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native silver for which he would not account; he insisted there was
none in the valley with something of the insistence of an inexpert
liar. They had all clubbed their money and ornaments together,
having little need for such treasure up there, he said, to buy them
holy help against their ill. I figure this dim-eyed young
mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim clutched
feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world,
telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the
great convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return
with pious and infallible remedies against that trouble, and the
infinite dismay with which he must have faced the tumbled vastness
where the gorge had once come out. But the rest of his story of
mischances is lost to me, save that I know of his evil death after
several years. Poor stray from that remoteness! The stream that
had once made the gorge now bursts from the mouth of a rocky cave,
and the legend his poor, ill-told story set going developed into
the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there" one may
still hear to-day.
And amidst the little population of that now isolated and
forgotten valley the disease ran its course. The old became
groping, the young saw but dimly, and the children that were born
to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that
snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor
briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed
of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of
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