the first place, hoping to bring back medicine and help; but he never returned, and his bones lay somewhere on the slopes outside.

The disease ran its course. The old folk became hard of hearing and dim, then dark; the young ones saw little, and the children that were born to them never saw at all. Yet life in the valley was easy, even without sight. There were no thorns to trouble them, and no harmful beasts; only the gentle llamas wandered down the rocky paths to drink at the streams.

Slowly, as the seeing died and the blind multiplied, the very memory of seeing faded from their minds. They built their houses to suit themselves, and made a simple round of laws. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things; they invented many things. They had ceased to remember the time when their people could see. In short, they became a nation apart, with their own ways of thought, and for fifteen generations this little people remained shut off from all the seeing world, knowing nothing of sight, and content.