He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly.  That refined his submission.  But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a great misery.  And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.

So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people ceased to be a generalised people and became individualities to him, and familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became more and more remote and unreal.  There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob’s nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of Yacob.  She was little esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face and lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man’s ideal of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation.  Her closed eyelids were not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but lay as though they might open again at any moment; and she had long eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement.  And her voice was weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley swains.  So that she had no lover.

There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.

He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services and presently he found that she observed him.  Once at a rest-day gathering they sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet.  His hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it.  Then very tenderly she returned his pressure.  And one day, as they were at their meal in the darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as it chanced the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.

He sought to speak to her.

He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight spinning.  The light made her a thing of silver and mystery.  He sat down at her feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she seemed to him.  He had a lover’s voice, he spoke with a tender reverence that came near to awe, and she had never before been touched by adoration.  She made him no definite answer, but it was clear his words pleased her.

After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity.  The valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains where men lived by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some day pour into her ears.  Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of sight.

Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence.  She did not believe, she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely understood.