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Island

Aldous Huxley


  "Old friends," said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese. The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands. Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.

  "Talk of Muscle Men," said Will as they left the clearing. "Those were really splendid specimens."

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  "That kind of physique," said Vijaya, "is a standing temptation. And yet among all these men—and I've worked with scores of them—I've never met a single bully, a single potentially dangerous power lover."

  "Which is just another way," Murugan broke in contemptuously, "of saying that nobody here has any ambition."

  "What's the explanation?" Will asked.

  "Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. They're never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before it's had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different. They're just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don't they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody's expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful."

  "So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people—is that it?"

  "Precisely. And when they've had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies."

  Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.

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  "What's the joke?"

  "I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him—not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question."

  "Didn't he have any physical outlet for his energies?" Will shook his head. "Besides being a gentleman," he explained, "my father thought he was an intellectual. But an intellectual doesn't hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks. Apart from brandy, my father's only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics. He fancied himself as a twentietly century version of Lord Acton— the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism. You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent state! 'Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely.'' After which he'd down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favorite pastime—trampling on his wife and children."

  "And if Acton himself didn't behave in that way," said Dr. Robert, "it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent. There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on. That was Acton's fatal weakness. As a political theorist he was altogether admirable. As a practical psychologist he was almost nonexistent. He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion. But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that's obvious. But it's also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I'd like to write a lit-

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  tle book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law."

  "Law," Will echoed. "I was just going to ask you about law. Are you absolutely swordless and punishmentless? Or do you still need judges and policemen?"

  "We still need them," said Dr. Robert. "But we don't need nearly so many of them as you do. In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don't commit many crimes. And in the second place, most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal's MAC. Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent. And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of moksha-medicme experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight."

  "So where do the judges come in?"

  "The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he's guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed."

  "And if they're never satisfactory?"

  "In the long run," said Dr. Robert, "they always are."

  There was a silence.

  "Did you ever do any rock climbing?" Vijaya suddenly asked.

  Will laughed. "How do you think I came by my game leg?"

  "That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?"

  "Enough," said Will, "to convince me that I wasn't much good at it."

  Vijaya glanced at Murugan. "What about you, while you were in Switzerland?"

  The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. "You can't do any of those things," he muttered, "if you have a tendency to TB."

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  "What a pity!" said Vijaya. "It would have been so good for you."

  Will asked, "Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?"

  "Climbing's an integral part of the school curriculum."

  "For everybody?"

  "A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People—that's about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls. We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb."

  The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.

  "That's the High Altitude Station," he said. "Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won't set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude—including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of."

  "Is this the place we're bound for?" Will asked.

  "No, we're going higher." Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the

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  clouds. "Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It's one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!" A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sigh
ed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.

  They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.

  "Entering the last, worst lap," said Vijaya. "Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel."

  He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.

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  Cautiously maneuvering his immobilized leg, Will climbed out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple—a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple's richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.

  "Built about fifty years before the Norman Conquest," said Dr. Robert.

  "And looks," Will commented, "as though it hadn't been built by anybody—as though it had grown out of the rock.

  ft

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  Grown like the bud of an agave, on the point of rocketing up into a twelve-foot stalk and an explosion of flowers."

  Vijaya touched his arm. "Look," he said. "A party of Ele-mentaries coming down."

  Will turned towards the mountain and saw a young man in nailed boots and climbing clothes working his way down a chimney in the face of the precipice. At a place where the chimney offered a convenient resting place he halted and, throwing back his head, gave utterance to a loud Alpine yodel. Fifty feet above him a boy came out from behind a buttress of rock, lowered himself from the ledge on which he was standing and started down the chimney.

  "Does it tempt you?" Vijaya asked, turning to Murugan.

  Heavily overacting the part of the bored, sophisticated adult who has something better to do than watch the children at play, Murugan shrugged his shoulders. "Not in the slightest." He moved away and, sitting down on the weatherworn carving of a lion, pulled a gaudily bound American magazine out of his pocket and started to read.

  "What's the literature?" Vijaya asked.

  ''Science Fiction." There was a ring of defiance in Murugan's

  voice.

  Dr. Robert laughed. "Anything to escape from Fact."

  Pretending not to have heard him, Murugan turned a page and went on reading.

  "He's pretty good," said Vijaya, who had been watching the young climber's progress. "They have an experienced man at each end of the rope," he added. "You can't see the number-one man. He's behind that buttress in a parallel chimney thirty or forty feet higher up. There's a permanent iron spike up there, where you can belay the rope. The whole party could fall, and they'd be perfectly safe."

  Spread-eagled between footholds in either wall of the narrow chimney, the leader kept shouting up instructions and encour-

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  agement. Then, as the boy approached, he yielded his place, climbed down another twenty feet and, halting, yodeled again. Booted and trousered, a tall girl with her hair in pigtails appeared from behind the buttress and lowered herself into the chimney.

  "Excellent!" said Vijaya approvingly as he watched her.

  Meanwhile, from a low building at the foot of the cliff—the tropical version, evidently, of an Alpine hut—a group of young people had come out to see what was happening. They belonged, Will was told, to three other parties of climbers who had taken their Postelementary Test earlier in the day.

  "Does the best team win a prize?" Will asked.

  "Nobody wins anything," Vijaya answered. "This isn't a competition. It's more like an ordeal."

  "An ordeal," Dr. Robert explained, "which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they'll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence. But after the ordeal comes the revelation. In a few minutes these boys and girls will be given their first experience of the moksha-medicinc. They'll all take it together, and there'll be a religious ceremony in the temple."

  "Something like the Confirmation Service?"

  "Except that this is more than just a piece of theological rigmarole. Thanks to the moksha-medicinc, it includes an actual experience of the real thing."

  "The real thing?" Will shook his head. "Is there such a thing? I wish I could believe it."

  "You're not being asked to believe it," said Dr. Robert. "The real thing isn't a proposition; it's a state of being. We don't teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols. When it's time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them four hundred milligrams of revelation. Two firsthand expe-

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  riences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what's what."

  "And don't forget the dear old power problem," said Vijaya. "Rock climbing's a branch of applied ethics; it's another preventive substitute for bullying."

  "So my father ought to have been an Alpinist as well as a

  woodchopper."

  "One may laugh," said Vijaya, duly laughing. "But the fact remains that it works. It works. First and last I've climbed my way out of literally scores of the ugliest temptations to throw my weight around—and my weight being considerable," he added, "incitements were correspondingly strong."

  "There seems to be only one catch," said Will. "In the process of climbing your way out of temptation, you might fall and ..." Suddenly remembering what had happened to Dugald MacPhail, he broke off.

  It was Dr. Robert who finished the sentence. "Might fall," he said slowly, "and kill yourself. Dugald was climbing alone," he went on after a little pause. "Nobody knows what happened. The body wasn't found till the next day." There was a long

  silence.

  "Do you still think this is a good idea?" Will asked, pointing with his bamboo staff at the tiny figures crawling so laboriously on the face of that headlong wilderness of naked rock.

  "I still think it's a good idea," said Dr. Robert.

  "But poor Susila___"

  "Yes, poor Susila," Dr. Robert repeated. "And poor children, poor Lakshmi, poor me. But if Dugald hadn't made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons. Better court the danger of killing yourself than court the danger of killing other people, or at the very least making them miserable. Hurting them because you're naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a

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  precipice. And now," he continued in another tone, "I want to show you the view."

  "And I'll go and talk to those boys and girls." Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.

  Leaving Murugan to his Science Fiction, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city. Seen from this high vantage point in its shining completeness, it looked like the tiny, meticulous painting of a city in a medieval
book of hours.

  "There's Shivapuram," said Dr. Robert. "And that complex of buildings on the hill beyond the river—that's the great Buddhist temple. A little earlier than Borobudur, and the sculpture is as fine as anything in Further India." There was a silence. "This little summerhouse," he resumed, "is where we used to eat our picnics when it was raining. I shall never forget the time when Dugald (he must have been about ten) amused himself by climbing up here on the window ledge and standing on one leg in the attitude of the dancing Shiva. Poor Lakshmi, she was scared out of her wits. But Dugald was a born steeplejack. Which only makes the accident even more incomprehensible." He shook his head; then, after another silence, "The last time we all came up here," he said, "was eight or nine months ago. Dugald was still alive and Lakshmi wasn't yet too weak for a

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  day's outing with her grandchildren. He did that Shiva stunt again for the benefit of Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini. On one leg; and he kept his arms moving so fast that one could have sworn there were four of them." Dr. Robert broke off. Picking up a flake of mortar from the floor, he tossed it out of the window. "Down, down, down . . . Empty space. Pascal avait son gouffre. How strange that this should be at once the most powerful symbol of death and the most powerful symbol of the fullest, intensest life." Suddenly his face lighted up. "Do you see that hawk?"