The houses of the central village were quite
unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the
mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either
side of a central street of astonishing cleanness, here and there
their parti-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a
solitary window broke their even frontage. They were
parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort
of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes
slate-coloured or dark brown; and it was the sight of this wild
plastering first brought the word "blind" into the thoughts of the
explorer. "The good man who did that," he thought, "must have been
as blind as a bat."
He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and
channel that ran about the valley, near where the latter spouted
out its surplus contents into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and
wavering thread of cascade. He could now see a number of men and
women resting on piled heaps of grass, as if taking a siesta, in
the remoter part of the meadow, and nearer the village a number of
recumbent children, and then nearer at hand three men carrying
pails on yokes along a little path that ran from the encircling
wall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments of
llama cloth and boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of
cloth with back and ear flaps.
Pages:
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160