The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories by H. G. Wells: Summary in 30 Seconds : Free Summarizer

The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

H. G. Wells · short story collection, 1911·12 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg

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A climbing accident drops him into the valley. Climbing Parascotopetl with an English expedition, Nunez slips off the mountain's unknown side, falls a thousand feet inside a snow avalanche, and lands "without a bone broken in his body." His party gives him up for dead and abandons the peak; he wakes alone, follows a gorge, and reaches a valley of stone huts by midday.
The word 'blind' occurs to him before any blind person does. Seeing the houses' wild, particolored plastering with no windows at all, Nunez thinks, "The good man who did that must have been as blind as a bat," then shouts at three men on the path who turn their heads but never look at him.
His proof of sight backfires instantly. He tells the elders he can see Pedro approaching on path Seventeen from far off; Pedro doubles back onto path Ten instead, and the villagers mock Nunez as a liar. Fourteen generations of blindness have sharpened hearing so fine they can catch a heartbeat a dozen paces away.
His one-eyed-king coup lasts about five minutes. Grabbing a spade to force the issue, he finds "it was impossible for him to hit a blind man in cold blood," flees instead, swings once in panic, then dives through a gate and lives outside the wall for two starving nights.
A doctor proposes to cure him by removing his eyes. Medina-saroté, Yacob's daughter, is spurned by blind suitors for the unsunken eyelids Nunez finds beautiful; when their marriage stalls, the village doctor diagnoses his "greatly distended" eyes as the cause of his madness and prescribes a surgery to cut them out. Old Yacob's verdict: "Thank Heaven for science!"
He chooses the mountain over the surgery. On the morning of the operation he walks out to say goodbye to Medina-saroté, then keeps climbing instead of turning back, scaling bare rock until sunset. He is found "smiling as if he were satisfied merely to have escaped from the valley of the Blind," lying content under the stars.

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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: the title story takes "in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" and proves it false in every particular, showing an advantage means nothing to a society that has already optimized around a different sense.

A sighted man falls into a hidden Andean valley certain the old proverb will crown him king, and learns an eye is worthless to people who rebuilt every sense but sight.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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The Country of the Blind, and Other Stories

•Why it earns a slot

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