"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 up 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 as 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 only 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 Charing-T Tower," was Lenina's comment. But she was not allowed to
enjoy her discovery of this reassuring resemblance for long. A padding of soft feet
made them turn round. Naked from throat to navel, their dark brown bodies painted
with white lines ("like asphalt tennis courts," Lenina was later to explain), their faces
inhuman with daubings of scarlet, black and ochre, two Indians came running along
the path. Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey
feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily
round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver
bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads. They came on
without a word, running quietly in their deerskin moccasins. One of them was
holding a feather brush; the other carried, in either hand, what looked at a distance
like three or four pieces of thick rope. One of the ropes writhed uneasily, and
suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.
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 hypnop?dic 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 neighboring 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 transfusion 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 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 ophthalmia 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 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
perpendicularly, 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 surdight 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 that 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 neighing 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 unterground 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
dancers 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 out-stretched
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, startingly, 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 af expectancy, then a swift
movement, the whistle of the lash and its loud flat-sounding impact on the ftesh.
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. Twice, thrice, four times
round he went. The blood was streaming. Five times round, six times round.
Suddenly Lenina covered her face shish 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
