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 lie 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 and purblind, the young saw but dimly, and the children that were born to them saw never at all.  But life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor briars, 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 noted their loss.  They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole Valley