062- The Country of the Blind -Edmond OBrien

Tired of the everyday routine? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Wanna get away from it all? We offer you escape, starring Edmund O'Brien. Escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

You are trapped in a remote valley in the Andes, Walled in by sheer rock preservices, and surrounding you, closing in on you, is a band of blind men who want your eyes. Today with Edmund O'Brien as Nuneus, we escape to the mountains of Ecuador, and to a remarkable world where sight is unknown.

As H. G. Wells imagined it in his gripping story, The Country of the Blind. I'm a mining engineer in Quito, Ecuador, high in the towering Andes. Up until a year ago, my chief sport was mountain climbing.

My last climb was an attempt to scale the remote and forbidding peak of Paris-Gorapetola, 20,000-foot crag, unconkered by man. It is unconquered still. Three thousand feet from the icy summit we turned back and fed for our lives.

I was escaped except one, a guide named Nuneus, who slipped over the frightful precipice and disappeared in the vast chasm, yawning 10,000 feet beneath us. The horror of that man's fall has terrorized my dreams for a year.

Because of it, I've forsaken mountain climbing for the rest of my life. And that decision still stands, even though today, I have seen Nuneus. You were sitting on the steps of my shack when I arrived at the mine this morning.

At first I didn't recognize him. He was so much changed. I thought he was some ragged beggar. Is it you, Senor Ibarra? My name is Ibarra. Yes. What do you want? You? You do not know me, Senor?