Maerpes

Malpais is a pueblo on the New Mexico Reservation, set on a mesa above a valley of dust and fields. For Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne, it is at once a destination presented as an amusing excursion and a place that exposes the distance between the World State and lives shaped by family, age, religion, and customs unfamiliar to them. Its decisive importance in their visit is that it is where they meet John and hear the history connecting him, Linda, and Thomas, the man Bernard knows as the Director.

Setting and Approach

The pilot identifies Malpais as their stop and calls it the rest-house, then tells Lenina that a dance is taking place that afternoon and that an Indian guide will take them there. His assurance that the inhabitants are harmless is framed by his casual reference to their experience with gas bombs; he departs in the helicopter, leaving Bernard and Lenina to continue on foot with the guide. His words establish the visitors’ first, dismissive frame for the place before they have seen it for themselves.

The pueblo stands at the centre of a mesa described as a stone ship caught in a strait of lion-coloured dust. A river and cultivated fields mark a green line through the valley, while the settlement rises in blocks of houses, each story smaller than the one below, against the sky. Smoke rises from a few places and disappears into the still air. The mesa’s steep sides and the pueblo’s compact, stepped form make the setting feel sharply bounded, unlike the visitors’ mobile approach by helicopter.

The Visitors’ Encounter with the Pueblo

Lenina responds to the settlement with repeated dislike. She condemns the guide as well as the place, and objects to his smell; at the pueblo entrance, rubbish, dust, dogs, and flies deepen her disgust. Holding a handkerchief to her nose, she wonders how people can live in such conditions. Bernard answers that they have done so for five or six thousand years, a reply that places her immediate aversion against the long duration of life there.

When the guide returns, he leads the visitors through a narrow street and into a house by way of a ladder. Inside, they pass through a long, dim room before reaching a terrace above the village square. The square is crowded with people wearing bright blankets, feathers, and turquoise. Two circular platforms occupy its centre; open hatchways and ladders descend from them into underground chambers. The physical route from street to room to terrace gives Bernard and Lenina a view of the gathering below, but not an understanding of its meaning.

The drums reach Lenina before that meaning does. Their repeated beat reminds her of the synthetic sounds used at Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations, and she quietly associates them with the familiar rhythm of the Orgy-porgy song. The moment reveals how thoroughly the World State’s conditioning supplies her interpretive frame: even in a markedly different communal setting, she first recognizes a sound by comparing it to her own society’s ceremonies.

John and the History Attached to the Place

At Malpais, Bernard and Lenina meet John, a young man who explains that he and Linda are strangers in the Reservation. Linda came from the Other Place before John was born with the man who was his father. She was later injured after falling while walking alone in the mountains to the north; hunters from Malpais found her and brought her to the pueblo. The man, whom Linda never saw again, was named Tomakin. Bernard recognizes that Thomas is the Director’s first name, making John’s account a link between this remote pueblo and the World State hierarchy.

John says that the man must have flown away and left Linda behind, and describes him as unkind and unnatural. His conclusion that he was born in Malpais gives the place a personal as well as geographical meaning: it is the home in which he grew up, but also the setting of a life whose beginnings connect him to the Other Place. His account transforms the visitors’ excursion into the discovery of a concealed family history.

Narrative Significance

Malpais is presented through contrasts that the visiting characters do not resolve in the same way. Lenina sees dirt and unfamiliar surroundings as reasons to leave; Bernard can at least acknowledge the settlement’s long continuity, though he admits that its combination of motherhood, gods, age, and disease is difficult for him to comprehend. Their reactions show the limits of the World State’s assumptions when confronted with a society beyond its own routines.

The pueblo also serves as the point where landscape, social difference, and personal history converge. The setting is not merely a backdrop for Bernard and Lenina’s visit: it is where Linda’s past and John’s birth become intelligible to them, and where Bernard identifies Tomakin as Thomas, the Director. Malpais therefore changes the significance of the journey, connecting the Reservation to the central world of the novel through a family history the World State’s ordinary social categories cannot contain.