In this chapter, Huxley opens another part of his dystopian world — the Savage Reservation — contrasting it implicitly and explicitly with the world of London, where the rest of the novel is set.
In one sense, Malpais represents the opposite of the rest of the dystopia, an "uncivilized" place against which the reader — as well as tourists Bernard and Lenina — can gauge the imagined progress of the "civilized" world. Here, on the Savage Reservation, age changes people unchecked by chemicals and hormones; women give birth and breastfeed their babies; and the natural process of decay produces sights and smells that appall the sensitive Lenina. In fact, "Civilization is Sterilization" underscores most of Lenina's experience in the Reservation. Fordian London is so clean that birth and old age have been swept away entirely, like germ-producing bacteria. But in Malpais, the pains of birth and death exist and endure unconquered — still the essential facts of human life.
Lenina faces these facts most dramatically in her meeting with Linda, who seems her mirror-double, the woman she might have been under different circumstances. (Note, for example, the similarity between the names "Lenina" and "Linda.") Linda's unspeakable fate — to become a mother and to grow old — is nothing less than a horror, an obscenity, really, to a Fordian mind. As an object of blasphemy and revulsion, Linda represents enormous power, one that Bernard will use in a later chapter to regain his position, just as he will use Linda's son, John, to improve his social standing.
