"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King." بلد العميان
كتبت هذه القصة عام 1904 وتحكي عن مجموعة من المهاجرين من بيرو فروا من طغيان الإسبان ثم حدثت انهيارات صخرية في جبال الإنديز فعزلت هؤلاء القوم في واد غامض..
انتشر بينهم نوع غامض من التهاب العيون أصابهم جميعا بالعمي وقد فسروا ذلك بانتشار الخطايا بينهم.
هكذا لم يزر أحد هؤلاء القوم ولم يغادروا واديهم قط لكنهم ورثوا أبناءهم العمي جيلا بعد جيل
هنا يظهر بطل قصتنا (نيونز)
إنه مستكشف وخبير في تسلق الجبال تسلق جبال الانديز مع مجموعة من البريطانيين وفي الليل انزلقت قدمه فسقط من أعلي سقط مسافة شاسعة بحيث لم يعودوا يرون الوادي الذي سقط فيه ولم يعرفوا أنه وادي العميان الأسطوري.
لكن الرجل لم يمت لقد سقط فوق وسادة ثلجية حفظت حياته.
وعندما بدأ المشي علي قدمين متألمتين رأي البيوت التي تملأ الوادي. لاحظ أن ألوانها فاقعة متعددة بشكل غريب ولم تكن لها نوافذ هنا خطر له أن من بني هذه البيوت أعمي كخفاش.
راح يصرخ وينادي الناس لكنهم لم ينظروا نحوه. هنا تأكد من أنهم عميان فعلا إذن هذا هو بلد العميان الذي كان يسمع عنه وتذكر المقولة الشهيرة:
ـ"في بلد العميان يصير الأعور ملكا"
وهو ما يشبه قولنا (أعرج في حارة المكسحين). راح يشرح لهم من أين جاء جاء من بوجاتا حيث يبصر الناس هنا ظهرت مشكلة. ما معني (يبصر)
راحوا يتحسسون وجهه ويغرسون أصابعهم في عينه بدت لهم عضوا غريبا جدا. ولما تعثر أثناء المشي قدروا أنه ليس علي ما يرام حواسه ضعيفة ويقول أشياء غريبة.
يأخذونه لكبيرهم هنا يدرك أنهم يعيشون حياتهم في ظلام دامس وبالتالي هو أكثر شخص ضعيف في هذا المجتمع. لقد مر علي العميان خمسة عشر جيلا وبالتالي صار عالمنا هو الأقرب إلي الأساطير.
عرف فلسفتهم العجيبة هناك ملائكة تسمعها لكن لا تقدر علي لمسها (يتكلمون عن الطيور طبعا) والزمن يتكون من جزءين: بارد ودافئ (المعادل الحسي لليل والنهار) ينام المرء في الدافئ ويعمل في البارد.
لم يكن لدي (نيونز) شك في أنه بلغ المكان الذي سيكون فيه ملكا سيسود هؤلاء القوم بسهولة تامة.
لكن الأمر ظل صعبا إنهم يعرفون كل شيء بآذانهم يعرفون متي مشي علي العشب أو الصخور. كانوا كذلك يستعملون أنوفهم ببراعة تامة.
راح يحكي لهم عن جمال الجبال والغروب والشمس. هم يصغون له باسمين ولا يصدقون حرفا. قرر أن يريهم أهمية البصر. رأي المدعو بدرو قادما من بعيد فقال لهم:
ـ"بدرو سيكون هنا حالا. أنتم لا تسمعونه ولا تشمون رائحته لكني أراه"
بدا عليهم الشك وراحوا ينتظرون. هنا لسبب ما قرر بدرو أن يغير مساره ويبتعد !.
راح يحكي لهم ما يحدث أمام المنازل لكنهم طلبوا منه أن يحكي لهم ما يحدث بداخلها. ألست تزعم أن البصر مهم
حاول الهرب لكنهم لحقوا به بطريقة العميان المخيفة. كانوا يصغون ويتشممون الهواء ويغلقون دائرة من حوله. لو ضرب عددا منهم لاعترفوا بقوته لكن لابد أن ينام بعد هذا وعندها سوف !
هكذا بعد الفرار ليوم كامل في البرد والجوع وجد نفسه يعود لهم ويعتذر وقال لهم:
ـ"أعترف بأنني غير ناضج. لا يوجد شيء اسمه البصر."
كانوا طيبي القلب وصفحوا عنه بسرعة فقط قاموا بجلده ثم كلفوه ببعض الأعمال. وفي هذا الوقت بدأ يميل لفتاة وجدها جميلة لكن العميان لم يكونوا يحبونها لأن وجهها حاد بلا منحنيات ناعمة وصوتها عال وأهدابها طويلة.
أي انها تخالف فكرتهم عن الجمال.
لما طلب يدها لم يقبل أبوها لأنهم كانوا يعتبرونه أقل من مستوي البشر. نوعا من المجاذيب. لكن الفتاة كانت تميل لنيونز فعلا. ووجد الأب نفسه في مشكلة لذا طلب رأي الحكماء.
كان رأي الحكماء قاطعا. الفتي عنده شيئان غريبان منتفخان يسميهما (العينين). جفناه يتحركان وعليهما أهداب. وهذا العضو المريض قد أتلف مخه. لابد من إزالة هذا العضو الغريب ليسترد الفتي عقله. بالتالي يمكنه أن يتزوج الفتاة.
بالطبع ملأ الفتي الدنيا صراخا. لن يضحي بعينيه بأي ثمن. بعد قليل ارتمت الفتاة علي صدره وبكت وهمست: ليتك تقبل. ليتك تقبل!
هكذا صار العمي شرطا ليرتفع المرء من مرتبة الانحطاط ليصير مواطنا كاملا. وقد قبل نيونز أخيرا وبدأ آخر أيامه مع حاسة البصر.
خرج ليري العالم للمرة الأخيرة هنا رأي الفجر يغمر الوادي بلونه الساحر. أدرك أن حياته هنا لطخة آثمة.الأنهار والغابات والأزرق في السماء والنجوم. كيف يفقد هذا كله من أجل فتاة. كيف ولماذا أقنعوه أن البصر شيء لا قيمة له برغم أن هذا خطأ
اتجه إلي حاجز الجبال حيث توجد مدخنة حجرية تتجه لأعلي. وقرر أن يتسلق.
عندما غربت الشمس كان بعيدا جدا عن بلد العميان.
نزفت كفاه وتمزقت ثيابه لكنه كان يبتسم. رفع عينيه وراح يرمق النجوم.
By H.G. Wells
Three hundred
miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the
wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that mysterious mountain valley,
cut off from all the world of men, the Country of the Blind. Long years ago
that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at last through
frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither
indeed men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust
and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of
Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was
boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil;
everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were land-slips and swift thawings
and sudden floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came
down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the
exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers had chanced to be on the
hither side of the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and he
perforce had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and
possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the lower world.
He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment
in the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along the
length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
He told of
his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which he had first been
carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear, when he was a child. The
valley, he said, had in it all that the heart of man could desire--sweet water,
pasture, an even climate, slopes of rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub
that bore an excellent fruit, and on one side great hanging forests of pine
that held the avalanches high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of
grey-green rock were capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream came not
to them, but flowed away by the farther slopes, and only now and then huge ice
masses fell on the valley side. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed,
but the abundant springs gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation would
spread over all the valley space. The settlers did well indeed there. Their
beasts did well and multiplied, and but one thing marred their happiness. Yet
it was enough to mar it greatly. A strange disease had come upon them and had
made all the children born to them there--and, indeed, several older children
also--blind. It was to seek some charm or antidote against this plague of
blindness that he had with fatigue and danger and difficulty returned down the
gorge. In those days, in such cases, men did not think of germs and infections,
but of sins, and it seemed to him that the reason of this affliction must he in
the negligence of these priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as
they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine--a handsome, cheap, effectual
shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted relics and such-like potent
things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals and prayers. In his
wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he would not account; he
insisted there was none in the valley with something of the insistence of an
inexpert liar. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments together, having
little need for such treasure up there, he said, to buy them holy help against
their ill. I figure this dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and
anxious, hat brim clutched feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the
lower world, telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the
great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious and
infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay with which he
must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had once come out. But the
rest of his story of mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil
death after several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that had
once made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend
his poor, ill-told story set going developed into the legend of a race of blind
men somewhere "over there" one may still hear to-day.
And amidst
the little population of that now isolated and forgotten valley the disease ran
its course. The old became groping, the young saw but dimly, and the children
that were born to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that
snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briers, with
no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged
and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up
which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they
scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and
thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight
died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt themselves
to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in stoves of stone.
They were a simple strain of people at the first, unlettered, only slightly
touched with the Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the
arts of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed generation.
They forgot many things; they devised many things. Their tradition of the
greater world they came from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all
things save sight they were strong and able, and presently chance sent one who
had an original mind and who could talk and persuade among them, and then
afterwards another. These two passed, leaving their effects, and the little
community grew in numbers and in understanding, and met and settled social and
economic problems that arose. Generation followed generation. Generation
followed generation. There came a time when a child was born who was fifteen
generations from that ancestor who went out of the valley with a bar of silver
to seek God's aid, and who never returned. Thereabout it chanced that a man
came into this community from the outer world. And this is the story of that
man.
He was a
mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been down to the sea and
had seen the world, a reader of books in an original way, an acute and
enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party of Englishmen who had come out
to Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace one of their three Swiss guides who
had fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed there, and then came the attempt
on Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the
outer world. The story of that accident has been written a dozen times.
Pointer's narrative is the best. He tells how the little party worked their
difficult and almost vertical way up to the very foot of the last and greatest
precipice, and how they built a night shelter amidst the snow upon a little
shelf of rock, and, with a touch of real dramatic power, how presently they
found Nunez had gone from them. They shouted, and there was no reply; shouted
and whistled, and for the rest of that night they slept no more.
As the
morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible he could
have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown side of the
mountain; far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way
down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went straight to the edge
of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far
below, and hazy with distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow,
shut-in valley--the lost Country of the Blind. But they did not know it was the
lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish it in any way from any other narrow
streak of upland valley. Unnerved by this disaster, they abandoned their
attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was called away to the war before he
could make another attack. To this day Parascotopetl lifts an unconquered
crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles unvisited amidst the snows.
And the man
who fell survived.
At the end of
the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst of a cloud of
snow upon a snow-slope even steeper than the one above. Down this he was
whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a bone broken in his body; and
then at last came to gentler slopes, and at last rolled out and lay still,
buried amidst a softening heap of the white masses that had accompanied and
saved him. He came to himself with a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then
realized his position with a mountaineer's intelligence and worked himself
loose and, after a rest or so, out until he saw the stars. He rested flat upon
his chest for a space, wondering where he was and what had happened to him. He
explored his limbs, and discovered that several of his buttons were gone and
his coat turned over his head. His knife had gone from his pocket and his hat
was lost, though he had tied it under his chin. He recalled that he had been
looking for loose stones to raise his piece of the shelter wall. His ice-axe
had disappeared.
He decided he
must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by the ghastly light of the
rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken. For a while he lay, gazing
blankly at the vast, pale cliff towering above, rising moment by moment out of
a subsiding tide of darkness. Its phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a
space, and then he was seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter . . . .
After a great
interval of time he became aware that he was near the lower edge of the snow.
Below, down what was now a moon-lit and practicable slope, he saw the dark and
broken appearance of rock-strewn turf He struggled to his feet, aching in every
joint and limb, got down painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went
downward until he was on the turf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a
boulder, drank deep from the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly fell
asleep . . . .
He was
awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.
He sat up and
perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast precipice that sloped
only a little in the gully down which he and his snow had come. Over against
him another wall of rock reared itself against the sky. The gorge between these
precipices ran east and west and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit to
the westward the mass of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge.
Below him it seemed there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in
the gully he found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which
a desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came at
last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no particular
difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He took his bearings and turned his face
up the gorge, for he saw it opened out above upon green meadows, among which he
now glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At
times his progress was like clambering along the face of a wall, and after a
time the rising sun ceased to strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing
birds died away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant
valley with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to
talus, and among the rocks he noted--for he was an observant man--an unfamiliar
fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense green hands. He
picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and found it helpful.
About midday
he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the plain and the sunlight.
He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the shadow of a rock, filled up his
flask with water from a spring and drank it down, and remained for a time,
resting before he went on to the houses.
They were
very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that valley became, as
he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The greater part of its surface
was lush green meadow, starred with many beautiful flowers, irrigated with
extraordinary care, and bearing evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece.
High up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a
circumferential water channel, from which the little trickles of water that fed
the meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas
cropped the scanty herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for
the llamas, stood against the boundary wall here and there. The irrigation
streams ran together into a main channel down the centre of the valley, and
this was enclosed on either side by a wall breast high. This gave a singularly
urban quality to this secluded place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by
the fact that a number of paths paved with black and white stones, and each
with a curious little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an orderly
manner. The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and
higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in
a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness,
here and there their parti-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a
solitary window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with
extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes
grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the
sight of this wild plastering first brought the word "blind" into the
thoughts of the explorer. "The good man who did that," he thought,
"must have been as blind as a bat."
He descended
a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran about the valley,
near where the latter spouted out its surplus contents into the deeps of the
gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. He could now see a number of
men and women resting on piled heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta, in the
remoter part of the meadow, and nearer the village a number of recumbent
children, and then nearer at hand three men carrying pails on yokes along a
little path that ran from the encircling wall towards the houses. These latter
were clad in garments of llama cloth and boots and belts of leather, and they
wore caps of cloth with back and ear flaps. They followed one another in single
file, walking slowly and yawning as they walked, like men who have been up all
night. There was something so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in their
bearing that after a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as conspicuously
as possible upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout that echoed round
the valley.
The three men
stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking about them. They
turned their faces this way and that, and Nunez 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. Nunez 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, Nunez 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 Nunez
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 Nunez, "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, Nunez saw was curious 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
Nunez 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 Nunez's
unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he will grow
finer."
Nunez
struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him firm.
"Carefully,"
he said again.
"He
speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."
"Ugh!"
said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.
"And you
have come into the world?" asked Pedro.
"Out of
the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there, half-way to the
sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down, twelve days' journey to the
sea."
They scarcely
seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may be made by the
forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things, and
moisture, and rottenness--rottenness."
"Let us
lead him to the elders," said Pedro.
"Shout
first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a
marvellous occasion."
So they
shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead him to the
houses.
He drew his
hand away. "I can see," he said.
"See?"
said Correa.
"Yes;
see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against Pedro's pail.
"His
senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He stumbles,
and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."
"As you
will," said Nunez, and was led along laughing.
It seemed
they knew nothing of sight.
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," be 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, in a pause. "I will not struggle against you
again."
They
consulted and let him rise.
The voice of
an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself trying to explain
the great world out of which he had fallen, and the sky and mountains and
such-like marvels, to these elders who sat in darkness in the Country of the
Blind. And they would believe and understand nothing whatever that he told
them, a thing quite outside his expectation. They would not even understand
many of his words. For fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut
off from all the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded
and changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child's
story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the rocky
slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had arisen among them and
questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they had brought with them from
their seeing days, and had dismissed all these things as idle fancies and
replaced them with new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had
shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new imaginations
with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised
this: that his expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts
was not to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them
had been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing the
marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into
listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men explained to
him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world (meaning their valley)
had been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and then had come first inanimate
things without the gift of touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had
little sense, and then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and
making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled
Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
He went on to
tell Nunez 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 Nunez 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 door-way murmured encouragingly. He
said the night--for the blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it
behooved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to sleep,
and Nunez 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 Nunez 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.
Nunez 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."
Nunez 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?"
Nunez
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."
Nunez
followed, a little annoyed.
"My time
will come," he said.
"You'll
learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the
world."
"Has no
one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King?'"
"What is
blind?" asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.
Four days
passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still incognito, as a clumsy
and useless stranger among his subjects.
It was, he
found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had supposed, and in the
meantime, while he meditated his coup d'etat, he did what he was told and
learnt the manners and customs of the Country of the Blind. He found working
and going about at night a particularly irksome thing, and he decided that that
should be the first thing he would change.
They led a
simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements of virtue and
happiness as these things can be understood by men. They toiled, but not
oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for their needs; they had
days and seasons of rest; they made much of music and singing, and there was
love among them and little children. It was marvellous with what confidence and
precision they went about their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been
made to fit their needs; each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a
constant angle to the others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its
kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long since been
cleared away; all their methods and procedure arose naturally from their
special needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute; they could hear and
judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces away--could hear the very
beating of his heart. Intonation had long replaced expression with them, and
touches gesture, and their work with hoe and spade and fork was as free and
confident as garden work can be. Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine;
they could distinguish individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they
went about the tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came to
the wall for food and shelter, with ease and confidence. It was only when at
last Nunez sought to assert himself that he found how easy and confident their
movements could be.
He rebelled
only after he had tried persuasion.
He tried at
first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you here, you
people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in
me."
Once or twice
one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears
turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was
to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with eyelids less red and sunken than the
others, so that one could almost fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he
hoped to persuade. He spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the
mountains, of the sky and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity
that presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no
mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed was
indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the universe,
from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he maintained stoutly the
world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts
were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it
seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth
roof to things in which they believed--it was an article of faith with them
that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some
manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter altogether, and
tried to show them the practical value of sight. One morning he saw Pedro in
the path called Seventeen and coming towards the central houses, but still too
far off for hearing or scent, and he told them as much. "In a little
while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be here." An old man remarked
that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and then, as if in confirmation,
that individual as he drew near turned and went transversely into path Ten, and
so back with nimble paces towards the outer wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro
did not arrive, and afterwards, when he asked Pedro questions to clear his
character, Pedro denied and outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.
Then he
induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows towards the wall
with one complaisant individual, and to him he promised to describe all that
happened among the houses. He noted certain goings and comings, but the things
that really seemed to signify to these people happened inside of or behind the
windowless houses--the only things they took note of to test him by--and of
those he could see or tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this
attempt, and the ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to force. He
thought of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting one or two of them to earth,
and so in fair combat showing the advantage of eyes. He went so far with that
resolution as to seize his spade, and then he discovered a new thing about
himself, and that was that it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold
blood.
He hesitated,
and found them all aware that he had snatched up the spade. They stood all
alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears towards him for what he
would do next.
"Put
that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror. He came
near obedience.
Then he had
thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him and out of the
village.
He went
athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass behind his
feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their ways. He felt
something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the beginning of a fight,
but more perplexity. He began to realise that you cannot even fight happily
with creatures who stand upon a different mental basis to yourself. Far away he
saw a number of men carrying spades and sticks come out of the street of houses
and advance in a spreading line along the several paths towards him. They
advanced slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the
whole cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.
The first
time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not laugh.
One struck
his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling his way along it.
For five
minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then his vague
disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood up, went a pace
or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went back a little way.
There they all stood in a crescent, still and listening.
He also stood
still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands. Should he charge them?
The pulse in
his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed
Man is King."
Should he
charge them?
He looked
back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable because of its smooth
plastering, but withal pierced with many little doors and at the approaching
line of seekers. Behind these others were now coming out of the street of
houses.
Should he
charge them?
"Bogota!"
called one. "Bogota! where are you?"
He gripped
his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows towards the place of
habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him. "I'll hit them
if they touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll hit." He
called aloud, "Look here, I'm going to do what I like in this valley! Do
you hear? I'm going to do what I like and go where I like."
They were
moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It was like playing
blind man's buff with everyone blindfolded except one. "Get hold of
him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose curve of pursuers.
He felt suddenly he must be active and resolute.
"You
don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great and
resolute, and which broke. "You are blind and I can see. Leave me
alone!"
"Bogota!
Put down that spade and come off the grass!"
The last
order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of anger. "I'll
hurt you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll hurt you!
Leave me alone!"
He began to
run--not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the nearest blind man,
because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and then made a dash to escape
from their closing ranks. He made for where a gap was wide, and the men on
either side, with a quick perception of the approach of his paces, rushed in on
one another. He sprang forward, and then saw he must be caught, and swish! the
spade had struck. He felt the soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down
with a yell of pain, and he was through.
Through! And
then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind men, whirling spades
and stakes, were running with a reasoned swiftness hither and thither.
He heard
steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing forward and swiping
at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his spade a yard wide of this
antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairly yelling as he dodged another.
He was
panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there was no need to
dodge, and, in his anxiety to see on every side of him at once, stumbling. For
a moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far away in the circumferential
wall a little doorway looked like Heaven, and he set off in a wild rush for it.
He did not even look round at his pursuers until it was gained, and he had
stumbled across the bridge, clambered a little way among the rocks, to the
surprise and dismay of a young llama, who went leaping out of sight, and lay
down sobbing for breath.
And so his
coup d'etat came to an end.
He stayed
outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights and days without
food or shelter, and meditated upon the Unexpected. During these meditations he
repeated very frequently and always with a profounder note of derision the
exploded proverb: "In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
King." He thought chiefly of ways of fighting and conquering these people,
and it grew clear that for him no practicable way was possible. He had no
weapons, and now it would be hard to get one.
The canker of
civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could not find it in himself
to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of course, if he did that, he might
then dictate terms on the threat of assassinating them all. But--Sooner or
later he must sleep! . . . .
He tried also
to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under pine boughs while
the frost fell at night, and-- with less confidence--to catch a llama by
artifice in order to try to kill it--perhaps by hammering it with a stone--and
so finally, perhaps, to eat some of it. But the llamas had a doubt of him and
regarded him with distrustful brown eyes and spat when he drew near. Fear came
on him the second day and fits of shivering. Finally he crawled down to the
wall of the Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms. He crawled along
by the stream, shouting, until two blind men came out to the gate and talked to
him.
"I was
mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."
They said
that was better.
He told them
he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.
Then he wept
without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and they took that as a
favourable sign.
They asked
him if he still thought he could see."
"No,"
he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing. Less than nothing!"
They asked
him what was overhead.
"About
ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the world--of rock--and
very, very smooth. So smooth--so beautifully smooth . . "He burst again
into hysterical tears. "Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I
shall die!"
He expected
dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of toleration. They
regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his general idiocy and
inferiority, and after they had whipped him they appointed him to do the
simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other
way of living, did submissively what he was told.
He was ill
for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his submission. But they
insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a great misery. And blind
philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and
reproved him so impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered
their cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the
victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.
So Nunez
became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people ceased to be a
generalised people and became individualities to him, and familiar to him,
while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal.
There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro,
Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of
Yacob. She was little esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a
clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind
man's ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and
presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed eyelids
were not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but lay as though
they might open again at any moment; and she had long eyelashes, which were
considered a grave disfigurement. And her voice was weak and did not satisfy
the acute hearing of the valley swains. So that she had no lover.
There came a
time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be resigned to live in
the valley for all the rest of his days.
He watched
her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services and presently he
found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gathering they sat side by side
in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet. His hand came upon hers and he
dared to clasp it. Then very tenderly she returned his pressure. And one day,
as they were at their meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly
seeking him, and as it chanced the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness
of her face.
He sought to
speak to her.
He went to
her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight spinning. The light
made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down at her feet and told her he
loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemed to him. He had a lover's
voice, he spoke with a tender reverence that came near to awe, and she had
never before been touched by adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it
was clear his words pleased her.
After that he
talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The valley became the
world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where men lived by day seemed
no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour into her ears. Very
tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.
Sight seemed
to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the
stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a
guilty indulgence. She did not believe, she could only half understand, but she
was mysteriously delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely
understood.
His love lost
its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding her of Yacob and the
elders in marriage, but she became fearful and delayed. And it was one of her
elder sisters who first told Yacob that Medina-sarote and Nunez were in love.
There was
from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez and
Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because they held him as
a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the permissible level of a
man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing discredit on them all; and old
Yacob, though he had formed a sort of liking for his clumsy, obedient serf,
shook his head and said the thing could not be. The young men were all angry at
the idea of corrupting the race, and one went so far as to revile and strike
Nunez. He struck back. Then for the first time he found an advantage in seeing,
even by twilight, and after that fight was over no one was disposed to raise a
hand against him. But they still found his marriage impossible.
Old Yacob had
a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grieved to have her weep
upon his shoulder.
"You
see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anything
right."
"I
know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's getting
better. And he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder than any
other man in the world. And he loves me--and, father, I love him."
Old Yacob was
greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and, besides--what made it more
distressing--he liked Nunez for many things. So he went and sat in the
windowless council-chamber with the other elders and watched the trend of the
talk, and said, at the proper time, "He's better than he was. Very likely,
some day, we shall find him as sane as ourselves."
Then
afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He was a great
doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a very philosophical
and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of his peculiarities appealed
to him. One day when Yacob was present he returned to the topic of Nunez.
"I have examined Nunez," he said, "and the case is clearer to
me. I think very probably he might be cured."
"This is
what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
"His
brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
The elders
murmured assent.
"Now,
what affects it?"
"Ah!"
said old Yacob.
This,"
said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things that are
called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable depression in the face,
are diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a way as to affect his brain. They
are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently
his brain is in a state of constant irritation and distraction."
"Yes?"
said old Yacob. "Yes?"
"And I
think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him complete,
all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical operation--namely, to
remove these irritant bodies."
"And
then he will be sane?"
"Then he
will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
"Thank
Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nunez
of his happy hopes.
But Nunez's
manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold and disappointing.
"One
might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not care
for my daughter."
It was
Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.
"You do
not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"
She shook her
head.
"My
world is sight."
Her head
drooped lower.
"There
are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the flowers, the lichens
amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a piece of fur, the far sky with
its drifting dawn of clouds, the sunsets and the stars. And there is you. For
you alone it is good to have sight, to see your sweet, serene face, your kindly
lips, your dear, beautiful hands folded together. . . . . It is these eyes of
mine you won, these eyes that hold me to you, that these idiots seek. Instead,
I must touch you, hear you, and never see you again. I must come under that
roof of rock and stone and darkness, that horrible roof under which your
imaginations stoop . . . no; you would not have me do that?"
A
disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a question.
"I
wish," she said, "sometimes--" She paused.
"Yes?"
he said, a little apprehensively.
"I wish
sometimes--you would not talk like that."
"Like
what?"
"I know
it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but now--"
He felt cold.
"Now?" he said, faintly.
She sat quite
still.
"You
mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps--"
He was
realising things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at the dull course
of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of understanding--a sympathy near akin
to pity.
"Dear,"
he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her spirit pressed
against the things she could not say. He put his arms about her, he kissed her
ear, and they sat for a time in silence.
"If I
were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was very
gentle.
She flung her
arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she sobbed,
"if only you would!"
For a week
before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude and inferiority
to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of sleep, and all through
the warm, sunlit hours, while the others slumbered happily, he sat brooding or
wandered aimlessly, trying to bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had
given his answer, he had given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at
last work-time was over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and
his last day of vision began for him. He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote
before she went apart to sleep.
"To-morrow,"
he said, "I shall see no more."
"Dear
heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.
"They
will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through this
pain, you are going through it, dear lover, for me . . . . Dear, if a woman's
heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my dearest with the
tender voice, I will repay."
He was
drenched in pity for himself and her.
He held her
in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her sweet face for the
last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to that dear sight,
"good-bye!"
And then in
silence he turned away from her.
She could
hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the rhythm of them threw
her into a passion of weeping.
He walked
away.
He had fully
meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful with white
narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his sacrifice should come, but as
he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel
in golden armour, marching down the steeps . . . .
It seemed to
him that before this splendour he and this blind world in the valley, and his
love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.
He did not
turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed through the wall of
the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his eyes were always upon the
sunlit ice and snow.
He saw their
infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to the things beyond he
was now to resign for ever!
He thought of
that great free world that he was parted from, the world that was his own, and
he had a vision of those further slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota,
a place of multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery by
night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white houses, lying
beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how for a day or so one might
come down through passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and
ways. He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the
still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert
places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded, and the big
steamers came splashing by and one had reached the sea--the limitless sea, with
its thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far
away in their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world. And
there, unpent by mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a disc as one
saw it here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the
circling stars were floating . . . .
His eyes
began to scrutinise the great curtain of the mountains with a keener inquiry.
For example;
if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there, then one might come
out high among those stunted pines that ran round in a sort of shelf and rose
still higher and higher as it passed above the gorge. And then? That talus
might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb might be found to take him up to the
precipice that came below the snow; and if that chimney failed, then another
farther to the east might serve his purpose better. And then? Then one would be
out upon the amber-lit snow there, and half-way up to the crest of those
beautiful desolations. And suppose one had good fortune!
He glanced
back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it with folded arms.
He thought of
Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.
He turned
again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come to him.
Then very
circumspectly he began his climb.
When sunset
came he was not longer climbing, but he was far and high. His clothes were
torn, his limbs were bloodstained, he was bruised in many places, but he lay as
if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on his face.
From where he
rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly a mile below.
Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the mountain summits around him
were things of light and fire. The mountain summits around him were things of
light and fire, and the little things in the rocks near at hand were drenched
with light and beauty, a vein of green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of
small crystal here and there, a minute, minutely-beautiful orange lichen close
beside his face. There were deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue
deepening into purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was
the illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer, but
lay quite still there, smiling as if he were content now merely to have escaped
from the valley of the Blind, in which he had thought to be King. And the glow
of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still he lay there, under the
cold, clear stars.
Literature
Network » H.G. Wells » The Country of the Blind
قصة (البروز) من الكتاب الأول لتيسير نظمي:خارطة للموتى خارطة للوطن - كتاب البحث عن مساحة - دار الطليعة 1979
Short story written by Tayseer Nazmi in 1977
Extracted from his first book
(Quest For An Area)
Kuwait 1979
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