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rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had
arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition
they had brought with them from their seeing days, and had
dismissed all these things as idle fancies and replaced them with
new and saner explanations. Much of their imagination had
shrivelled with their eyes, and they had made for themselves new
imaginations with their ever more sensitive ears and finger-tips.
Slowly Nunez realised this: that his expectation of wonder and
reverence at his origin and his gifts was not to be borne out; and
after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had been set aside
as the confused version of a new-made being describing the marvels
of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed, into
listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men
explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the
world (meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the
rocks, and then had come first inanimate things without the gift of
touch, and llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense,
and then men, and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and
making fluttering sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which
puzzled Nunez greatly until he thought of the birds.
He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into
the warm and the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and
night, and how it was good to sleep in the warm and work during the
cold, so that now, but for his advent, the whole town of the blind
would have been asleep. He said Nunez must have been specially
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