f that now isolated and
forgotten valley the disease ran its course. The old became
groping, the young saw but dimly, and the children that were born
to them never saw at all. But life was very easy in that
snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world, with neither thorns nor
briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed
of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of
the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The
seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed
their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and
thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at
last sight died out among them the race lived on. They had even
time to adapt themselves to the blind control of fire, which they
made carefully in stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of
people at the first, unlettered, only slightly touched with the
Spanish civilisation, but with something of a tradition of the arts
of old Peru and of its lost philosophy. Generation followed
generation. They forgot many things; they devised many things.
Their tradition of the greater world they came from became mythical
in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight they were strong
and able, and presently chance sent one who had an original mind
and who could talk and persuade among them, and then afterwards
another. These two passed, leaving their effects, and the little
community grew in numbers and in understanding, and met and settled
social and economic problems that arose. Generation followed
generation. Generation followed generation. There came a time
when a child was born who was fifteen generations from that
ancestor who went out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek
God's aid, and who never returned. Thereabout it chanced that a
man came into this community from the outer world. And this is the
story of that man.

He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who
had been down to the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books
in an original way, an acute and enterprising man, and he was taken
on by a party of Englishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb
mountains, to replace one of their three Swiss guides who had
fallen ill. He climbed here and he climbed there, and then came
the attempt on Parascotopetl, the Matterhorn of the Andes, in which
he was lost to the outer world. The story of that accident has
been written a dozen