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.