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.