Chapter VII
The mesa
was like a ship becalmed in a strait of lion-coloured dust. The channel wound between precipitous banks,
and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a streak of green
- the river and its fields. On the prow
of that stone ship in the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of it, a
shaped and geometrical outcrop of the naked rock, stood the pueblo of Malpais. Block above
block, each storey smaller than the one below, the tall houses rose like
stepped and amputated pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low
buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the precipices fell sheer
into the plain. A few columns of smoke
mounted perpendicularly into the windless air and were lost.
"Queer,” said Lenina,
"very queer." It was her
ordinary word of condemnation. "I
don't like it. And I don't like that
man." She pointed to the Indian
guide who had been appointed to take them to the pueblo. Her feeling was evidently reciprocated; the
very back of the man, as he walked along before them, was hostile, sullenly
contemptuous.
"Besides," she lowered her
voice," he smells.
Bernard did not attempt to deny it. They walked on.
Suddenly it was though the whole air had come alive and were pulsing, pulsing with the
indefatigable movement of blood. Up
there, in Malpais, the drums were being beaten. Their feet fell in with the rhythm of that
mysterious heart; they quickened their pace.
Their path led them to the foot of the precipice. The sides of the great mesa ship towered over
them, three hundred feet to the gunwale.
"I wish we could have brought the
plane," said Lenina, looking up resentfully at
the blank impending rock face. "I
hate walking. And you feel so small when
you're on the ground at the bottom of a hill."
They walked along for some way in the shadow
of the mesa, rounded a projection, and there, in a water-worn ravine, was the
way up the companion ladder. They
climbed. It was a very steep path that
zigzagged from side to side of the gully.
Sometimes the pulsing of the drums was all but inaudible, at others they
seemed to be beating just round the corner.
When they were half-way up, an eagle flew
past so close to them that the wind of his wings blew chill on their
faces. In a crevice of the rock lay a
pile of bones. It was all oppressively queer,
and the Indian smelt stronger and stronger.
They emerged at last from the ravine into the full sunlight. The top of the mesa was a flat deck of stone.
"Like the
The men came nearer and nearer; their
dark eyes looked at her, but without giving any sign of recognition, any
smallest sign that they had seen her or were aware of her existence. The writhing snake hung limp again with the
rest. The men passed.
"I don't like it," said Lenina. "I
don't like it."
She liked even less what awaited her at
the entrance to the pueblo, where their guide had left them while he went
inside for instructions. The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs,
the flies. Her face wrinkled up
into a grimace of disgust. She held her
handkerchief to her nose.
"But how can they live like
this?" she broke out in a voice of indignant incredulity. (It wasn't
possible.)
Bernard shrugged his shoulders
philosophically. "Anyhow," he
said, "they've been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by
now."
"But cleanliness is next to fordliness," she insisted.
"Yes, and civilization is
sterilization," Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hypnopaedic lesson in elementary hygiene. "But these people have never heard of
Our Ford, and they aren't civilized. So
there's no point in ..."
"Oh!" She gripped his arm. "Look."
An almost naked Indian was very slowly
climbing down the ladder from the first-floor terrace of a neighbouring house -
rung after rung, with the tremulous caution of extreme old age. His face was profoundly wrinkled and black,
like a mask of obsidian. The toothless
mouth had fallen in. At the corners of
the lips and on each side of the chin a few long bristles gleamed almost white
against the dark skin. The long unbraided hair hung down in grey wisps round his face. His body was bent and emaciated to the bone,
almost fleshless. Very slowly he came
down, pausing at each rung before he ventured another step.
"What's the matter with him?"
whispered Lenina.
Her eyes were wide with horror and amazement.
"He's old, that's all," Bernard
answered as carelessly as he could. He
too was startled; but he made an effort to seem unmoved.
"Old?" she repeated. "But the Director's old; lots of people
are old; they're not like that."
"That's because we don't allow them
to be like that. We preserve them from
diseases. We keep their internal
secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don't permit their magnesium-calcium ratio
to fall below what it was at thirty. We
give them transfusions of young blood.
We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don't look like
that. Partly," he added,
"because most of them die long before they reach this old creature's
age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty,
and then, crack! the end."
But Lenina was
not listening. She was watching the old
man. Slowly, slowly he came down. His feet touched the ground. He turned.
In their deep-sunken orbits his eyes were still extraordinarily
bright. They looked at her for a long
moment expressionlessly, without surprise, as though she had not been there at
all. Then slowly, with bent back, the
old man hobbled past them and was gone.
"But it's terrible," Lenina whispered.
"It's awful. We ought not to
have come here." She felt in her
pocket for her soma - only to discover that, by some unprecedented
oversight, she had left the bottle down at the rest-house. Bernard's pockets were also empty.
Lenina was left
to face the horrors of Malpais unaided. They came crowding in on her thick and
fast. The spectacle of two young women
giving the breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face. She had never seen anything so indecent in
her life. And what made it worse was
that, instead of tactfully ignoring it, Bernard proceeded to make open comments
on this revoltingly viviparous scene.
Ashamed, now that the effects of the soma had worn off, of the
weakness he had displayed that morning in the hotel, he went out of his way to
show himself strong and unorthodox.
"What a wonderfully intimate
relationship," he said, deliberately outrageous. "And what an intensity of feeling it
must generate! I often think one may
have missed something in not having had a mother. And perhaps you've missed something in not being
a mother, Lenina.
Imagine yourself sitting there with a little baby of your own ..."
"Bernard! How can you?" The passage of an old woman with opthalmia and a disease of the skin distracted her from her
indignation.
"Let's go away," she
begged. "I don't like it."
But at this moment their guide came back
and, beckoning to them to follow, led the way down the narrow street between
the houses. They rounded a corner. A dead dog was lying on a rubbish heap; a
woman with a goitre was looking for lice in the hair
of a small girl. Their guide halted at
the foot of a ladder, raised his hand perpindicularly,
then darted it horizontally forward. They did what he mutely commanded - climbed
the ladder and walked through the doorway, to which it gave access, into a long
narrow room, rather dark and smelling of smoke and cooked grease and long-worn,
long-unwashed clothes. At the further
end of the room was another doorway, through which came a shaft of sunlight and
the noise, very loud and close, of the drums.
They stepped across the threshold and
found themselves on a wide terrace.
Below them, shut in by the tall houses, was the village square, crowded
with Indians. Bright
blankets, and feathers in black hair, and the glint of turquoise, and dark
skins shining with heat. Lenina put her handkerchief to her nose again. In the open space at the centre of the square
were two circular platforms of masonry and trampled clay - the roofs, it was
evident, of underground chambers; for in the centre of each platform was an
open hatchway, with a ladder emerging from the lower darkness. A sound of subterranean flute-playing came up
and was almost lost in the steady remorseless persistence of the drums.
Lenina liked
the drums. Shutting her eyes she
abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her
consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in
the world but the one deep pulse of sound.
It reminded her reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity
Services and Ford's Day celebrations.
"Orgy-porgy," she whispered to herself. These drums beat out just the same rhythms.
There was a sudden startling burst of singing
- hundreds of male voices crying out fiercely in harsh metallic unison. A few long notes and silence,
the thunderous silence of the drums; then shrill, in a neighbouring treble, the
women's answer. Then
again the drums; and once more the men's deep savage affirmation of their
manhood.
Queer - yes. The place was queer, so was the music, so
were the clothes and the goitres and the skin diseases and the old people. But the performance itself - there seemed to
be nothing specially queer about that.
"It reminds me of a lower-caste
Community Sing," she told Bernard.
But a little later it was reminding her a
good deal less of that innocuous function.
For suddenly there had swarmed up from those round chambers underground
a ghastly troop of monsters. Hideously
masked or painted out of all semblance of humanity, they had tramped out a
strange limping dance round the square; round and again round, singing as they
went, round and round - each time a little faster; and the drums had changed
and quickened their rhythm, so that it became like the pulsing of fever in the
ears; and the crowd had begun to sing with the dancers, louder and louder; and
first one woman had shrieked, and then another and another, as though they were
being killed; and then suddenly the leader of the dance broke out of the line,
ran to a big wooden chest which was standing at one end of the square, raised
the lid and pulled out a pair of black snakes.
A great yell went up from the crowd, and all the other dancers ran
towards him with outstretched hands. He
tossed the snakes to the first-comers, then dipped
back into the chest for more. More and
more, black snakes and brown and mottled - he flung them out. And then the dance began again on a different
rhythm. Round and round they went with
their snakes, snakily, with a soft undulating
movement at the knees and hips. Round
and round. Then the leader gave a
signal, and one after another, all the snakes were flung down in the middle of the
square; an old man came up from underground and sprinkled them with corn meal,
and from the other hatchway came a woman and sprinkled them with water from a
black jar. Then the old man lifted his
hand and, startlingly, terrifyingly, there was absolute silence. The drums stopped beating,
life seemed to have come to an end. The
old man pointed towards the two hatchways that gave entrance to the lower
world. And slowly, raised by invisible
hands from below, there emerged from the one a painted image of an eagle, from
the other that of a man, naked, and nailed to a cross. They hung there, seemingly self-sustained, as
though watching. The old man clapped his
hands. Naked but for a white cotton
breech-cloth, a boy of about eighteen stepped out of the crowd and stood before
him, his hands crossed over his chest, his head bowed. The old man made the sign of the cross over
him and turned away. Slowly, the boy
began to walk round the writhing heap of snakes. He had completed the first circuit and was
half-way through the second when, from among the dancers, a tall man wearing
the mask of a coyote and holding in his hand a whip of plaited leather,
advanced towards him. The boy moved on
as though unaware of the other's existence.
The coyote-man raised his whip; there was a long moment of expectancy,
then a swift movement, the whistle of the lash and its loud flat-sounding
impact on the flesh. The boy's body
quivered; but he made no sound, he walked on at the same slow, steady
pace. The coyote struck again, again;
and at every blow at first a gasp and then a deep groan went up from the
crowd. The boy walked on. Twice, thrice, four times round he went. The blood was streaming. Five times round, six times round. Suddenly Lenina
covered her face with her hands and began to sob. "Oh, stop them, stop them!" she
implored. But the whip fell and fell
inexorably. Seven times round. Then all at once the boy staggered and, still
without a sound, pitched forward on to his face. Bending over him, the old man touched his
back with a long white feather, held it up for a moment, crimson, for the
people to see, then shook it thrice over the snakes. A few drops fell, and suddenly the drums
broke out again into a panic of hurrying notes; there was a great shout. The dancers rushed forward, picked up the
snakes and ran out of the square. Men,
women, children, all the crowd ran after them.
A minute later the square was empty, only the boy remained, prone where
he had fallen, quite still. Three old
women came out of one of the houses, and with some difficulty lifted him and
carried him in. The eagle and the man on
the cross kept guard for a little while over the empty pueblo; then, as though
they had seen enough, sank slowly down through their hatchways, out of sight,
into the nether world.
Lenina was
still sobbing. "Too awful,"
she kept repeating, and all Bernard's consolations were in vain. "Too awful! That blood!" She shuddered. "Oh, I wish I had my soma,"
There was the sound of feet in the inner
room.
Lenina did not
move, but sat with her face in her hands, unseeing, apart. Only Bernard turned round.
The dress of the young man who now
stepped out on to the terrace was Indian, but his plaited hair was
straw-coloured, his eyes pale blue, and his skin a white skin, bronzed.
"Hullo. Good-morrow," said the stranger, in
faultless but peculiar English.
"You're civilized, aren't you?
You come from the Other Place, outside the Reservation?"
"Who on earth ...?" Bernard
began in astonishment.
The young man sighed and shook his
head. "A most
unhappy gentleman." And,
pointing to the bloodstains in the centre of the square, "Do you see that
damned spot?" he asked in a voice that trembled with emotion.
"A gramme
is better than a damn," said Lenina mechanically
from behind her hands. "I wish I
had my soma!"
"I ought to have been
there," the young man went on.
"Why wouldn't they let me be the sacrifice? I'd have gone round ten times - twelve,
fifteen. Palowhtiwa
only got as far as seven. They could
have had twice as much blood from me.
The multitudinous seas incarnadine." He flung out his arms in a lavish gesture;
then, despairingly, let them fall again.
"But they wouldn't let me.
They disliked me for my complexion.
It's always been like that. Always." Tears
stood in the young man's eyes; he was ashamed and turned away.
Astonishment made Lenina
forget the deprivation of soma.
She uncovered her face and, for the first time, looked at the
stranger. "Do you mean to say that
you wanted to be hit with that whip?"
Still averted from her, the young man made
a sign of affirmation. "For the
sake of the pueblo - to make the rain come and the corn grow. And to please Pookong and Jesus.
And then to show that I can bear pain without crying out. Yes," and his voice suddenly took on a
new resonance, he turned with a proud squaring of the shoulders, a proud,
defiant lifting of the chin, "to show that I'm a man ... Oh!" He gave a gasp and was silent, gaping. He had seen, for the first time in his life,
the face of a girl whose cheeks were not the colour of chocolate or dogskin, whose hair was auburn and permanently waved, and
whose expression (amazing novelty!) was one of benevolent interest. Lenina was smiling
at him; such a nice-looking boy, she was thinking, and a really beautiful
body. The blood rushed up into the young
man's face; he dropped his eyes, raised them again for a moment only to find
her still smiling at him, and was so much overcome that he had to turn away and
pretend to be looking very hard at something on the other side of the square.
Bernard's questions made a
diversion. Who? How?
When? From
where? Keeping his eyes fixed on
Bernard's face (for so passionately did he long to see Lenina
smiling that he simply dared not look at her), the young man tried to explain
himself. Linda and he - Linda was his
mother (the word made Lenina look uncomfortable) -
were strangers in the Reservation. Linda
had come from the Other Place long ago, before he was born, with a man who was
his father. (Bernard pricked up his
ears.) She had gone walking alone in
those mountains over there to the North, had fallen down a steep place and hurt
her head. ("Go on, go on,"
said Bernard excitedly.) Some hunters
from Malpais had found her and brought her to the
pueblo. As for the man who was his
father, Linda had never seen him again.
His name was Tomakin. (Yes, 'Thomas' was the D.H.C.'s
first name.) He must have flown away,
back to the Other Place, away without her - a bad, unkind, unnatural man.
"And so I was born in Malpais," he concluded. "In Malpais." And he shook his head.
The squalor of that little house on the
outskirts of the pueblo!
A space of dust and rubbish separated it
from the village. Two famine-stricken
dogs were nosing obscenely in the garbage at its door. Inside, when they entered, the twilight stank
and was loud with flies.
"Linda!" the young man called.
From the inner room a rather hoarse
female voice said "Coming."
They waited. In bowls on the floor were the remains of a
meal, perhaps of several meals.
The door opened. A very stout blonde squaw stepped across the
threshold and stood looking at the strangers, staring incredulously, her mouth
open. Lenina
noticed with disgust that two of the front teeth were missing. And the colour of the ones that remained ...
She shuddered. It was worse than the old
man. So fat. And all the lines in her face, the
flabbiness, the wrinkles. And the
sagging cheeks, with those purplish blotches.
And the red veins on her nose, the bloodshot eyes. And that neck - that neck; and the blankets she
wore over her head - ragged and filthy. And under the brown sack-shaped tunic those enormous breasts, the
bulge of the stomach, the hips.
Oh, much worse than the old man, much worse! And suddenly the creature burst out in a
torrent of speech, rushed at her with outstretched arms and - Ford! Ford! it was too
revolting, in another moment she'd be sick - pressed her against the bulge, the
bosom, and began to kiss her. Ford! to kiss, slobberingly, and
smelt too horrible, obviously never had a bath, and simply reeked of that
beastly stuff that was put into Delta and Epsilon bottles (no, it wasn't true
about Bernard), positively stank of alcohol.
She broke away as quickly as she could.
A blubbered and distorted face confronted
her; the creature was crying.
"Oh, my dear, my
dear." The torrent of words
flowed sobbingly. "If
you knew how glad - after all these years! A civilized face. Yes, and civilized clothes. Because I thought I should never see a piece
of real acetate silk again." She
fingered the sleeve of Lenina's shirt. The nails were black. "And those adorable
viscose velveteen shorts! Do you
know, dear, I've still got my old clothes, the ones I came in, put away in a box. I'll show them
to you afterwards. Though, of course,
the acetate has all gone into holes. But
such a lovely white bandolier - though I must say your green morocco is even
lovelier. Not that it did me much
good, that bandolier." Her tears
began to flow again. "I suppose
John told you. What I had to suffer -
and not a gramme of soma to be had. Only a drink of mescal
every now and then, when Popé used to bring it. Popé is a boy I
used to know. But it makes you feel so
bad afterwards, the mescal does, and you're sick with the peyotl; besides, it always made that awful feeling
of being ashamed much worse the next
day. And I was so ashamed. Just think of it: me, a Beta - having a baby:
put yourself in my place." (The
mere suggestion made Lenina shudder.) "Though I wasn't my fault, I swear;
because I still don't know how it happened, seeing that I did all the
Malthusian drill - you know, by numbers, One, two, three, four, always, I swear
it; but all the same it happened; and of course there wasn't anything like an
Abortion Centre here. Is it still down
in