7-10

The Indian guide leads Bernard and Lenina into the reservation, where the smells and the sight of poverty, disease, and old age immediately assault them. Since there is no live birth in the outside society, Lenina finds the scene of a woman nursing a child to be disgusting. She then discovers that both she and Bernard forgot their soma, so she has to see the village consciously rather than through the veil of the narcotic. However, Bernard feels a strange fascination with the scene. Bernard and Lenina meet Linda, John's mother, who rejoices at seeing civilized people again. She complains that there is too much dirt and that she has to drink mescal (alcohol) and use peyote, a hallucinatory drug, in place of soma. The tribal dance shows that although their culture differs entirely from Bernard and Lenina’s, it is also imperfect because it too enforces the suppression of emotion.