He wrote so much, Anthony Burgess said of him, mainly because he liked to sit. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine him doing much else! Over the course of his long literary career, he would produce 52 novels, 70 volumes of non-fiction on a huge variety of topics (including his famous history of the world), more than 100 now-classic short stories and countless newspaper and magazine articles. And despite his stodgy, walrus-like appearance, he was as open-minded as any of his contemporaries - proving that you didn’t have to be incomprehensible to be a modernist!
But, of course, these days we remember him
most as the “Father of Science Fiction”, and he certainly has claim to that title.
This is the man, after all, who gave us The Time
Machine, The War of the Worlds and The
Island of Dr. Moreau, among many others.
It might be said that he’s the one who staked out the territory, and that everyone who has written sci-fi after him is aguably in his debt.
Here, in honour of our COUNTRIES issue, is
one of his very finest creations, a Borgesian journey of exploration into the
very nature of our own perceptions. It’s weird, disturbing, melodramatic and perhaps
politically incorrect, but still unforgettable and thought-provoking.
So let’s turn back the clock to 1904 and pay a quick visit to... THE COUNTRY OF
THE BLIND.
The Country of
the Blind
by H. G. Wells
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the Country of the Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil; everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind for ever from the exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers had chanced to be on the hither side of the gorges when the world had so terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife and his child and all the friends and possessions he had left up there, and start life over again in the lower world. He started it again but ill, blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in the mines; but the story he told begot a legend that lingers along the length of the Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.
