О дивный новый мир / Brave New World. 4 уровень

At last, thank Ford, he was through and, yes, it was Helmholtz, who promised to go round at once and turn off the tap, yes, at once, but took this opportunity to tell him what the D.H.C. had said, in public, yesterday evening…

“What? He’s looking out for someone to take my place?” Bernard’s voice was agonized. “So it’s actually decided? Did he mention Iceland?”

He hung up the receiver and turned back to Lenina. His face was pale.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“The matter?” He dropped heavily into a chair.

“I’m going to be sent to Iceland.”

Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected to some great trial, some pain, some persecution. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s office, he had imagined himself stoically accepting suffering without a word. Now he realized that it was because he had not taken the threats quite seriously, he had not believed that, when it came to the point, the D.H.C. would ever do anything.

Now there wasn’t a trace of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage.

He raged against himself[26 - raged against himself – злился на себя]-what a fool! – against the Director-how unfair not to give him that other chance, that other chance which, he now had no doubt at all, he had always intended to take. And Iceland, Iceland…

Lenina shook her head.

In the end she persuaded him to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes later he felt better. A message from the porter announced that a Reservation Guard had come round with a plane and was waiting on the roof of the hotel.

They went up at once.

The programme was: a bird’s-eye view of ten or a dozen of the principal pueblos, then a landing for lunch in the valley of Malpais. The rest-house was comfortable there, and up at the pueblo the savages would probably be celebrating their summer festival. It would be the best place to spend the night.

They took their seats in the plane and set off.

Ten minutes later they were crossing the frontier that separated civilization from savagery. Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over mesas, the fence marched on and on. At its foot, here and there, a mosaic of white bones, a still unrotted carcass marked the place where an animal had come too close to the destroying wires.

“They never learn,” said the green-uniformed pilot.