What unusual qualities does Nunez notice about the villagers's houses?
When Nunez first looks down from the hill at the houses, he thinks that the people that built them must have been "as blind as a bat." They have smeared the walls with plaster of such irregular colors that browns, grays, and other drab colors are all mixed together in an ugly swirl.
Perhaps in light of this, Nunez states that the most noticeable thing about them was the cleanliness of their surroundings. They are organized in "continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness." They are, he says, quite unlike "the higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew."
Even more intriguingly, none of the houses have any windows. Their only opening is a small door. When he finally enters a house and the door is closed behind him, it is, apart from a fire at one end, pitch black.
In "The Country of the Blind," Nunez notices that the village houses do not resemble any of the ones he is familiar with in mountain villages.
For example, the village houses are neatly arranged in rows. In turn, the twin, continuous rows are separated by an unusually clean street. Nunez is surprised that the houses are not located in haphazard locations in "higgledy-piggledy agglomeration[s]," as the mountain village homes are. Additionally, the walls of the village houses are also multi-colored, and none of the houses have windows.
Nunez also notices that "parti-colored" plaster appear to have been smeared onto the walls in no particular order. Because of the random way in which plaster has been applied to the walls of the houses, Nunez concludes that a blind man must have worked on the buildings. He is, however, most intrigued by the lack of windows in any of the houses.
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