Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried up the steps into the main lobby. Here the stink is overpowering, the filth beyond description. Close-up of two rats gnawing at a mutton bone, of the flies on the purulent eyelids of a small girl. The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuse on the floor, on the tattered remnants of ancient beds and sofas. Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples, we hear the voice of the Narrator.
NARRATOR
For this other death — not by plague, this time, not by poison, not by fire, not by artificially induced cancer, but by the squalid disintegration of the very substance of the species — this gruesome and infinitely unheroic death-in-birth could as well be the product of atomic industry as of atomic war. For in a world powered by nuclear fission everybody’s grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody’s grandmother — everybody’s grandfather and father and mother as well, everybody’s ancestors back to three and four and five generations of them that hate Me.
From the last of the deformed babies the Camera pulls back to Dr. Poole, who is standing, his handkerchief held to his still too sensitive nose, staring with horrified bewilderment at the scene around him.
‘All the babies look as if they were exactly the same age,’ he says, turning to Loola, who is still beside him.
‘Well, what do you expect? Seeing that practically all of them were born between the tenth and the seventeenth of December.’
‘But that must mean that ...’ He breaks off, deeply embarrassed. ‘I think,’ he concludes hastily, ‘that things must be rather different here from what they are in New Zealand ...’
In spite of the wine, he remembers his grey-haired Mother across the Pacific and, blushing guiltily, coughs and averts his eyes.
‘There’s Polly,’ cries his companion, and hurries across the room.
Mumbling apologies as he picks his way between the squatting or recumbent mothers, Dr. Poole follows her.
Polly is sitting on a straw-filled sack near what was once the Cashier’s desk. She is a girl of eighteen or nineteen, small and fragile, her head shaved like that of a criminal prepared for execution. She has a face whose beauty is all in the fine bones and the big luminous eyes. It is with an expression of hurt bewilderment that those eyes now look up into Loola’s face and from Loola’s face move without curiosity, almost without comprehension, to that of the stranger who accompanies her.
‘Darling!’
Loola bends down to kiss her friend. NO NO, from Dr. Poole’s viewpoint. Then she sits down beside Polly, and puts a comforting arm around her. Polly hides her face against the other’s shoulder and both girls begin to cry. As though infected by their grief, the little monster in Polly’s arms wakes up and utters a thin complaining howl. Polly raises her head from her friend’s shoulder and, her face still wet with tears, looks down at the deformed child, then opens her shirt and, pushing aside one of the crimson NO’s, gives it the breast. With an almost frantic hunger the child starts to suck.
‘I love him,’ Polly sobs. ‘I don’t want them to kill him.’
‘Darling,’ is all that Loola can find to say, ‘darling!’
A loud voice interrupts her.
‘Silence there! Silence!’
Other voices take up the refrain.
‘Silence!’
‘Silence there!’
‘Silence, silence!’
In the lobby all talk ceases abruptly and there is a long, expectant hush. Then a horn is blown, and another of those strangely babyish but self-important voices announces: ‘His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood.’
Long shot of the hotel’s main staircase. Dressed in a long robe of Anglo-Nubian goatskins and wearing a golden crown set with four tall, sharp horns, the Arch-Vicar is seen majestically descending. An acolyte holds a large goatskin umbrella over his head and he is followed by twenty or thirty ecclesiastical dignitaries, ranging in rank from three-horned Patriarchs to one-horned Presbyters and hornless Postulants. All of them, from the Arch-Vicar downwards, are conspicuously beardless, sweaty and fat-rumped, and, when any of them speaks, it is always in a fluting contralto.
The Chief rises from his litter and advances to meet the incarnation of spiritual authority.
NARRATOR
Church and State,
Greed and Hate: —
Two baboon-persons
In one Supreme Gorilla.
The Chief inclines his head respectfully. The Arch-Vicar raises his hands to his tiara, touches the two anterior horns, then lays his spiritually charged fingertips on the Chief’s forehead.
‘May you never be impaled upon His horns.’
‘Amen,’ says the Chief; then, straightening himself up and changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly business-like, ‘Everything O.K. for tonight?’ he asks. In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic long accustomed to playing the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervision of the Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of Familiars and Postulants has travelled from settlement to settlement, making the yearly census. Every mother of a monster has been marked down. Heads have been shaved and the preliminary whippings administered. By this time all the guilty have been transported to one or other of the three Purification Centres at Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles. The knives and the consecrated bulls’ pizzles have been made ready and, Belial willing, the ceremonies will begin at the appointed hour. Before tomorrow’s sunrise the purification of the land should be complete.
Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Reopening his eyes, he turns to the ecclesiastics in his train.
‘Go, take the shaven ones,’ he squeaks, ‘take these defiled vessels, these living testimonies of Belial’s enmity, and lead them to the place of their shame.’
A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and out into the crowd of mothers.
‘Hurry, hurry!’
‘In Belial’s name.’
Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their feet. Their little burdens of deformity pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move towards the door in a silence more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.
Medium shot of Polly on her sack of straw. A young Postulant approaches and pulls her roughly to her feet.
‘Up!’ he shouts in a voice of an angry and malevolent child. ‘Get up, you spawner of filth!’
And he slaps her across the face. Cringing away from a second blow, Polly almost runs to rejoin her fellow-victims near the entrance.
Dissolve to a night sky, with stars between thin bars of cloud and a waning moon already low in the west. There is a long silence; then we begin to hear the sound of distant chanting. Gradually it becomes articulate in the words, ‘Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest,’ repeated again and again.
NARRATOR
An inch from the eyes, the ape’s black paw
Eclipses the stars, the moon, and even
Space itself. Five stinking fingers
Are all the World.
The silhouette of a baboon’s hand advances towards the Camera, grows larger and more menacing, and finally engulfs everything in blackness.
We cut to the interior of the Los Angeles Coliseum. By the smoky and intermittent light of torches we see the faces of a great congregation. Tier above tier, like massed gargoyles, spouting the groundless faith,
the subhuman excitement, the collective imbecility which are the products of ceremonial religion — spouting them from black eye-holes, from quivering nostrils, from parted lips, while the chanting monotonously continues: ‘Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest.’ Below, in the arena, hundreds of shaven girls and women, each with her tiny monster in her arms, are kneeling before the steps of the High Altar. Awe-inspiring in their chasubles of Anglo-Nubian fur, in their tiaras of gilded horns, Patriarchs and Archimandrites, Presbyters and Postulants stand in two groups at the head of the altar steps, chanting antiphonally in a high treble to the music of bone recorders and a battery of xylophones.
SEMICHORUS I
Glory to Belial,
SEMICHORUS II
To Belial in the lowest!
Then, after a pause, the music of the chant changes and a new phase of the service begins.
SEMICHORUS I
It is a terrible thing,
SEMICHORUS II
Terrible, terrible,
SEMICHORUS I
To fall into the hands,
SEMICHORUS II
The huge hands and the hairy,
SEMICHORUS I
Into the hands of the living Evil,
SEMICHORUS II
Hallelujah!
SEMICHORUS I
Into the hands of the Enemy of man,
SEMICHORUS II
Our boon-companions;
SEMICHORUS I
Of the Rebel Against the Order of Things —
SEMICHORUS II
And we have conspired with him against ourselves,
SEMICHORUS I
Of the great Blowfly who is the Lord of Flies,
SEMICHORUS II
Crawling in the heart;
SEMICHORUS I
Of the naked Worm that never dies,
SEMICHORUS II
And, never dying, is the source of our eternal life;
SEMICHORUS I
Of the Prince of the Powers of the Air —
SEMICHORUS II
Spitfire and Stuka, Beelzebub and Azazel, Hallelujah!
SEMICHORUS I
Of the Lord of this world;
SEMICHORUS II
And its defiler;
SEMICHORUS I
Of the great Lord Moloch,
SEMICHORUS II
Patron of all nations;
SEMICHORUS I
Of Mammon our master,
SEMICHORUS II
Omnipresent:
SEMICHORUS I
Of Lucifer the all-powerful,
SEMICHORUS II
In Church, in State;
SEMICHORUS I
Of Belial,
SEMICHORUS II
Transcendent,
SEMICHORUS I
Yet, oh, how immanent!
ALL TOGETHER
Of Belial, Belial, Belial, Belial.
As the chanting dies away, two hornless Postulants descend, seize the nearest of the shaven women, raise her to her feet and lead her up, dumb with terror, to where, at the head of the altar steps, the Patriarch of Pasadena stands whetting the blade of a long butcher’s knife. The thick-set Mexican mother stands staring at him in fascinated horror, open-mouthed. Then one of the Postulants takes the child out of her arms and holds it up before the Patriarch.
Close shot of a characteristic product of progressive technology — a hare-lipped Mongolian idiot. Over the shot we hear the chanting of the Chorus.
SEMICHORUS I
I show you the sign of Belial’s enmity,
SEMICHORUS II
Foul, foul;
SEMICHORUS I
I show you the fruit of Belial’s grace,
SEMICHORUS II
Filth infused in filth.
SEMICHORUS I
I show you the penalty for obedience to His Will,
SEMICHORUS II
On earth as it is in Hell.
SEMICHORUS I
Who is the breeder of all deformities?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
Who is the chosen vessel of Unholiness?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
And the curse that is on our race?
SEMICHORUS II
Mother.
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed, possessed —
SEMICHORUS II
Inwardly, outwardly:
SEMICHORUS I
Her incubus an object, her subject a succubus —
SEMICHORUS II
And both are Belial;
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed by the Blowfly.
SEMICHORUS II
Crawling and stinging,
SEMICHORUS I
Possessed by that which irresistibly
SEMICHORUS II
Goads her, drives her,
SEMICHORUS I
Like the soiled fitchew,
SEMICHORUS II
Like the sow in her season,
SEMICHORUS I
Down a steep place
SEMICHORUS II
Into filth unutterable;
SEMICHORUS I
Whence, after much wallowing,
SEMICHORUS II
After many long draughts of the swill,
SEMICHORUS I
Mother emerging, nine months later,
SEMICHORUS II
Bears this monstrous mockery of a man.
SEMICHORUS I
How then shall there be atonement?
SEMICHORUS II
By blood.
SEMICHORUS I
How shall Belial be propitiated?
SEMICHORUS II
Only by blood.
The Camera moves from the altar to where, tier above tier, the pale gargoyles stare down in hungry anticipation at the scene below. And suddenly the faces open their black mouths and start to chant in unison, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence and an ever greater volume of sound:
‘Blood, blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood ...’
We cut back to the altar. The sound of the mindless, subhuman chanting continues monotonously over the shot.
The Patriarch hands his whetstone to one of the attendant Archimandrites, then with his left hand takes the deformed child by the neck and impales it on his knife. It utters two or three little bleating cries, and is silent.
The Patriarch turns, allows half a pint of blood to spill out on the altar, then tosses the tiny corpse into the darkness beyond. The chanting rises in a savage crescendo:
‘Blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood ...’
‘Drive her away!’ cries the Patriarch in a commanding squeak.
In terror the mother turns and hurries down the steps. The two Postulants follow, striking at her savagely with their consecrated bulls’ pizzles. The chanting is punctuated by piercing screams. From the congregation comes a noise that is half commiserating groan, half grunt of satisfaction.
Flushed and a little breathless from so unusually strenuous an exercise, the plump young Postulants seize another woman — a girl this time, frail and slender almost to the point of childishness. Her face is hidden as they drag her up the steps. Then one of them steps back a little and we recognize Polly.
Thumbless, eight-nippled, the child is held up before the Patriarch.
SEMICHORUS I
Foul, foul! How shall there be atonement?
SEMICHORUS II
By blood.
SEMICHORUS I
How shall Belial be propitiated?
This time it is the entire congregation that answers:
‘Only by blood, blood, blood, blood, the blood ...’
The Patriarch’s left hand closes about the infant’s neck.
‘No, no, don’t. Please!’
Polly makes a movement towards him, but is held back by the Postulants. Very deliberately, while she sobs, the Patriarch impales the child on his knife, then tosses the bod
y into the darkness behind the altar.
There is a loud cry. We cut to a medium close shot of Dr. Poole. Conspicuous in his front-row seat, he has fainted.
Dissolve to the interior of the Unholy of Unholies. The shrine, which stands at one end of the arena’s shorter axis, to the side of the high altar, is a small oblong chamber of adobe brick, with an altar at one end and, at the other, sliding doors, closed at present, except for a gap at the centre, through which one can see what is going on in the arena. On a couch in the centre of the shrine reclines the Arch-Vicar. Not far off a hornless Postulant is frying pigs’ trotters over a charcoal brazier, and near him a two-horned Archimandrite is doing his best to revive Dr. Poole, who lies inanimate on a stretcher. Cold water and two or three sharp slaps in the face at last produce the desired result. The botanist sighs, opens his eyes, wards off another slap and sits up.
‘Where am I?’ he asks.
‘In the Unholy of Unholies,’ the Archimandrite answers. ‘And there is His Eminence.’
Dr. Poole recognizes the great man and has enough presence of mind to incline his head respectfully.
‘Bring a stool,’ commands the Arch-Vicar.
The stool is brought. He beckons to Dr. Poole, who scrambles to his feet, walks a little unsteadily across the room and sits down. As he does so a particularly loud shriek makes him turn his head.
Long shot, from his viewpoint, of the High Altar. The Patriarch is in the act of tossing yet another little monster into the darkness, while his acolytes shower blows upon its screaming mother.
Cut back to Dr. Poole, who shudders and covers his face with his hands. Over the shot we hear the monotonous chanting of the congregation. ‘Blood, blood, blood.’
‘Horrible!’ says Dr. Poole. ‘Horrible!’
‘And yet there’s blood in your religion too,’ remarks the Arch-Vicar, smiling ironically: “Washed in the blood of the Lamb.” Isn’t that correct?’
‘Perfectly correct,’ Dr. Poole admits. ‘But we don’t actually do the washing. We only talk about it — or, more often, we only sing about it, in hymns.’
Dr. Poole averts his eyes. There is a silence. At this moment the Postulant approaches with a large platter, which, together with a couple of bottles, he sets down on a table beside the couch. Spearing one of the trotters with a genuine antique twentieth-century forgery of an early Georgian fork, the Arch-Vicar stars to gnaw.