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 rock.”

“Bogota,” he said.  “Bogota.  Over the mountain crests.”

“A wild man—­using wild words,” said Pedro.  “Did you hear that—­ Bogota?  His mind is hardly formed yet.  He has only the beginnings of speech.”

A little boy nipped his hand.  “Bogota!” he said mockingly.

“Ay!  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 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,” he 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 sight 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 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