"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above
the world--of rock--and very, very smooth. So smooth--so
beautifully smooth . . "He burst again into hysterical tears.
"Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I shall die!"
He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were
capable of toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more
proof of his general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had
whipped him they appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work
they had for anyone to do, and he, seeing no other way of living,
did submissively what he was told.
He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That
refined his submission. But they insisted on his lying in the
dark, and that was a great misery. And blind philosophers came and
talked to him of the wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so
impressively for his doubts about the lid of rock that covered
their cosmic casserole that he almost doubted whether indeed
he was not the victim of hallucination in not seeing it overhead.
So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and
these people ceased to be a generalised people and became
individualities to him, and familiar to him, while the world beyond
the mountains became more and more remote and unreal. There was
Yacob, his master, a kindly man when not annoyed; there was Pedro,
Yacob's nephew; and there was Medina-sarote, who was the youngest
daughter of Yacob.
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