"Those sounds were almost the only ones that reached my ears until I had grown up, for these nuns had taken a vow of silence—and in any case, I soon enough learned that the Indias came from a certain vale in the mountains where in-breeding had been practiced on a scale exceeding even that of the Hapsburg Dynasty, and none of them could hear. The only speech I ever heard was that of the carters and drovers who came up the mountain to bring victuals, and of the several other guests who, like me, were the beneficiaries of the nuns’ Christian hospitality. For at no time were there fewer than half a dozen residents in the guest-house: men and women both—who, judging from their clothes and personal effects, were of gentle or even noble families. My fellow-guests appeared healthy, but behaved strangely: some spoke in garbled words, or remained as mute as the nuns, others were continually tormented by fiendish visions, or were imbeciles, unable to remember events that had occurred a mere quarter of an hour previously. Men who had been kicked in the head by horses, women whose pupils were of different sizes. Some spent all of their time locked in their rooms, or tied into their beds, by the nuns. But I had the run of the place.