CHAPTER XVII

THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL

It was four in the afternoon when we sighted Parahyba, capital of the

state of the same name, on its ridge beside a river of similar

designation which we had been following for several hours. We were met

by a considerable delegation, including the Danish manager of the

“Cinema Rio Branco,” a young chap whom Vinhães had left behind to look

after his interests, and the German owner of the “Pensão Allemã,” whom

some unauthorized friend from Recife had told to prepare rooms for us.

As the only other hotel-keeper in town admitted, evidently under the

impression that it was a recommendation, that half his rooms were given

over to unprotected women, I allowed our personal baggage to be carried

away by the solicitous German, while three little carts dragged the rest

uphill to the cinema. By the time our apparatus was set up and the

tickets stamped, perspiration was oozing from our shoes. I raced back to

the _pensão_ to get rid of two days’ dust and whiskers, and by the time

I appeared again the house was packed to the roof. But as it held only

four hundred, and the president of the state had thrust himself in with

half a dozen generously painted females, and a score of other

“influential citizens” had followed his example, it was evident that we

were not going to win an independent fortune in Parahyba. To make things

worse, “Tut” had failed to try out the apparatus before the doors were

opened, and our first number flashed on the screen without a sound to

accompany it! The phonograph had suffered some slight injury during the

rough journey and refused to speak. To my astonishment a great howl of

satisfaction went up from the audience, followed by a constant series of

cat-calls until the loose screw had been found and the trouble remedied.

It was not merely, as I first suspected, that sense of being greater

than the inventor whose invention fails to work which had delighted

these lineal descendants of African tree-climbers, but the pleasure of

what might be called the anti-Kinetophonists at being able to say, even

momentarily, “I told you so!” Formation of petty cliques is one of the

chief pastimes in these dawdling old towns off the track of world

travel, and Parahyba had divided, without our knowledge, for and against

us almost at the moment we descended from the train. Those who sided

with the disgruntled hotel-keeper joined the friends of the rival cinema

in an effort to boycott us, with the result that, though we did not know

it until next day, by the time the show had been set up all Parahyba had

been assured that both the Kinetophone and this “gringo” Edison were

humbugs of the first water, and that those who came to see it would be

wasting their money. The instant destruction of this theory as soon as

the phonograph had been readjusted confounded the opposition, but the

atmosphere of ill-will, and of doubt, always engendered among the

volatile Brazilians by the slightest mishap on an opening night, could

be felt as long as we remained in the town.

Parahyba was founded in 1585 by Martín Leitão—his name, by the way,

means suckling pig—eighteen miles from the mouth of the river of the

same name. This region was once abundant in the _pau brazil_ for which

the country was named, but to-day its principal product is cotton, bales

of which were exchanging places with barrels of Minneapolis flour in the

freight-cars behind the station. Most of the town’s estimated 30,000

inhabitants appeared to be loafing government employees. They were a

melancholy lot, on the whole, to whom life was evidently as joyless as

to the Puritan, crushed under the weight of existence and always

struggling to repress the desire to live gladly. “These tropical

people,” said a Dane who had lived long among them, “have none of the

joy of living, none of the chest-expansion of pleasure at confronting

life which is common to northern peoples. Such enjoyment as they have is

made up almost exclusively of the constant stimulating of the sexual

instinct. They have no feeling for what we people of the North call a

“home,” and never really found one. They have a wildly romantic idea of

marriage, which means to them nothing but physical gratification, and,

their sensual instincts satisfied, they continue to live together merely

out of custom, following the line of least resistance. There is not a

man in town, from president to porter, who does not keep at least one

other woman besides his wife, if he can by hook or crook afford it.”

[Illustration: The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of

downtown Recife]

[Illustration: In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most

important crop]

[Illustration: Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink]

[Illustration: Wherever a Brazilian train halts long enough the

passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee]

“Whatever the economic condition of the colony,” boasts the History of

Parahyba, “it never failed to bequeath plenty of churches to posterity.”

The town terminates in a bulking old religious edifice, and is

generously supplied with others throughout its length. Of breadth it has

little, for it falls quickly away on either side of its ridge into cacao

groves or vast reaches of bluish swamp-like bushes, half covered at high

tide. The dead hot streets of noonday were like those of an abandoned

city; stepping from the sunshine into the shade was like dropping an

enormous weight off one’s head and shoulders. Most of the thirty

thousand live in mud huts with palm-leaf roofs and doors, the earth for

floor, and the omnipresent hammock for chair, bed, and favorite

occupation. The central praça has a hint of grass, by great effort and

much carrying of water, and glorious royal palms stand high above it.

But beautiful as it is, the royal palm does not take high rank as a

shade tree. Elsewhere the streets, like Kipling’s railroad, soon run out

to sand-heaps. An hour’s swift walk from the new power-house at the end

of the made-in-Germany tram line brings one, through hot sandy jungle,

heavily wooded in places, to the open sea, where the well-to-do

_Parahybanos_ go in “summer” by a little railroad that did not operate

in this wintry season. Small steamers can reach Parahyba at high tide,

though few ever do so. Its port is Cabedello at the mouth of the river,

the fortress of which, like most of Brazil north of Rio, fell several

times into the hands of Holland, the name of the town being once changed

by Maurice of Nassau to “Margarida” in honor of his mother.

It is only 130 miles by rail from Parahyba to Natal, capital of the next

state north, but it takes more than twenty-four hours to cover them. For

some distance the route is the same as that back to Recife; then at

Entroncamento, which is Portuguese for Junction, another branch starts

north, striking well inland, like the other lines of the “G.W.B.R.” The

yellow-green _cajueiro_, rugged as an olive-tree, was often the only

vegetation that broke the dreary sand landscape. Evidently the constant

trade winds that were so welcome to the sun-scorched skin are deadly to

the soil, blowing far to the south and west the rains it needs so badly.

White men living in northeastern Brazil complain that eyes grow weak

early in life from the constant glare. Even bread dries up in this

moistureless, heated air almost between the cutting and the raising to

the lips. Here and there were patches of cotton, in saffron-colored

blossom, planted in small quantity and only by the poorer classes, for

those who keep account of profit and loss do not find it worth the

trouble. Yet one carried away the impression that, properly irrigated

and inhabited by an energetic people, this thirsty paunch of South

America should be able to feed all the armies of Europe. Grazing,

however, is the main industry on the larger estates. In North Brazil the

word _fazenda_ loses the significance of “plantation” that it has to the

south and means cattle ranch, of which there are great numbers farther

inland. Such plantations as are cultivated are usually in the hands of a

_morador_, literally a “dweller,” who runs the place to suit himself and

sells the crop to the owner at a fixed price agreed upon between them.

There are few absentee owners in this settled eastern part of the

region, however, even the “best families” spending much of the year on

their estates and only a few months in their town house in the capital.

The more-or-less negro laborers are paid from 500 to 1000 reis a day,

with ground on which to build their mud and palm-leaf huts; but it is

probably as much as they earn, and there is no approach to slavery or

peonage, for the obsequiousness of the working class, so striking to the

American traveler in most of South America, has no exponents in Brazil.

A moderate range of hills gradually grew up on our left, and we rose

high enough above the general dead-level to look across immense reaches

of Brazil, bushy and faintly rolling, flooded with sun to the ghost of

the far-off range. As usual, there was not a drop of water on the train,

which would not have been so bad if anything to drink had been sold

along the line. But there were not even oranges, and dining-cars do not

run above Parahyba. Well on in the afternoon we halted at a station with

a large earthenware crock of water, lukewarm and of swampy odor, on the

platform. The first man to drink from the single tin can hanging beside

it dropped it into the vessel, whereupon the next travel-stained mulatto

rolled up a sleeve and plunged in a yellow arm to the elbow. The natives

saw nothing amiss in this, and the rest of us were forced to drink

anyway, for we were on the verge of choking to death.

Toward sunset we drew up, in a bushy half-desert, at the town of

Guarabira, recently renamed Independencia, but a change which the

populace had refused to adopt, perhaps because they found the new name

sarcastic. Here all trains, from north or south, stop overnight, so that

the so-called hotels, lacking more of the indispensable requirements of

public hostelries than the stay-at-home could imagine possible, were

crowded beyond their capacity, though on four nights a week they are

empty. There was a good cinema in Independencia, which plays only on the

three train-nights and on Sundays. The owner had gone down to Parahyba

to see the Kinetophone and had come back with me, coaxing me all the way

to give him a two-day contract. Instead, I signed for one day on the

return trip, for this time the show was to sail directly from Cabedello

to Ceará, picking me up at Natal.

By six next morning the same crowd of us, all men, were riding on into

the north by the same train. Toward eight we crossed the arbitrary

boundary into Rio Grande do Norte, grinding on through unbroken miles of

the same bushy wilderness. Every town of half a dozen huts sent its

quota of beggars down to meet the train, so that the begging line that

had begun at Maceió was never broken. The “Great Western of Brazil”

could add materially to its revenue by a tax on station mendicants.

Before ten we stopped at a partly whitewashed collection of desert huts

for _jantar_, first of Brazil’s two daily meals. The first-class

passengers charged madly across the sand to one of the huts, where a

long table was set for some thirty guests. Each “washed” his hands in

the single pan of yellow water, wiped them on the one towel, and fell to

with a mighty noise upon the immense plates of fish, roast pork, beef in

all its forms, rice, _farofa_, and chicken which, already cold,

garnished the table. To wash down this stalwart provender there was

nauseating lukewarm water, or equally tepid and unpalatable beer, at

prices only within the reach of the wealthy. As we ate, the whistle of

our train kept blowing, as if the contrivance were about to dash away

again, and having gulped down the dinner ostrich fashion, we rushed back

on board and gradually crawled on into the north.

Beyond, we rose slightly, and there opened out a vista of flat valley

with some fertility. Bananas and green cocoanuts were offered for sale

at some of the stations, from nearly all of which great baskets of

mangos were shipped. Here the chief features of a landscape uninspiring

as a decapitated palm-tree were fields of mandioca, their willow-like

bushes from one to ten feet high. The tuberous root of this plant is

peeled and the poison washed or squeezed out, after which it is turned

into one of the several flours or meals that stand in jars on every

Brazilian table. If it is simply cooked, fermented, and dried, the

result is _farinha secca_, white, bran-like mandioca flour; a more

elaborate process, including grating under water, gives the yellow

_farinha d’agoa_, which seems to be the favorite. A coarser form of the

same product is called _farofa_, and during the cooking there are

precipitated the gum-like grains we call tapioca. _Taquira_, a species

of alcohol, is also produced from mandioca. _Farinha_ or _farofa_ are to

the Brazilians what potatoes are to the Irish. Whole boatfuls of it in

leaf-and-creeper baskets may be seen loading or unloading at every coast

town, and the native who could not reach out and get a spoonful—or a

handful—of this, his favorite fodder, with which to thicken his soup or

stew or to eat dry, would consider his dinner a total failure.

The wearisome desert country broke up frankly into sand-dunes as we

neared the coast again, and through these and a bit of arid vegetation

we rumbled into Natal, not only the end of the “Great Western of Brazil

Railway,” but the jumping-off place of those traveling north, for here

South America turns sharply to the westward. A little line, staggering

under the name of “Estrada de Ferro Central do Rio Grande do Norte,”

does start from across the harbor and wander a few hours and about as

many miles out into the country, but it soon returns, as if terrified at

the thought of losing itself in the choking wilderness. There would be

no choice henceforth but to take to the sea. The Brazilian Government

has long contemplated extending its principal line from Pirapora on the

São Francisco to Pará, which would make it the “Central Railway of

Brazil” indeed; but even had this nebulous project already been carried

out, I should not have chosen that route, for while scenery is all very

well in its way, the great bulk of Brazil’s estimated thirty millions of

people live along her seaboard.

Raul de Freitas Walker, a more than ordinarily endurable young

Brazilian, agent for the “Companhia Cinematographica Brazileira” with

which we had signed our first contract, agreed to share with me the only

room available in the “International Annex,” another of the alleged

“hotels” of North Brazil. It was a garret room, in which Freitas

occupied the hammock and I the bed, and the best that can be said of it

is that it had first choice right off the ocean of the constant trade

winds bound inland on their drought provoking errands. Its scant

half-inch partitions made the pastimes of my fellow-guests and the

mulatto girls, who accosted one everywhere with an inviting air, quite

free from privacy, but there was no choice between enduring them and

going out to sleep in the sand on the beach. The maternal grandfather of

Freitas was English; hence his silent last name, which he pronounced,

when forced to do so, “Vahl-kar.” His British blood had not saved him

from being a true Brazilian, and on the second day he left me with

vociferous regrets and moved over to a cheaper one-story hotel, not to

save money but “so I won’t have to climb stairs.”

Natal is rather a pleasing town, for all its aridity. Considering the

difficulties it has to struggle against in the form of heat, sand, and

the usual tropical drawbacks, it is almost worthy of praise. Though they

are knee-deep in sand wherever they are not paved, its streets are wide,

and there are several large public gardens marked by the indolent

swaying of flexible palm-trees. Government buildings, and a few private

ones, are far from being eyesores. If the electric-lights are weak, they

are at least widespread, and electric tramcars carry one in any

direction, notably to the top of a great sand ridge called Petropolis,

from which there is a far-reaching view of curving beach edged with

leaning cocoanut-palms, of the reef that gave Natal its site, and the

old fort at the narrow entrance to the bottle-like little harbor.

Perhaps there are 12,000 inhabitants, if one counts all the mud huts

scattered about the sand-blown outskirts—for in places the sand is

drifted completely over the rails of the tram-line that stretches on

over the rolling sandhills to nowhere.

At one of the two cinemas our poster portrait of Edison was already

displayed, though it would be at least two months before the show could

play there. Pará beer, reminding me that the end of Brazil was

approaching, was sold in the cafés and hotels, but it seemed to enjoy

less popularity than a mineral water from Wisconsin, widely consumed by

Brazilians. Local drugstores advertised an “Específico contra Cançaço”

(Specific against Tiredness) which should have won its inventor a

fortune in Brazil alone. Many otherwise pretty girls—if one could

overlook a cocoa tint—lost their rating for lack of good teeth.

Politicians in heavy black frock-suits, waiting in the broiling sun for

others of their clan, made it a pleasure to know that there are some

places where politicians must do penance for their sins. Social

formality refused to take climate into account, and at the gate of the

sandy cemetery, hot as the most approved purgatory, male visitors were

requested to remove their hats! Sharp-cut masses of black shade

alternating with patches of blinding glare, a parrot trying to pick the

red spots off a ten of diamonds as the only sign of life in a long

noonday street-vista, contrasted with the shrieking far into the night

of sidewalk groups—for Brazilians of the north cannot discuss the

simplest subjects without howling, dancing, and waving their hands in

their excitement—complete the picture of Natal.

St. Patrick’s Day in the morning dawned hotter than I had ever known it

before. As I looked out across sandhills and ocean toward the soft

summer sunrise, I made out the steamer _Pará_ of the “Lloyd-Brazileiro”

already at anchor a stone’s-throw from the shore. It was just too far

off to make out whether “Tut” and the show were on board, and after

waiting in vain for them to come ashore I slipped into my oldest

garments and set out on a last tramp through Natal’s ankle-deep sand in

an effort to reduce the surplus energy that is so troublesome on

shipboard. There was no danger of being left behind, for the _Pará_ was

bottled up in the harbor until high tide at two in the afternoon. Groups

of passengers came ashore, but I began to fear that my “company” had

been left behind. Soon after noon he of the unpronounceable grandfather

and I, not to mention a new steamer-chair, now that I must take to the

sea, were rowed out to the _Pará_, on which I found to my amazement that

not only Carlos and the agent of Vinhães but even “Tut” had squatted all

day without once going ashore!

The exit from Natal harbor is as difficult as the oldest seadog would

care to attempt in a large steamer. The long jagged reef has only one

break in it, and just inside that there is a series of sharp and mainly

submerged rocks. A ship of any size, therefore, must make a right-angle

turn in almost her own length, through an opening barely her own width

by which at low tide there is scarcely exit for a rowboat. The rusted

boiler and ribs of a steamer piled up close beside the entrance showed

that the passage has not always been as successful as ours, and there

was a general sigh of relief and a settling down to deck-chair ease as

the _Pará_ took to pulsating steadily across a smooth blue sea toward

the setting sun.

The coast of Brazil resembles Broadway,—a main thoroughfare along which,

if one travel it long enough, many faces become familiar. There were

half a dozen men on the _Pará_ whom even I, accustomed to crawl along

the land wherever possible, instead of following the broad sea route of

Brazilian travel, had seen before somewhere—along the Avenida of Rio, at

some theater in São Paulo, on the streets of Bahia or Pernambuco. If I

had ever wondered during my dust-laden, cinder-bitten, oft-broken

journey from the Rio Grande of the South to the far different one of the

North how Brazilian ladies or the more finnicky of their male

contemporaries travel from one city to another, here was the answer.

They take to the sea, either in one of the foreign ships that ply up and

down the coast or in the sometimes no less luxurious steamers of their

own national line.

The “Lloyd-Brazileiro,” like the “Central Railway,” is operated by the

Brazilian Government, and is thereby subject to many of the same

misfortunes. If one can believe a fourth of the tales that float up and

down the coast, the national temperament is as much at home on the

rolling main as on Brazilian soil. Rumor has it—and verification is

often thrust upon the traveler who is in the habit of leaving his

berth—that the line has three times as many employees as are

required,—needy friends of politicians ranging all the way from

pantry-boys without potatoes to peel to captains and managers with

nothing to command or direct. “Deadheads” are notoriously so numerous

that any Brazilian who pays his fare runs the risk of losing caste among

his clever friends. Congressmen and the like not only travel on

government boats free of charge as a legal right, but carry with them

whole Brazilian families, from upholstered mama and her dusky maid down

through the whole stairway of children and their servants to the pet

poodles and shrieking parrots. Even the mere citizen who plans to take

to the sea is said to have no difficulty in obtaining his ticket without

the troublesome formalities of the pocketbook route—provided, of course,

that his political affiliations are suitable. Those are only foolish

travelers, native or foreign, scandal has it, who pay, even to New York,

more than the fare in the class next below the one in which they wish to

make the journey, for it is a simple matter to “fix it up” after they

get on board. The “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamers carry livestock and fowls

as food on their journeys. When a ship arrives in Pará or Manaos, the

story runs, the steward sells those that are left—and an hour later he

goes ashore and buys back the same animals for the return trip,

naturally not at the same price at which they were sold. The line has

always been noted for its generous yearly deficit. In 1914 the

government tried to sell it, but there was not a single bid. Private

owners knew the insuperable obstacles to discharging or refusing to

carry free the swarms of political favorites and putting the boats on a

paying basis.

On board, however, few evidences of these things meet the naked eye.

Outward propriety, from scandal-less grafting to frock-coat and spats,

is a fixed Brazilian characteristic. The _Pará_ was one of the large new

ships of the line, British made, and even government ownership had not

yet succeeded in ruining it. In the sumptuous music-room reigned the air

of a salon gathering in high society, the nearest approach to luxury

which many a Brazilian ever gets. I sat late into the moonlighted

evening, broken by music and attempts thereat, idly comparing and

checking off the pretty girls who flitted in and out among the rather

pompous gathering. There were a few who, could one have extracted what

they had in place of them and inserted brains, would have made quite

passable domestic ornaments—for the few years until they were overtaken

by that fatal faded fatness that comes so early upon South American

women.

At ten next morning the boundless sea was broken on the port bow by a

long white strip of sand, behind which gradually grew up a shadowy range

of almost mountains. By noon, but long after the midday meal, we dropped

anchor before Ceará, capital of the state of the same name, a flat and

sandy town, with the usual churches and palm-trees rising above it, as

did two dimly seen clusters of hills against the fathomless horizon.

Ceará is the worst landing-place on the coast of Brazil, being no port

at all but merely a sandy shore, marked by a lighthouse far out on the

end of a tongue of sand and open to all the winds from off the North

Atlantic. What it might be in bad weather was not hard to guess, for

even with the slight swell of a calm and cloudless day the scores of

heavy rowboats and freight barges that came out a mile or more to meet

us rolled and pitched like capering schoolboys. That we would be ducked

in getting ashore was taken for granted, that being a common disaster in

the port of Ceará; my fears were rather for our outfit, which seemed

several times on the point of being hopelessly smashed or dropped

overboard before we got it lowered into one of the toy barges. Even

passengers have been lost here, and the rusted carcass of an old steamer

lay piled up on the beach. At the shore end the landing facilities were

even worse. A high and flimsy wooden wharf thrust itself far out to

barge depth where, with the boat rising and falling twenty feet or more

with every swell, half a dozen languid negroes, tugging at the extreme

end of an often too-short rope and liable, in their Brazilian apathy, to

let go at any moment, slowly hoisted our travel-battered old maroon

trunks upon it. To have dropped almost any one of them would have meant

the immediate canceling of the Kinetophone tour of Brazil.

As things were landed on the wharf, negroes put the lighter articles on

their heads and straggled ashore—not, of course, without mishaps. One

haughty lady, returning from Rio or Paris, had among her belongings six

huge pasteboard boxes, which she or her maid had carelessly tied shut,

and which an equally careless negro tried to carry off all at once

without securing them. He had taken three steps when the roaring sea

wind picked two boxes off his head, opened them, and tossed the latest

creation in head-gear and feathers into the sea, a fate from which

another dream in pink and froth was saved only by being stepped on by a

barefoot but unusually quick-witted negro. They would not have been

cheap hats anywhere, and in Brazil they certainly would have cost four

times as much. The owner having already gone ashore before the mishap

occurred, the negro waded out into the surf and rescued the feathered

contraption, which he put back into the box and delivered as if nothing

had happened, getting his pay and fading from the landscape before

milady opened the box to prepare for the gala first performance of a new

invention at the municipal-state theater that evening.

It took us four hours to get all our outfit from the ship to the

theater. Vinhães, however, had everything prepared for an immediate

_estrea_ under conditions that promised excellent results. By

manipulating certain political filaments he had obtained the “Theatro

José d’Alencar,” named for Brazil’s greatest novelist and the most

famous “son” of Ceará. It is government owned and the most important one

in northeastern Brazil, generally closed except when some second-rate

Caruso or a European dramatic company comes to give Fortaleza the

sensation of being the center of the universe. The nominal sum of 130$

covered the salaries of the countless government employees attached to

the place, though there was no knowing how many permanent passes Vinhães

had issued for the five days he had advertised. His posters, articles,

and newspaper displays had penetrated to the last hut in town; and he

had even had special tickets printed, the stamping of which, in addition

to the thousand and one other things essential to a proper début, left

us little time to loiter between the landing and a hurried supper.

Our time, taken from the ship and Rio, was twenty minutes later than

that of the town, so that when I returned to the theater at sunset

Vinhães greeted me halfway across the square with the tightly pursed

lips and the closely compressed fingers of the upraised right hand

which, in Brazil’s complete language of gestures, meant a densely packed

house. It was, and more than that the crowded audience was getting

vociferous in its demands for the show to begin, that they might judge

for themselves this new wonder. Despite all these favoring circumstances

our opening came near resulting in disaster. The state theater was not

equipped as a moving-picture house. Vinhães had hired the only available

lantern in town and arranged with a local operator to run the ordinary

films he had himself brought along. But the operator had not recovered

from the celebration made possible by the advance he had demanded on his

wages, and the lantern was so aged and the lens so worthless that barely

the outline of the pictures reached the screen. Protest was rapidly

developing into uproar when I saved the day by ordering the ordinary

films run through our special machine. This was contrary to my contract

with Vinhães and something we had never done before; but I waived that

clause for once and agreed to have “Tut” and Carlos run the whole show,

provided Vinhães paid them 10$ a night each for their extra labor. Thus

their salaries were in a twinkling raised high above my own, while to me

was left the brunt of fighting the crowd at the door.

It may be that his sudden and unexpected good luck turned Carlos’ head.

It was now trebly important for the Kinetophone to do its best,—the

ordinary films had been a disappointment, the house was crowded with an

audience which would carry good or bad word of our performance to every

corner of the city, nay, of all Ceará, and the state president himself

sat in the center of the regal central box, surrounded by all the most

influential members of the political and social world. I had chosen our

program with care, the introductory film to be followed by a portion of

“Il Trovatore,” a well-sung number which always delighted the higher

class of Brazilian audiences. As the title flashed on the screen a

murmur of satisfaction rippled across the house. The president

readjusted the broad red ribbon across his paunch and settled down for

what he plainly expected to be a treat. On the screen a romantic figure,

dressed in the elaborate garb of the days of knights and troubadours,

advanced with the supreme grace of medieval heroes, at least as it has

been brought down to us by Italian tenors, and with a princely gesture

opened his mouth and—and in the nasal twang of an untraveled native of

rural Indiana said, “Gentlemen, be seated!” Carlos had put on the record

that went with our minstrel show!

All disasters, however, save death, may be more or less redeemed by hard

work, good luck, and so splendid an apparatus as a well-operated

Kinetophone, and before our performance was over the audience had

advanced from resentment to enthusiasm, had even burst forth in loud

applause, a social faux pas almost unknown at a cinema in Brazil.

Chuckles of delight and flattering words could still be heard under the

murmuring, silver-flecked palm-trees when “Tut” piloted me to a gay café

on the main praça and showed his gratitude by squandering a considerable

amount of his extra ten milreis for two small portions of what North

Brazil thinks is ice-cream. _Cearenses_ went out of their way to assure

us that we had brought the finest music that had ever been heard in the

state and the best theatrical performance that had ever been given at

such modest prices. Had we come two or three years before, more than one

of them asserted, we might have charged seven times as much and packed

the house at every one of the ten performances we would be obliged to

give.

Vinhães had arranged for us in the “Pensão Bitú,” the “only hotel” in

Ceará, as there is only one within even the Brazilian pale of

respectability in all these northern capitals. Considering what it might

have been, it was almost good, with a constant sea breeze sweeping

through our long and narrow room, which almost made us forget that we

were within four degrees of the equator. Rumor had it that deaths from

yellow fever were frequent in Fortaleza, and though we saw no

mosquitoes, “Tut” and I were careful to tuck in the canopied

mosquito-nets over our beds. Carlos, across the hall, scorned such

refinements, or else it was natural Brazilian carelessness that made him

sleep, stark naked, as comes to be the custom of both native and

foreigner, and without any protection from possible flying death.

As in the case of Pernambuco, the capital of Ceará is best known to the

outside world by the name of the state, only in the interior of which it

takes universally its correct title of Fortaleza. The old fort which

gives it this name still forms a part of the public promenade near the

“only” hotel, and to this day old cannon point bravely out to sea from

its several dry, grassy levels. The City of the Fort is one of the most

important towns of North Brazil, a comparatively new city, for all its

antiquity, rebuilt since the destructive drought of 1845. Situated

directly on the sea, without so much as a creek to give its rowboats

refuge, it has all the maritime advantages, except a port. Its soil is

sandy, almost Sahara-like in its aridity, and though it has some ten

praças shaded by _castanheiros_, mangos, palms, and other magnificent

tropical trees, its vegetation is dependent on the almost constant care

of man. The city water is abominable, even after being filtered, and

wise foreign travelers—there seem to be no foreign residents—and

Brazilians from the south quench a thirst which cannot but be frequent

in this climate with mineral water or native beer, or by melting the

plentiful product of the local ice factory.

More American windmills than in any town of similar size in the United

States rise above the monotonous level of Ceará. It is almost entirely

of one story, for its people know the terrors of earthquakes and have

little faith in their loose, sandy soil. The private buildings of two

stories could probably be counted on the fingers, though several

churches in the old Portuguese style of architecture and some rather

pretentious government edifices bulk above the general mass. Where its

right-angled and often wide streets are not paved in rough, unshaped

cobblestones it is impossible to walk with any degree of pleasure

because of the sand. The landscape reminds one of the driest regions of

Arizona, an Arizona of perpetual July, and it is hard to understand how

the human race lives here—or why. Yet there is a picturesqueness, a

pleasing something about Fortaleza that makes it more interesting than

all but the half a dozen most striking Brazilian cities. Its windows are

covered with wooden blinds hinged at the top, and from these and the

doors peer upon the passer-by a constant double row of people, except

during the midday siesta. It is a curious custom of Fortaleza to have

water-spouts of tin or zinc projecting from the low flat eaves well out

into the street, just far enough to deluge the pedestrian whenever it

does rain; and these are always in the form of a conventional alligator,

serpent, or dragon, the spout of even the poorest house ending in an

open-mouthed monster, the teeth, tin tongue, toothed fin on top, and the

smooth one on the bottom never lacking. Vistas of these may be seen for

a kilometer or more down almost any street. The variegated bright colors

of the house façades are all that break the monotonous symmetry of the

fixed architecture, for originality does not seem to be a North

Brazilian characteristic. Many doors open so directly upon the scanty or

entirely missing sidewalks that they thrust pedestrians off them—which

serves them right for not realizing that sidewalks are meant here to be

family verandas rather than public passageways.

Ceará is famous for its hammocks—_redes_, or nets, they call them in

Portuguese, for lack of an exact word. They are woven of cotton grown in

the state—by hand still in the _sertão_, though by machinery in town

factories—and great heaps of them lie for sale in the most nearly

picturesque market-place in Brazil. This is a large square in the center

of town, partly roofed over, and here, too, sit women selling home-made

lace, which constitutes perhaps the second most important industry of

the state. The hammock is the favorite bed of the _Cearense_, and his

lounge, cradle, and easy-chair; wherever the visitor enters, a hammock

offers him its lap. In and about among vendors and buyers, and down the

white-hot streets, wander blind beggars led by a sheep, often wearing

several bells to announce its coming. Many women and children, and some

men, wear about their necks a little black hand made of ebony, as a

protection against the evil eye. The leisurely traveler from the south

is struck by the scarcity of African blood; a full negro is almost never

seen and the prevailing mixture is Indian with white. The flat head of

the _Cearense_ is legendary, and the average complexion is a

half-burnished copper. Their own citizens admit that four fifths of the

people of Ceará are _mestiços_ with a greater or less percentage of

aboriginal blood, and this gives them an individuality among their

largely African fellow-countrymen, with many of the characteristics of

the South Americans of the Andean regions. In place of the hilarious

indifference of blacker Brazil, they face life with the rather

melancholy fatalism of the New World aborigines.

In their native dances, such as the _samba_, the _Cearenses_ display

tumultuous passions and an ardent temperament in great contrast to their

quiet everyday manner, and the scent of a merry-making throng of

sweating, rarely washed people of the _mestiço_ rank and file has a

suggestion of that of a den of wild animals, mixed with the odor of

home-made perfume. Politics is always a seething pot, and the bickerings

of parties ever on the verge of bursting forth in violence. The

_Cearense_ is easily recognizable elsewhere in Brazil by his speech, the

peculiar accent of the region, especially in the country districts,

consisting of raising the tone of the last unaccented syllable in each

phrase, giving a sort of singsong rhythm and an upturned ending to each

sentence, like the flip of the tail of a playful fish. Fortaleza,

however, prides itself on its modernity and worldly-wiseness, and feels

little but scorn for the uncouth, singsongy _mattuto_ or _sertanejo_ of

the interior, startled out of his wits by his first encounter with such

extraordinary manifestations of civilization as an automobile or one of

the ancient but recently electrified street-cars of the state capital.

On Sunday evening people poured in upon us so rapidly that I had to

stand like a buttress in the middle of the stream, just inside the door,

and split it into two channels so that our ticket-takers could do their

duty. There was one unexpected step just above me, and not too much

light, so that some fifty or sixty of the ladies of Ceará fell into my

arms during the course of the evening. It would be exaggeration to say

that the majority of them were worth embracing, though now and then a

real gem appeared among the gravel—just the ones whose footing was

surest. As our theater belonged to the state, of course every third

cousin of a grandniece of a government employee expected to march in at

will. Vinhães had arranged with the chief authorities that we were to

donate four _loges_, as many upper boxes, and thirty-five seats, and

also let in those wearing uniforms. But there is no such thing as

satisfying the “deadhead” appetite of Brazilians. Officials, from state

president down to government bootblack, would not be hampered by

presenting passes; if I dared to halt a flashily dressed courtesan, the

head door-keeper came rushing up to draw me aside and warn me that it

was fatal to open strife with that class, as their political influence

was all-powerful. I left it mainly to Vinhães to curb the voracity of

his own countrymen, but even he found the task impossible. As

“deadheads” multiplied, he donned his most resplendent black garb and

called upon the _delegado_ of police, offering to send as many free

passes as he needed, if only he would not allow plain-clothes men to

come in without them. The _delegado_ assured him that three would be

sufficient. He sent six for good measure—and that night almost the first

man to arrive was one who showed a document proving that he was a

plain-clothes man and insisted on bringing three friends in with him.

Vinhães opposed him with un-Brazilian firmness. The man went away, and

soon afterward the _delegado_ and his be-diamonded wife entered,

whereupon Vinhães caused him to state within hearing of all the

door-keepers that only those with passes were to be admitted. Barely had

the illustrious couple disappeared within when a boy policeman, wearing

the white uniform which takes the place on Sundays of the week-day

khaki, marched up to Vinhães and told him that he was under arrest and

must report at once to the _delegacia, on order of the delegado_! He

refused to go. The policeman returned to the station and came back with

still more urgent orders. Again Vinhães declined to obey, and as the

police were about to use force he stepped inside and entered the box of

the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—to learn that the _delegado_ knew

nothing whatever of the order purported to have been given out by him,

which had been signed in his name by his _escribano_ on complaint of the

latter’s friend, the disgruntled plain-clothes man. Thereupon the boy

policeman took to marching to and fro, assuring everyone that he was

wholly innocent in the matter, and all the policemen on duty gathered in

a compact group and spent the rest of the evening chattering and waving

their arms excitedly over their heads. Sad fate it must be to live

permanently the life of the helpless native in this land of political

pull.

The State of Ceará has long been notorious for its _seccas_, or deadly

droughts. Of the four or five states in the so-called “dry zone” of

Northern Brazil it is the most harshly treated by the moisture-sponging

trade winds. An all-wise native editor has it that “in Ceará there has

always been less lack of water than of instruction and practical

knowledge of the most rudimentary notions of agronomy.” A simple hot-air

pump would do wonders, he contends, for wood is plentiful; and even

crude windmills with cloth sails have been known to make garden spots of

the driest parts of the state. All this may be true enough, but the

traveler in primitive South America never ceases to marvel at the

improvidence of wilderness people, which often costs them so dearly.

High as he stands in some respects among his fellow-Brazilians, the

_Cearense_ has not the energy and initiative needed to overcome his one

great natural disadvantage—at least as a people, and even the editor

admits that individuals could do nothing, since to supply themselves

with a special source of water would merely be to have all their

neighbors camp upon them in dry weather. Hence the state continues to

endure periodical drought and famine with Indian fatalism, dying off,

emigrating to the Amazonian region, or awaiting a change in the weather,

“_como Deus quere_—whatever God wishes.”

They call 1877 “O Anno da Fome”—“The Year of Famine”—in Ceará, but there

have been others nearly as deadly. When the never-ceasing winds from the

Atlantic refuse to bring rain with them, or carry it too far into the

interior, the trees grow bare, covering the ground with their leaves, as

in lands where winter reigns; the naked beds of rivers tantalize

thirsting man and beast—the maps of Ceará divide its streams between

“perennial” and “non-perennial”—even the hardy roots of the mandioca dry

up, and there is nothing left but flight or death. In the worst years

human skeletons have been strewn along the trails from the interior to

Fortaleza; and even in the capital sufficient aid has often been

unobtainable, so that plagues have added to the misery of the hordes of

refugees, and people have died so continuously that there has been

neither time nor energy to bury them. Those wealthy enough to die in

their hammocks are carried off in them; the corpses of others are tied

hands and feet to a pole and borne to some sandy hollow beyond the town,

over which hover clouds of gorged and somnolent vultures. Many of the

starving become earth-eaters, which may postpone but not alleviate their

fate. The more enterprising abandon what to them is their native land

and take up life anew along the Amazon, enduring as best they can the

gloomy heavens and months of constant rains which make that region so

different from their own cloudless land.

The opening up of the Amazon basin, and the consequent enormous increase

in the production of rubber, was largely due to the droughts in Ceará.

Nomad by atavism through his Indian ancestors, the irregularities of the

season and the impossibility of counting on a certain to-morrow has made

the _Cearense_ more so, and it is a rare spot that has been inhabited by

the same family for generations. First they went to the rubber-fields

singly, then in bands, and finally in whole ship-loads, contracted and

shipped by regular recruiting agents. In the Amazonian wilderness they

may die of fevers or other dread ailments, but at home they are sure to

die of drought, so in years of extreme dryness the risk is worth taking.

If they live through all the dangers of the wilderness along the

“Sea-River” and escape the onslaughts of the swarms of touts and harlots

of all colors and nationalities who prey upon descending

rubber-gatherers at Manaos and Pará, their return to Ceará is much like

that of an Italian immigrant from America to his native village. So rare

and so important, in fact, is the native of Ceará who returns from the

rubber-fields to his dry but beloved home that a special term has been

coined for him; they call him a _paroara_—one who has been beyond Pará.

This year the drought threatened to be as bad as the fearful one of

1877; worse, in fact, for then at least there was good old Emperor

Peter, whose statue in the praça just outside our window testified to

Ceará’s gratitude for his timely assistance; then money was plentiful

instead of all Brazil being wrung dry by a financial crisis, and there

was the final resort of the rubber-fields, which now returning

_paroaras_ were reporting useless because of the low price of that

commodity. Already tales of wholesale starvation were coming from the

vicinity of Cratheus, and cattle were dying by hundreds throughout the

interior, leaving nothing but their hides to recoup the owners for their

labor and investment. True, there was an imposing government department

in Fortaleza known as the “Inspectory of Works against the Droughts,”

but the country people knew only too well that this was mainly a means

for political rascals to make hay out of their sufferings.

[Illustration: The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made entirely

of palm leaves]

[Illustration: Transportation in the interior of Brazil is primitive—and

noisy]

[Illustration: Our advertising matter parading the streets of a

Brazilian town off the main trail of world travel]

[Illustration: The _carnauba_ palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility

as well as its beauty]

From Fortaleza what was originally called the “Estrada de Ferro de

Baturité,” but which had recently changed its nationality and become the

“Brazil North Eastern Railways, Ltd.,” runs far into the interior of the

state. A journey to the end of the line and return, however, takes from

Thursday morning to Sunday night, and I did not dream I could absent

myself so long until I discovered the unimportance of Maranguape. This

nearest important town of the interior was a mere eighteen miles away,

and as ten days must be passed between steamers, it seemed the best

place to spend our evenings after Fortaleza had had its fill of the

Kinetophone. There was more green along the way than the constant cry of

“_secca medonha_” (horrible drought) had led us to expect, but it was

largely in trees and bushes, with grass almost wholly lacking. Beside

the track lay scattered expensive iron pipes from abroad that were some

day to bring sufficient water to the capital, if they did not rust away

first. These, we learned, represented another of Brazil’s government

scandals. State officials had been given a hundred and fifty thousand

contos ($50,000,000) by recent legislation with which to bring Fortaleza

a suitable water supply. They found it necessary to spend a year or more

in Europe before finally ordering pipe specially cast, with the name

“Ceará” embossed on each length of it. When thousands of these had been

tossed upon the beach at the capital and scattered for fifty miles or

more along the railroad, the politicians reported that the money had

given out, and Fortaleza continues to drink such water as it can dig out

of its own sand-holes by hand or by windmill.

An hour out we began to draw near the clusters of hills we had seen from

the sea. A little branch line circled the base of them and at length

brought us to Maranguape, spread a bit up the lower skirts of the range.

It proved to be a sleepy village, fairly large, for it lay scattered for

long distances in both directions, but of that grass-grown temperament

which promised little reward for our efforts. The promise was only too

exactly fulfilled. The sound of shod footsteps was so rare in Maranguape

that everyone hurried to the doors whenever we passed, leaving behind us

a long trail of motionless, open-mouthed faces, and we were surrounded

and hemmed in by curious ragamuffins and innumerable children—the one

unfailing crop of Ceará, wet or dry—until we were forced to use violence

to get room to move; yet few families had energy enough to come across

the street to see what was unquestionably the greatest novelty, if not

the best show, that had ever come to Maranguape. Even while our

performance was at its height, however, the town remained squatted in

family groups before its doors, cracking the same aged jokes, exchanging

the same petty, malicious gossip, indulging in the same banal

pseudo-courtesies as their great-grandfathers did and as their

great-grandchildren probably will. One fellow to whom, curious to get

the local point of view, I put a question, replied, “_Eu quero primeiro

ouvir o bicho roncar_—I want to hear the beast snore first; then if it

is good I’ll come to-morrow.” It was hard to believe that Maranguape was

the birthplace even of Rodolpho Theophilo, a pharmacist who has written

several readable, if amateurish, novels on life in drought-stricken

Ceará. Our total receipts that evening amounted, at the current

exchange, to seventeen dollars!

There was reported to be a hotel by a waterfall half an hour’s walk up

the hillside. “Tut,” Carlos and Vinhães trudged there after our

miniature audience had been hustled out, but I preferred to stay near

the railway station. There was not even a restaurant in the town proper,

and I could only get a lump of stale bread in one shop, an ancient can

of American sardines in another, and wash them down with “cajú wine,” a

concoction which the seller assured me was “magnificent,” but which

outdid the strongest medicine I had ever taken. I swung my hammock in

the cinema, the manager having induced the owner to permit me to open

one barred window to save me from drowning in my own perspiration, and

brought a _moringa_ of water to save me from death by thirst.

Dawn found me on my way back to the main line to catch the weekly train

to the end of it. A narrow-shouldered locomotive dragged the four

freight and six passenger cars made in Delaware away from the little

heap of hills into what might best be called a jungle, though there were

few large trees and no really dense vegetation. The leaves were

everywhere shriveled or curled together, as if striving to protect from

the malignant sun their last suggestion of moisture. The dry air was so

clear that the arch of heaven seemed higher and the horizon more vast

than I had ever known them before, and the light falling from this

greater height of cloudless sky struck the ground with doubly blinding

clarity and seemed to spray out in all directions, like falling water. A

few stagnant puddles in the depressions of the land were all that

remained of the long-forgotten rains. Of vegetation the most striking,

and at the same time the most numerous, were the _carnauba_ palms for

which Ceará is famous. The _carnauba_ is much smaller than the royal

palm, of girlish slenderness, its leaves, shaped like those of our

palm-leaf fans, arranged in symmetrical sphere shape as carefully as the

netted hair of a modest young lady. There is nothing of the careless,

lop-shouldered cocoanut nor of the haughty majesty of the _palma

imperial_ about the _carnauba_; rather is it chic and dainty. The royal

palm is a regal lady always proudly garbed in rich plumes, but of no

great worth, except ornamentally. The cocoanut palm is a slouchy,

disheveled wench given to hanging about negro huts and tropical beaches,

producing only water and a bit of copra, sufficient to save herself from

destruction. The _carnauba_, on the other hand, is not only a modest and

pretty, but a very useful, young lady, who stays at home and attends to

business, no matter what the provocation to go down to the beach and

play with the sea breezes. She is as typical of the _Cearense_ landscape

as the parasol pine-tree is of the southernmost states of Brazil.

The _carnauba_ is useful from crown to toe; like a certain animal

familiar to our stockyards, nothing but its murmur is devoid of utility.

Among other things, it was of fibers and wax from the _carnauba_ that

were made the first phonograph records and some of the first electric

light filaments. This wax is one of the important exports of the state

and of its railroad. The leaves are taken inside a closed hut and

threshed until the wax falls in white powder, which is then swept up and

reaches us in many forms, from seals to shoe-polish. From it the natives

make their candles, almost the only form of light used in the interior.

Exported in more ambitious quantity, the wax alone would enrich and

occupy half the people of Ceará. From the roots of the _carnauba_ is

made a purgative, and a kind of _farinha_ of inestimable value in times

of famine. The leaves are woven into hats, mats, baskets, brooms, and

the roofs of houses; from them comes the palm-leaf fan with which we are

familiar. Fibers useful for many purposes are taken from the inside of

the trunk, the iron-hard wood of which serves many purposes, ranging

from musical instruments to water-pipes. The pulp of the fruit has an

agreeable taste, as does the seed, after being roasted. From the latter

comes a saccharine substance similar to sago. When small it serves as

food, and it may be turned into wine or vinegar. Lastly, the seeds are

used as _birros_, knobs to which native lace-makers tie the ends of

their threads, and the clickity-click of these may be heard all over

northern Brazil.

Unfortunately the drought was beginning to choke even this paragon of

usefulness, and some of the lower leaves had turned sear and brown,

breaking the perfect symmetry of the sphere. Sometimes the only

representative of plant life that survives the _seccas_ is the

_joazeiro_, a dense-green, haystack-shaped tree, the leaves and branches

of which are cut and fed to cattle as a last resort. The leaves of this

tree fall, still green, in September, and new ones immediately take

their place. There is another tree of Ceará that furnishes a natural

soap, but its oily stench is so offensive that until some means is found

of neutralizing this, only the poorest people will use it.

The manager of the Ceará railway was an English F.R.G.S. who had not

lost his energy during long tropical residence, and we made good

Brazilian time in spite of a heavy train and the war-time necessity of

making steam of wood rather than coal. A few isolated houses were

scattered up the low, thick-wooded ridges, and towns were almost

frequent. Torrid as it was under the unclouded sun, the more pretentious

natives wore clothing as dark and heavy as we of the North in April or

October. Coffee was available at every station, but little else could be

had, sometimes mangos and oranges, or hot milk served at scandalous

prices by old women little less distressing in appearance than the

beggars. There was a constant procession at every station of lame, halt,

blind, and especially the unwashed, rubbing their unsoaped hands along

the window-sills and imploring “a charity, for the love of God and our

Lady Mary and by the saints in Heaven!” Others of these unfortunates

marched through the aisles of the cars, so that one was beset on all

sides by offensive caressing hands. Those who, for some reason, could

not reach us, were almost as annoying with their “Psio!” as Brazilians

spell their ubiquitous hiss to attract attention. How weary one grows of

this short, shrill, nerve-startling “Psio!” here and “Psio!” there,

everywhere, all day long and far into the night, up and down the whole

country!

Baturité, once terminus of the line to which it gave its name, is a town

of some size, sitting placidly among low foothills. Some of these small

isolated ranges are high enough to snatch a little moisture from the

passing trade winds and turban themselves in clouds that gave them a

mantle of green, but such slight patches were of little use to the

thirsty state as a whole. All the region, both rolling plains and hills,

had a soft velvety-brown color, everywhere besprinkled with stocky

_joazeiro_ trees. Many of these were already being cropped to feed the

starving cattle. Here and there smaller trees of deep-striking roots had

retained their color, but most of the vegetation was bare and leafless

as our own in midwinter, the landscape growing more and more oppressive

as we proceeded inland. Early in the afternoon rugged granite hills

began to break the horizon until, at Quixadá, there were great rows of

them. Solid masses of granite heaped up into big hills stood in

soldierly formation for miles along the track, like a guard of honor,

magnificent heaps sufficient to build all the edifices the world could

need for a century.

Quixadá means in the aboriginal Tupi “lean cow,” and there were a few

such animals there to bear out the appellation. A mule-car staggered

away to somewhere up in the rock hills. Granite, piled in fantastic

ridges and forming most striking sky-lines, followed us for a long

distance. Everywhere was dead-bare ground, without even a sprig of

grass, and the air was so devoid of moisture that it dried up the

nostrils, so clear that one could see plainly the slightest markings on

the granite heaps far away on the otherwise flat horizon and marvel that

the train took so incredibly long to reach them. We rumbled frequently

over bone-dry creeks and rivulets; once we crossed a huge four-span iron

bridge over a river not only without water but even without moisture.

Yet if the _Cearenses_ lack rivers in times of drought, it is probably

because they let them all flow madly away to the sea after the rains,

instead of damming them up and using the water for irrigation. All day

there was scarcely a sign of cultivation, and very few cattle or even

skeletons of them. No doubt they were farther back among the hills,

where mud-holes still existed. A cotton tree of moderate size seemed to

grow wild, but it, too, had succumbed to the general fate and we ground

monotonously on through a sun-flooded landscape of bare bushes not

unlike the chaparral of Texas.

Quixeramobim bore slight resemblance to its aboriginal meaning of “fat

cow,” and the land beyond was still more dreary. Exclamations of “secca

medonha!” rose within the car whenever we passed a family—men, women and

children, gaunt, ragged, sun-bleached and jungle-travel-worn—tramping

north with all their miserable possessions, consisting mostly of

blackened pots and pans on their heads. They were off after water, of

course, since their own mud-hole had dried up, and might be forced to

tramp all the way to the coast, or even go on to the Amazon, before they

could again find means of grubbing out a livelihood. Long stretches of

country as deadly as an elderly rattlesnake exhausted our weary eyes,

and the train, as if it, too, were worn out by twelve hours of this

dreary monotony, at length halted for the night in Senador Pompeu.

We were at once mobbed by a throng of self-styled hotel-keepers and

baggage-carrying ragamuffins, and I was soon imprisoned in an interior

room without ceiling in which there was not even a bed, but only three

hammocks hanging listlessly from hooks in the mud walls. I threw these

outside and put up my own, then set out for a stroll. The Southern Cross

and Great Dipper were exactly at the same height. The surrounding

landscape consisted chiefly of dried-up cotton bushes, and the trade

wind howled across it as if we were still on the seacoast, instead of

nearly two hundred miles inland. A night-school of ragged urchins was in

full swing in one of the mud huts, but it was run much like a crap game.

Here everyone, from hotel proprietor to street gamins, called me

“doctor,” possibly because I still wore the resemblance to a white

collar. What a mongrel race they were! If one were picking a team of

men, they would be harder to match in color than horses. Nor was there

any connection between color and social position. A ragged blond farmer

might be seen cringing and baring his head before a pompous black

politician—though for the most part negroes were scarce and lowly.

Around a long, loose-jointed, wooden table my fellow-passengers wolfed

the never-varying Brazilian meal as only Brazilians can, shoveling it up

in great knifefuls and racing away to begin an all-night uproar of

gambling and prattle.

It would not feel natural to go on a railway journey in Brazil without

getting up in the middle of the night to catch a five o’clock train.

When we rumbled away it was still pitch dark, and as the old kerosene

lamp in the car blew out I fell asleep again. From daylight on there

were many piles of wood for the engines along the way, and the white

bones of cattle lay scattered through the brown brush. Here and there a

few rib-racked animals were eating leaves. Men in brown leather hats,

each twisted and warped by sun, rain, wind, and individual use into a

distinctive shape, appeared at the rare stations. The flat land grew

almost swampy, with now and then a hint of green, and at 10:30, with

only a scattering of passengers left, we drew up at Iguatú, 265 miles

from the coast, and the end of the line. Iguatú is completely beyond the

land of beds. The room I got in a sort of miniature caravansary was

furnished with two hooks, and nothing more. To these I managed to add a

table and chair, with a _moringa_ of what passed for drinking-water; and

there was a shower-bath available whenever one could coax a man to lug a

can of water up a ladder and fill another, perforated and suspended from

the roof. Midday was no time to stroll in such a climate. I swung my

hammock and fell to reading by the light of a glassless window that

looked out upon a white-hot world in which the sheer sunshine fell like

molten iron on every unsheltered thing.

I was back again below the sixth parallel of longitude, for to go inland

from the capital of Ceará means journeying south rather than west. The

town was flat, with the usual sandy praça, a windmill in its center, and

tile-roofed mud huts scattered in every direction. One really could not

feel much sympathy for a people who depend for water, for life itself,

on a few mud-holes that may dry up at any time. Clothing is considered

merely an adornment in Iguatú, and children in sun-proof hides were

playing everywhere in the sand. The people prided themselves on being

_caboclos_, or native Brazilians for generations back, and though there

were a few blonds scattered among them, the great majority were of part

Indian blood, with negro mixtures, but no full-blooded Africans. The

treacherous, surly _cabra_, as the Brazilian calls the cross between

Indian and negro, when none of that class is listening, was in

considerable evidence. There was a childlike simplicity about the

inhabitants which recalled those of Diamantina, though here the

preponderance of Indian blood made the general indifference a matter of

fatalism rather than racial cheerfulness. Many of the inhabitants had an

indistinct notion that England, London, Europe, and New York were all

different names for the same place—a place in which was being waged the

great war of which they had heard rumors. One man asked me in great

earnestness whether it was true, as some visitor had once asserted

without winning credence, that “there are places in the world where it

is so cold you have to wear garments on your hands,” In this region

patriotism is a matter of separate mud-holes. A makeshift waiter to whom

I was attempting to make some kindly remark about Iguatú interrupted me

with, “Eu não son filho d’aqui, não, s’nho’—I am not a son of here but

of ——,” naming some other mud town identical with this one but which to

him was as Rome is to Oshkosh.

There were many picturesque countrymen about the market-place.

Goat-skins and cowhides are the most important commerce here, especially

with the drought killing great numbers of cattle, and _caboclos_, burned

a velvety brown by the blazing sunshine, rode in with a few sun-dried

cowhides and sold them for what the merchants chose to give, which

seemed to be three _vintems_ a kilogram, or less than a cent a pound.

Every possible thing is made of leather in this land where starving

cattle make it so plentiful—ropes, boxes, curtains, hats, even clothing.

Nearly all the men wore hats some two feet in diameter, most of them

made of leather, the cheaper ones merely of cowhide, which twists into

uncouth shapes with long exposure to the elements, the better ones of

sheep- or deer-skin. The others were woven from the _carnauba_ leaf,

looking much like the coarsest of our farmers’ straw hats.

I had concluded to buy the largest hat to be found in the shops when I

caught sight of an unusually fine one on the head of a powerful and

handsome young native in the crowd that was watching me from the street.

When I had overcome the mixture of pride and bashfulness in which nearly

all _caboclos_ wrap themselves, I learned that his name was João Barboso

de Lera, and that the hat had been made to his special order by an old

woman expert living some ten miles away. It was most elaborately

decorated, and it was evident that its possession raised the wearer high

above the rank and file of his fellow-townsmen. His hat is to the

youthful _Cearense_ of the interior what spats and silk cravats are to

the urban Latin-American. João, however, may have been in financial

straits, for when I hinted in a mild and easily repudiated voice my

willingness to buy his head-gear, he astonished me by accepting at once.

It had cost him twelve milreis and was almost new; he thought ten would

now be a fair price for it. I concealed my delight as we walked together

to my lodging, where João deposited the hat on my table, crumpled up in

his hand the bill I handed him, and wishing me, with a friendly but

diffident smile, a joyful future, strode away bareheaded through the

gruelling sunshine.

Later I learned that he was a _valoroso_, almost a bandit, who had “shot

up” a neighboring town only a few days before and had several

assassinations to his discredit. The hat is of cowhide, covered with

fancifully patterned sheepskin, weighs almost two pounds and measures

two feet from tip to tip, though the crown is little larger than a

skull-cap. How the natives endure these under a cloudless tropical sun

is beyond northern conception, but the _Cearense_ countryman considers

them the only adequate protection. Whole suits of leather are also worn

in this region, tight trousers for riding, a short coat, and a sort of

apron from neck to crotch in lieu of waistcoat, the whole ordinarily

costing less than ten dollars. Whether or not the wearer overtaken by

rain, followed by another space of the blazing sun, is removed from this

garb by a taxidermist is another of the unsolved mysteries of the

picturesque state of Ceará.

At Iguatú tobacco was sold in black rolls as large as a ship’s hawser,

being wound round a stick in ropes thirty or forty yards long and sewed

up in leather for muleback transportation. A kind of sedan chair on a

mule, with canvas or leather curtains and fitted inside with cushions

and all the comforts of home, is still used by the few wealthier women

obliged to travel. The railway goes on quite a distance into the

interior, but though there was a big two-span iron bridge near town

across a mud gully that might be a river, traffic has been abandoned

beyond Iguatú. The track southward was wrinkled and twisted out of all

possible use as a railroad, and great heaps of rails which the company

had hoped some day to lay all the way to the frontier of the state, and

perhaps beyond, were rapidly rusting away in the ruthless climate.

The chief cause of this railway stagnation was Padre Cicero and his

_cangaceiros_. Father Cicero is one of the chief celebrities of Brazil,

his name being known from the Uruguayan to the Venezuelan boundaries.

Thirty-two leagues beyond Iguatú is the town of Crato, of some

importance industrially, and three leagues east of this lies Joazeiro,

said to have more inhabitants than Fortaleza, though they are nearly all

fanatical followers of their local saint, living in mud huts and all

more or less of African blood. Here Padre Cicero, a saint in the purely

Catholic sense of the word, reigns supreme. He is an old man, past his

three score and ten, a native of Crato, who took orders in the seminary

of Bahia and became parish priest of Joazeiro. The conviction of some

woman that he had cured her of an ailment by miracle gave him the by no

means original idea of establishing a shrine with a “miraculous Virgin.”

Credulous fools were not lacking, and Joazeiro soon became the most

famous place of pilgrimage in North Brazil, at least among the lower

classes. Three large churches were built, and so persistently did people

flock thither and settle down within immediate reach of miraculous

assistance that Padre Cicero soon became too powerful to be handled by

the state government. His picture occupies the saint’s place in all the

country houses of the region, and he was said to have more than ten

thousand followers, variously called _cangaceiros_ and _jagunços_, whom

he could use either as workmen or as a sort of outlaw force to impress

his will upon the region. The trade winds which dry up the northern part

of the state begin to drop their moisture in the vicinity of Crato and

Joazeiro, making them green and fertile and giving the outlaw priest an

added advantage. Several expeditions have been sent against him and he

has been a prisoner in Fortaleza, Rio, and Rome, but always returns to

power. Suspended by the Church, he is said to live up to the papal order

by merely confessing and baptizing, without saying mass or otherwise

conducting himself as a full-fledged priest. Those of a friendly turn of

mind toward him assert that Father Cicero is a “good and pious man, a

strict Catholic, who is doing his duty as he sees it and who has no

other fault than too great a liking for money.”

There is always talk of this or that part of Brazil seceding; Ceará has

already partly done so, thanks to the power of Padre Cicero. He is

really the ruler of an autonomous state, from whom even the _delegado_

and other government officials take their orders. For years the roads of

southern Ceará have been unsafe, for his followers have robbed and

killed with impunity, torturing and mutilating natives who oppose or

give evidence against them, levying on political opponents, the rich,

and merchants, though they have seldom ventured to trouble foreigners.

They call themselves “_romeiros_” (pilgrims or crusaders), and the

federal government has no more been able to conquer them than to put

down the quarrel between the States of Paraná and Santa Catharina. Padre

Cicero deposed the president of Ceará, and when a regiment of federal

troops was sent to put down his “jagunços” they were treated as brothers

by the fanatics and threw their weight against the state authorities.

Like Rio and Nictheroy, the state was declared in a state of siege by

“Dudú,” but those who know their way about the political labyrinth of

Brazil claim that the soldiers ostensibly sent to put down the

bandits—and who did more robbing and killing than the outlaws they came

to suppress—had secret orders from the national boss, the “odious

gaucho,” to aid the cause of the priestly despot. However that may be,

Padre Cicero continues in full command of the region, all commerce of

which is in his hands. He has surrounded Joazeiro with a high granite

wall and smuggled in overland from Santos quantities of arms and

ammunition, among them several cannon. He is notorious among Brazilian

priests for his reputation of living up to his vows of chastity, though

the rumor persists that this is due to physical drawbacks which have

finally developed into his present mania for power and wealth. Old and

feeble now, he had an Italian secretary and a complete staff, including

a treasurer, and was said to do nothing but play saint and strengthen

the belief of his followers that upon his death he will immediately

appear among them again in another form. This last would seem to be a

golden opportunity for an experienced actor with the proper

qualifications and ample courage.

The entire ragged, leather-hatted town of Iguatú was down to see us off

the next noon, wriggling the fingers of a crooked hand in friendly

farewell, as is the Brazilian fashion. They are a simple, good-hearted,

superstitious people, looking outwardly like fierce bandits, yet really

childlike in their harmlessness, unless they are led astray by

fanaticism or designing superiors. We had to struggle for seats because

the thirty-four country people whom the government was assisting to go

to the rubber-fields of the Amazon, rather than have them die at home of

the drought, overflowed from the second-class car into the first. Many

of these were pure white under their tan, but a more animal-like lot of

human beings could scarcely be found in an ostensibly civilized country.

Ragged, dirty, sun-scorched, prematurely aged by the rough life-struggle

with their ungenerous soil and climate, their personal habits were as

frankly natural and un-selfconscious as those of the four-footed

animals. Children, ranging from the just-born to the already

demoralized, rolled about the car floor, while men and women alike

constantly passed from mouth to mouth bottles of miserable native

_cachaza_ and crude pipes, both sexes generously decorating the floor

with their expectoration—a rare thing in South America. All this would

have been more nearly endurable had they had any notion of their own

drawbacks, but they were as convinced of their own equality, if not

superiority, as are most untutored people—a semi-wild tribe lacking the

virtues of real savages.

Everywhere the talk was of rain, to the _Cearense_ the most important

phenomenon of nature. Even the women knew cloud possibilities and

studied the horizon constantly for signs of storm. They ended their more

forceful sentences not with “if God wishes,” but “_se chover_—if it

rains.” A man bound for the Amazon was holding one of the many babies

when it played upon him that practical joke for which babies of all

races and social standings are noted. “_Menina!_” he cried, “_Parece que

a secca não ‘sta’ tão grande aqui, não!_—Girl! It looks as if the

drought were not so great here, eh!”

In fact, the drought was broken that very night. We had halted again at

Senador Pompeu—where the _sertanejos_ refused to pay more than a milreis

each for hotel accommodations and slept out in consequence—and I had at

last fallen asleep in spite of the incessant rumpus of my fellow-guests

when I was awakened by a heavy downpour. With daylight the domes and

sugar-loaves and heaps of granite hills among which the train picked its

way stood forth ghost-like through a blue rainy-season air with an

appearance quite different from that under a blazing sun. Heavy showers

continued throughout the day, and as the last rain had fallen ten months

before, joy was freely manifesting itself. Everywhere people were

congratulating one another, showing perfect contentment whether they

were forced to keep under shelter or to wade about in the downpour,

talking of nothing but the rain, the sound of which on his roof is to

the _Cearense_ the sweetest of music. It was remarkable how nature, too,

responded to the change. I could not have chosen a better four days in

which to make the trip to Iguatú, for these had given me both the

drought and the resurrection. The whole region, dry, brown, and

shriveled three days before, was already a sea of bright green. Leaves

opened up overnight as they do only in a month or six weeks in the

temperate zone, giving the effect of seeing midwinter followed by late

spring in a single day, a jungle magic reminding one of the Hindu

tricksters who seem to make plants grow in an hour from seed to bloom

before the eyes. Rivers bone-dry on Thursday were considerable streams

on Sunday, with natives wading like happy children in water where they

had shuffled the day before in dry sand. No wonder these poor, misguided

people of the jungle lose heart when their world dries up, and become

suddenly like another race when the clouds again come to their rescue.

All day long joyful cries of “Eil-a chuva!” (There’s the rain!) sounded

whenever a new shower burst upon us. Life at best is rigorous in this

climate, under the life-giving but sometimes death-dealing sun, and only

the hardy or the helpless would have remained here to endure it. No

wonder the _Cearense_ who can by hook or crook do so becomes a lawyer

without idealism or a shopkeeper without human pity. The aspect of

nature changed so magically that it was hard to judge what this light,

half-sandy soil might be able to do under proper rainfall or irrigation,

so that my first conclusion that northeastern Brazil was doomed to

remain a thinly populated semi-desert may have been too hasty. Between

showers the breeze gently moved the fans of the palm-trees, the

_graúnas_, or singing blackbirds of North Brazil, flitting in and out

among the _carnaubas_. At Baturité all the Amazon-bound travelers old

enough to own a few coppers bought mangos and quickly made the car look

like a bathroom by their furious attacks on a fruit that has been fitly

described by a disappointed tourist as tasting “like a paint-brush

soaked in turpentine.” As the negro blood and light sand marking the

coast strip announced our approach to Fortaleza, I turned to the

brakeman on the back platform with a fervent, “Well, we are getting back

where we can sleep in beds again.” He gazed at me with a

puzzled-astonished air that caused me to put a question. I had forgotten

the native _Cearense’s_ devotion to the hammock; the brakeman had slept

in a bed once in his life—when he had a broken leg.

I had installed myself again in the “Pensão Bitú” and was just starting

for the theater when I was held up by another downpour. When I finally

entered the “Cinema Rio Branco” I found it almost empty; but it would

scarcely have been fair to curse the first rain that had troubled us

since early January in Victoria, especially one which meant almost the

difference between life and death to thousands of our fellow-men. We had

done poor business during my absence, due mainly to the fact that the

ten-day engagement forced upon us by the steamer schedule was too long

for Ceará. At Maranguape my three companions had lived in an old

hammock-hotel up in the hills where a natural spring furnished splendid

swimming, and where there was no charge for rooms, but merely for meals.

On Friday the performance was a “Benefit for the Santa Casa de

Misericordia,” or nun’s hospital, for which I had sold our part of the

show at 300$ to Vinhães, who in his turn had contracted with the nuns to

furnish everything for 500$. But when it was all over the religious

ladies had refused to pay, so that in the end Vinhães was the loser. I

relieved “Tut” by running the second session myself to a handful of

people, while the rain drumming on our sheet-iron roof all but drowned

out the phonograph, and pocketed one eleventh as much as I had the

Sunday before in this gamble known as the show business.

My last duties in Ceará were mainly of a personal nature, for to Vinhães

fell the task of buying the tickets and getting the outfit on board. The

_Brasil_ arrived about noon and we were down at the wharf by two, only

to have our leisurely boatmen nearly cause us to miss the steamer and

squat in the sand another ten days. The whistle had long since blown and

the sailing-hour was well past before we even started out from the

wharf. Then we lost our rudder, which was rescued by a negro rower who

sprang overboard and was washed up on the beach with it, while the heavy

boat with all our possessions, not to mention the four of us, threatened

at any moment to capsize. There followed a long struggle between time

and white-capped swells, with the lazy negro oarsmen as referees, and we

were off at the very moment that the last of our trunks went into the

hold.