Mulefa

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The mulefa are a race of beings who inhabit a parallel Earth in the novel The Amber Spyglass, the third part of the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.

The mulefa are sentient beings who evolved in a radically different fashion to humans. An individual is referred to as a zalif. They possess an anatomy based on a diamond-framed skeleton, have hide, short horns and a trunk. Lacking hands, the mulefa make much use of trunk-gestures in communicating - small movements and "flicks" are an integral part of their vocabulary. They appear to be genetically related to the creatures simply referred to as "grazers", which are a source of milk, meat, hides and other materials to the mulefa.

The most-notable feature of the mulefa is their use of large circular seeds from their world's "seed-pod trees" to travel around their countryside; the seeds fit neatly onto a spur on their legs when the beings reach a certain age. Of course, a highway of sorts is required for easy movement and this is provided by ancient lava flows now solidified into smooth rivers of rock running across the land. As the book notes, it is the three combined elements of seed, spur and rock formation which leads to the current mulefa existence.

From a technological point of view, the mulefa appear primitive. They live in wattle-and-daub villages and use hand tools - there is no evidence of any form of mechanisation in their world. This is most likely a result of the limitations imposed by their handless bodies and their dependence on the wheel pods. However, the mulefa exist harmoniously with the natural world - their use of the pods on the "roads" allows the extremely hard exterior to crack and the seeds to emerge. These are germinated by the mulefa, allowing the wheel-pod trees to survive. Reference is also made to their efficient culling of the grazer herds, their non-intrusive use of trees to make lacquer and their distilling of acid from rocks. One of their few natural enemies are huge white birds called tualapi which habitually destroy settlements with chilling ferocity.

Naturally, the mulefa view the world differently to humans, and by their own admission to Mary Malone they have much slower thought processes and do not so easily establish links and patterns. They have an extraordinary race memory though, remembering all of their history from the previous 33000 years. At that time, it seems that they first interacted with the wheel-pod trees in what is their equivalent of the Adam and Eve fable, although they see the event in a very positive light. The oil from the pods (seemingly awash with Dust, or sraf as the mulefa call it) make them aware that they are mulefa, conscious beings with the ability to reason and remember. They also perceive the sraf for the first time, seeing its close association with the innocence–experience divide.