Chapter 5 Summary

At eight o'clock, Lenina and Henry are finished with their evening game of Obstacle Golf. They pause in Henry's machine at eight hundred feet over the fading landscape, which reveals the various lower-caste barracks of the Golf Club and the smaller Alpha and Beta houses on the other side of the dividing wall. Further southeast are the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. Henry remarks how fine it is to think that people can go on being socially useful even after death; more than a kilo and a half of phosphorus is recovered from every corpse, which is used to make plants grow. But Lenina thinks it's queer that Alphas and Betas won't make any more plants grow than Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons. Henry says everyone is physico-chemically equal, and even Epsilons perform indispensable services.

This reminds Lenina of a time when...