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 the chance of birth and heredity 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.  Thereabouts 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 the 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.