Medina-Saroté, however, simply dismisses it as his imagination. Nuñez and Medina-Saroté soon fall in love, and having won her confidence, Nuñez slowly starts trying to explain sight to her.

He becomes attracted to Yacob's youngest daughter, Medina-Saroté. Nuñez is assigned to work for a villager named Yacob. Frustrated, Nuñez becomes angry, but the villagers calm him, and he reluctantly submits to their way of life, because returning to the outside world seems impossible. He realizes that he can teach and rule them, but the villagers have no concept of sight, and do not understand his attempts to explain this fifth sense to them. Upon discovering that everyone is blind, Nuñez begins reciting to himself the proverb, 'In the Country of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King'. Nuñez descends into the valley and finds an unusual village with windowless houses and a network of paths, all bordered by kerbs. As the blindness slowly spread over many generations, the people's remaining senses sharpened, and by the time the last sighted villager had died, the community had fully adapted to life without sight. The isolated community prospered over the years, despite a disease that struck them early on, rendering all newborns blind. The valley had been a haven for settlers fleeing the tyranny of Spanish rulers, until an earthquake reshaped the surrounding mountains, cutting the valley off forever from future explorers. Unknown to Nuñez, he has discovered the fabled 'Country of the Blind'. At the end of his descent, down a snow-slope in the mountain's shadow, he finds a valley, cut off from the rest of the world on all sides by steep precipices. While attempting to climb the unconquered crest of Parascotopetl (a fictitious mountain in Ecuador), a mountaineer named Nuñez slips and falls down the far side of the mountain. ''Carefully,' he cried, with a finger in his eye.'

Hg wells short stories list