The crags closed in as we went on, and the hiss of the stream which had neared the road began to drown the bird-songs. Some of the hills beside us were clothed with green shrubs, and some were gaunt and bare, of homely gray splashed with red. Ahead there was a wee white house, apparently balanced like an eagle's nest in an inaccessible eyrie. The orchards had gone, but the stony land was still scratched up to receive crops, and laboriously terraced to keep the soil from being swilled into the sea.
The hills pressed farther together into a rocky gorge, with the rut of the road perched high on one side, and the stream brawling away fifty feet below. Goats with tinkling bells were flitting about the crags like so many brown flies. One began to wonder whether the road was not a cul-de-sac, and whether Valledemosa did not lie in some other direction. There seemed absolutely no outlet except for wings.
But with an angle of the gorge one opened out a new scene. Another wide valley lay ahead of us, through which the road wound steeply, past women gathering the purple olives from the turf beneath the trees, past laden orange-trees, and sprawls of prickly pears, and fields of sprouting beans.
And then we came to two yellow gate-posts, on one of which was the date 1063, whilst the other bore this inscription: "vitæ in introitv ædis sanctæ exus."
"Valledemosa is here," said my companion, "the village beside that convent where Madame Dudevant brought Chopin to die, and from which she took him away full of new life. The mules will bait here. It is for you to say whether we go on or return to Palma."
"From the day when I lost my eyes to this day," was my reply, "I have never known what it was to see the shapes that God has builded on the face of the earth, or the colours with which He has painted them. Mind, I have never whined for the sight that was taken away from me. I have accepted my Kismet, and have made it as bright as thought and contrivance could manage. I believe, without egotism, that there are few blind men who have trained themselves to be as conscious of their surroundings as I am. But my powers have great limitations. However preternaturally sensitive a man may be to all manner of sounds, he cannot tell everything from sound alone, not even though his sense of touch besides is laboriously refined. Without the gift of sight there must always be (so I had been forced to decide) a black gaping hiatus which it seemed that no human power could fill. Of my helpers, till yesterday, Sadi was the only one who showed the least fraction of talent; yet even his best efforts could scarcely throw a glimmer through the cloud.
"But to-day you have done what I believed no breathing person could do. You have worked a miracle. You have made me to see as with mine own old eyes. Heaven grant that this is not all a dream to be waked up from."
We spent that night at the Archduke's hospitar at Miramar—near Raymond Lully's birthplace—where free housing is given to any passer-by for three days, with olives, salt, and oil, the typical trio, provided. In the evening I told her across the brazero a tale that had never crossed my lips before, the tale of how I had lost my eyes. I took her in my story to the south of Africa, and led her out over green rolling veldt to a hawthorn-crowned kopje, where we lay out of sight amongst the bushes. I explained to her that I was a diamond merchant, and that I was waiting there for men who were to bring me stones for sale. And then I told how, instead of those I expected, others came out of the soft black tropical night, in turn mistaking me also for some one else. They thought I was there for I.D.B.—I, an honest trader—and not daring to kill, had loaded their guns with rock-salt. I told her how the first charge had struck me full in the face and destroyed my sight for ever; how I had got up and fled shrieking away, and then lay hid for days in a clump of karoo-scrub nursing my hideous pain, and wishing for the death which would not come. And then I sketched to her the way that Sadi had found me, and nursed me, and been with me in all those groping after years, paying full tribute to his devotion.
When I had finished she said she wanted to ask me one question, if she might do so without offence.
"Nothing you would say," I replied, "can annoy me."