This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There's an old story by H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, called The Country of the Blind.

In it, he imagines the civilization of blind men and women who live in a hidden mountain valley without

any knowledge of the sighted world.

One day an explorer stumbles across it.

He's on an expedition in the Andes and gets separated from his team.

And a landslide falls into this forgotten valley that has existed

out of contact with the rest of human civilization

for many, many, many generations.

That's reporter and author Andrew Leeland.

And it's the proverbial country of the blind.

This explorer whose name is Nunez enters it with a kind of very

colonial attitude like oh well he keeps on repeating to himself in the land of the

blind the one-eyed man is king and he sort of thinks he'll just sort of single-handedly

dominate them and then he comes to discover that the world is really built for blindness

and not for sightedness and actually they're the ones with all the power and it's a lot about this question of escape

versus assimilation which in a lot of ways reflected my own experience of

becoming blind and gradual vision loss.

Andrew compares himself to Nunez, an accidental and sometimes wary

visitor to the strange and often beautiful country of the blind. Andrew was

diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease during his freshman year in college.

Over the past couple of decades he's slowly been going blind, but he still has some sight

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