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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 hypnopædic 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]