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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 such-like marvels, to these
elders who sat in darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they
would believe and understand nothing whatever that 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 all the things of sight had faded and changed; the story
of the outer world was faded and changed to a child's story; and
they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond the
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