Bernard also laughed; after two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some reason, good. Laughed and then, almost immediately, dropped off to sleep[27]. When he woke, he found their machine standing on the ground, Lenina carrying the suitcases into a small square house, and the Gamma-green pilot talking incomprehensibly with a young Indian.
“Malpais,” explained the pilot, as Bernard stepped out. “This is the rest-house. And there’s a dance this afternoon at the pueblo. He’ll take you there.” He pointed to the young savage. “Funny, I expect.” He grinned. “Everything they do is funny.” And with that he climbed into the plane and started up the engines. “Back tomorrow. And remember,” he added reassuringly to Lenina, “they’re perfectly tame; savages won’t do you any harm. They’ve got enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks.”
Chapter Seven
The mesa was like a ship in a strait of dust. The channel ran between precipitous banks, and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a streak of green-the river and its fields. In the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of it, stood the pueblo of Malpais. Block above block, each story smaller than the one below, the tall houses rose like stepped pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low buildings, a criss-cross of walls. 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. Her feeling was evidently reciprocated; the very back of the man, as he walked along before them, was hostile.
They walked on.
Suddenly it was as though the whole air had come alive and was pulsing. 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.
“I wish we could have brought the plane,” said Lenina. “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, and reached a 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.
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. A sound of footsteps made them turn round. Naked from throat to navel, their dark brown bodies painted with white lines, 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. 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, and suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.
The men came nearer and nearer; their dark eyes looked at her, but only showed the 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. The dirt, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs, the flies. She held her handkerchief to her nose, disgusted.
“How can they live like this?” she broke out.
“They’ve been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by now.”
“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. His face was 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 hair hung down in grey wisps. His body was bent and emaciated.
“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.
“Old?” she repeated. “But 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.”
“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 she had left the bottle down at the rest-house.
Lenina was left to face the horrors[28] of Malpais by herself. They came crowding in on her[29] thick and fast. She saw two young women giving breast[30] to their babies made her blush and turn away. She had never seen anything so indecent in her life. And what made it worse was that, instead of ignoring it, Bernard proceeded to make comments on this scene.
“What a wonderfully intimate relationship,” he said. “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? Let’s go away, I don’t like it.”
At this moment their guide came back and beckoned them to follow. He led the way down the narrow street. They rounded a corner. Their guide stopped at the foot of a ladder, raised his hand, then darted it horizontally forward. They did what he 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 dirty clothes. At the further end of the room was another doorway, through which came a ray of sunlight and the noise of the drums.
They stepped across the threshold and found themselves on a wide terrace. Below them 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 of underground chambers; for in the centre of each platform was an open hatchway.
Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she allowed the sound to invade her consciousness more and more, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound. It reminded her of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations. “Orgy-porgy,” she whispered to herself.
“It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing,” she told Bernard.
Suddenly a ghastly troop of monsters had swarmed up from the round chambers underground. Hideously masked or painted out of all semblance of humanity, they danced strangely round the square; round and again round, singing as they went, round and round-each time a little faster. The drums had changed and quickened their rhythm. The crowd had begun to sing with the dancers, louder and louder. 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 outstretched hands. He tossed the snakes to the first-comers, then dipped back into the chest for more. More and more-he flung them out. The dance began again on a different rhythm. 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. Then the old man lifted his hand and, terrifyingly, there was absolute silence. The drums stopped beating. The old man pointed towards the two hatchways. And slowly, from one emerged a painted image of an eagle, from the other that of a man, naked, and nailed to a cross. The old man clapped his hands. A boy of about eighteen, wearing a white cotton cloth, stepped out of the crowd and stood before him. 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 circle when, from among the dancers, a tall man wearing the mask of a coyote and holding in his hand a whip, came out. The boy moved on. The coyote-man raised his whip, there was a whistle of the lash and its loud 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 and again. 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 with her hands and began to sob. “Oh, stop them, stop them!” she pleaded. Seven times round. Then all at once the boy staggered and, still without a sound, fell forward on 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; 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, quite still. Three old women came out of one of the houses, lifted him up and carried him in. The eagle and the man on the cross kept guard over the empty pueblo.