bout midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge
into the plain and the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat
down in the shadow of a rock, filled up his flask with water from
a spring and drank it down, and remained for a time, resting before
he went on to the houses.

They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole
aspect of that valley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more
unfamiliar. The greater part of its surface was lush green meadow,
starred with many beautiful flowers, irrigated with extraordinary
care, and bearing evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece.
High up and ringing the valley about was a wall, and what appeared
to be a circumferential water channel, from which the little
trickles of water that fed the meadow plants came, and on the
higher slopes above this flocks of llamas cropped the scanty
herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places for the
llamas, stood against the boundary wall here and there. The
irrigation streams ran together into a main channel down the centre
of the valley, and this was enclosed on either side by a wall
breast high. This gave a singularly urban quality to this secluded
place, a quality that was greatly enhanced by the fact that a
number of paths paved with black and white stones, and each with a
curious little kerb at the side, ran hither and thither in an
orderly manner. 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