The Country of the Blind — By H.G. Wells

The story is about a mysterious valley in South America where a community grew up, separated from the rest of civilisation. A disease struck the community which meant that people went blind, until each new generation was born completely sightless.

An man from Ecuador, named Nunez, while acting as a mountain-guide for some Englishmen, falls and ends up amongst this ‘country of the blind’. He has heard the legends about them, and regards the whole thing as an adventure. He recalls the old proverb, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King’, and thinks he will ‘teach’ them about the world beyond their village.

When he is taken to see their elders, however, he discovers that over the course of the fourteen generations that their people had lived in this valley, they had developed their own world cut off from the rest of civilisation: their valley was the whole world to them, and birds in the sky were ‘angels’ with their gift of flight and their beautiful song.

Instead of day and night, they divide the day up into ‘warm’ and ‘cold’, because they cannot see the light (or dark) but can sense the temperature of the land by day and night. Because they don’t need to work by daylight, they sleep during the warm (i.e. daytime) and work during the cold (i.e. night-time).

Communication between Nunez and the blind is not perfect, and when they are trying to ascertain who he is, they misinterpret his responses and believe his name is ‘Bogota’ (whereas that is the place where he came from before his fall).

The people of the Country of the Blind view Nunez as someone who has been created so that he might learn from them; Nunez, of course, has other ideas and wishes to teach (and lord it over) the blind. His speech is not as beautiful or as elegant as theirs (their skill with language appears to have developed, presumably because speech was more important to them as they could not rely on visual cues or observing body language in conversation).

Although Nunez believes he is a King among these people, he is ‘a clumsy and useless stranger’ whose sense of hearing and smell is nowhere near as good as it is among those he considers his royal subjects. They do not recognise such concepts as ‘sight’ and ‘blind’: these words do not figure in their vocabulary.

He seeks to amaze them with his knowledge of what the world looks like (and the stars beyond), but they disbelieve him, arguing that the world ends at the edges of their own valley and that there is a roof of stone over the world (instead of the sky).

Becoming increasingly frustrated that his plan to become their King has not proved as easy to implement as he’d hoped, Nunez gets angry one day and picks up a spade, meaning to strike one of them down. He keeps repeating to himself, ‘In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King’.

However, he finds that he cannot morally bring himself to hit a blind person in cold blood, and when he the blind all gather against him, armed with their own spades, he runs away.

However, he cannot survive for long on his own, without food, and so he ends up going back to them and submitting to them, apologising for his former behaviour and telling them what he knows they want to hear: that he was mistaken when he said he could ‘see’ and that there is a stone roof over the world, as they argue there is.

Nunez becomes a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and is attracted to a young woman, Medina-saroté, who is unmarried because her face does not conform to the ideals of feminine beauty among the blind (but very much appeals to Nunez, since she has long eyelashes and lacks the sunken eyes which the rest of the blind have in this world). The two of them fall in love, and Nunez ventures to tell her about the beauty of sight. She listens and appears to understand.

However, Yacob, her father, forbids them to marry because he (and the rest of the blind) view Nunez as an ‘idiot’ who ‘has delusions’. Yacob can see how much his daughter loves Nunez, however, so he speaks to one of the other elders, a doctor, who examines Nunez and says that the problem with Nunez’s brain seems to stem from his eyes, which are unlike those of the blind. He proposes a surgical operation to remove Nunez’s eyes so he will be cured and can then marry Medina-saroté.

Nunez resists the proposal at first, but Medina-saroté tells him he should go through with it for her, so they will be allowed to be together. Although she seems to understand Nunez’s gift of sight, she knows that her father will not allow them to marry unless her would-be husband is ‘cured’ of his ability to see.

He agrees to this reluctantly, but when the day arrives for the operation to be carried out, he finds he cannot go through with it, so much does his sight mean to him. So he leaves the village and begins the long climb up the mountains so that he might escape the Country of the Blind and get back to Bogota and civilisation. The story ends with him lying ‘peacefully contented’ under the stars when night comes.