hire and a rare surviving café chantant, or—well, when the semimonthly
steamer from Rio came in with the list of prizes in the national lottery
a government band sat before the lottery agency and played all the
morning, while firecrackers were exploded and the lottery winnings were
paid. That was the Manaos idea of industry and “combatting the present
grave crisis.” The zoo was gone, of course, and the imposing state
theater, the _azulejo_ dome of which rose high above all else except the
cathedral tower, had not been opened for more than two years and was a
dried-mud ruin within. It was not as in the “good old days” when a
_carregador_ got a fortune for carrying a _seringueiro’s_ trunk across
the praça, and spent it to hear imported opera sung in the proud theater
at the top of the knoll. There were still dramatic companies direct from
Europe, changing every night as they made the rounds of the three
theaters under one ownership—but they came on reels that fit into a
lantern. The plot of the story they told was never a mystery; it
consisted succinctly of the adventures of two men and a woman or, in
contrast, of two women and a man. These original and refreshing themes,
presented nightly under a new title and disguised in a new near-Parisian
costumes, continued to attract such stray coins as still remained in
Manaos, not to mention those to whom there are no earthly barriers. I
had often told myself that what Brazilian theaters needed was a
turnstile at the entrance, and was surprised to find that the cinemas of
Manaos had exactly that thing. But system and strictness lead haunted
lives in Brazil. I stood at the door of the principal cinema one evening
and counted just as large a percentage of “deadheads” as even the
Kinetophone had ever attracted. For instead of having a register on the
turnstile and requiring the door-keeper to turn in a ticket for every
click of the stile or pay the price of one, he was allowed to use his
own judgment as to who should go in free—and the judgment of a Brazilian
door-tender! In short, Manaos was entirely an exotic city, which even
the few _caboclos_ and Indians paddling down to market in their canoes
do not tinge with the local color and things native to Amazonia.
I had come up the Amazon with the faint hope of being able to make my
way overland from Manaos to the capital of British Guiana. Such a trip
should be wild enough to allay any craving for the wilderness for some
time to come, and even if one could scarcely call plunging along jungle
trails taking to the open road, the effect would be about the same. Even
in Manaos, however, no one knew whether or not it was possible to reach
Georgetown by land. Launches and _batelões_, a species of Amazonian
barge, sometimes went up the Rio Branco to the frontiers of Brazil to
bring down cattle, but they could go only at the height of the rainy
season, when the Rio Branco was flooded, and the last one had made the
trip in August, nearly nine months before.
“He who has no dog goes hunting with the cat,” the Brazilians say, so I
turned my attention to the possibility of making the journey through my
own exertions. That, too, it seemed, was out of the question. Even had I
bought a canoe and hired a crew, it would have required at least two
months of constant, laborious paddling to bring me to the Guianese
frontier; and as to walking, that would have been as impossible in this
Amazonian wilderness as on the open sea. My hopes had reached their
lowest ebb when word reached my ears that heavy rains in the interior
were rapidly raising the Rio Branco, and that if they continued, the
first _batelão_ of the season would set out for what is known as the
Brazilian Guyana on May 25. I settled down to endure with as much
patience as I could muster a wait of half a month, and in all likelihood
more, in such a climate and surroundings.
[Illustration: An Amazonian landscape]
[Illustration: A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is
round]
[Illustration: An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and
Manaos, and the Brazilian flag]
On the morning of May 20, however, I was still sleeping soundly when the
barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ I had subsidized—at nothing a day—to
look after my traveling interests put his head in at the door and said
that the boat I awaited was leaving not on May 25, but at once—and would
I please kindly, senhor, give him or his brother, and not some common
fellow, the pleasure of carrying my baggage down to it. I knew, of
course, that the tropical sun had addled the poor fellow’s wits, for
though it is a common thing in Brazil for boats scheduled to sail on May
25 to leave on May 30, or next month, or next year, no one had ever
heard of such a one going out on May 20. However, I could not throw
anything at a man whom I had not even paid a retaining fee, so I went
over to the Armazen Rosas to inquire. It was as I had suspected; the sun
had been too much for the poor fellow. On the board before the
warehouse, and in all the morning papers of Manaos, the _Macuxy_ was
still advertised to leave on May 25. I was about to return to my bed in
disgust when I recalled that I was in Brazil, and entered the _armazen_
to verify the chalked figures. _Não, senhor_, the launch would leave
that very evening. The owner had just arrived in town and had decided to
sail at once. The fact that several people who had been waiting for
weeks might be slightly discommoded if the craft sneaked away without
them, with no other for a month or two, did not trouble him in the
least. If they happened to find out about the change in plans by looking
at the stars and refusing to believe the chalked board and the
newspapers, well and good; but the launch was going primarily to bring
down beefsteaks on the hoof for Manaos, and passengers were merely
endured as a necessary evil.
It was seven o’clock of a dark tropical night when I ate my last
Brazilian “ice-cream,” and two hours later that we began to crawl away
from the wharf—good-by for no one knew how long not only to ice-cream
and ice-cold beer, but to electric lights and street cars, to paved
streets and to reading by night. The announcement had read that the
“Launch _Macuxy_ leaves for the Rio Branco,” which was true enough, but
I quickly discovered that passengers left rather on the _batelão_
hitched beside it, a huge, unwieldy, three-story cattle-barge or scow,
with no motive-power of its own. In the hold and on the lower deck were
piled wood for the launch’s boiler, freight, baggage, cattle, pigs,
chickens, _rancho_, or an unspeakable native kitchen, the third-class
passengers, who paid half-fare, and whatever else chanced to be on
board. The wide-open, roofed, upper deck was reserved, first of all, for
the captain and the owner in a commodious cabin, then for the
first-class passengers with their two “staterooms” back of this. These
had nothing in them but chains, cans, iron-castings, and all the other
odds and ends of ship’s junk, on top of which we put our baggage and
changed our clothes. Everything else took place on the open deck, three
fourths of which consisted of a long row of hammock-hooks on either side
of a beam down the center, under which were a long, narrow dining-table,
a cupboard, a crude water-filter and one glass, neither of which was
usually available for use, and one dirty tin wash-bowl. Much baggage was
piled along the open sides of the craft, far aft were two tiny
partitioned-off places, one a kitchen and the other divided into two
places of convenience, of which one had been turned into a shower-bath
by letting a pipe in through the ceiling above and boring a hole in the
lowest corner of the floor as an exit for the river-water. The shower
was “not working yet, because this was the first trip of the year, but
it would _amanhã_.” Meanwhile I dipped up pailfuls of the Rio Negro and
threw them over me, then tossed most of the night in my hammock, as is
generally the case when one takes to such a bed after a long respite.
We were by no means crowded,—one non-Brazilian besides myself, a dozen
men, and some women and children—but I left the complete inventory to
the long unoccupied days ahead. All swung their hammocks diagonally
across the _batelão_ from the central beam to the outer roof-rail, and
spent their nights and most of their days in them. Close against our
side of the boat—so close that it was constantly spitting sparks and
cinders into our hammocks—was the little launch-tug _Macuxy_, constantly
puffing and snorting like a Decauville engine up a stiff grade and
furnishing our only motive power. The two craft were so balanced that
the launch seemed to steer easily with the heavy _batelão_ alongside, as
is the custom everywhere on the upper Amazon, where a barge is often put
on either side of the launch, but where no boat is ever towed. May is
the usual time for a flock of these craft to set out from Manaos through
all the river network of upper Amazonia, taking freight to the
settlements that cannot be reached in the dry season and bringing down
rubber, “chestnuts,” and, in our case only, cattle.
All the first day we plowed the black waters of the Rio Negro without
seeing a human being or any sign of human existence. There was a
constantly unbroken line of dense-green forest, with trees of all sizes
from small to gigantic, half-hidden by lianas and orchids, and all so
deep in the water that they seemed to be drinking it with the ends of
their branches. The trees were often completely covered with plants from
which bloomed myriads of pinkish flowers like the morning-glory,
retreating toward noon from the ardent tropical sun. There was no
visible sign of bird or animal life, though there must have been much of
both farther inland. In general the country was low and level, but with
an occasional hill or low bluff masked in dense forest. Now and then
there were small islands, also thickly wooded down into the very water,
though we saw none of the floating bits of jungle that were so numerous
in the Amazon proper.
There are places in Amazonia where steamers have to stop and cut their
own wood. Luckily we were not reduced to that extremity, for there were
rare inhabitants along this route to gather and pile it at the water’s
edge. At that, it took four or five hours to load enough for a day’s
run, the Indian and _caboclo_ crew tossing it stick by stick from one to
another along the gangplank, the last man, being more nearly white and
therefore the most intelligent, counting them in a loud voice, the
captain setting down each fifty in a book. For wood is sold as well as
loaded by the stick along the Amazon, sticks a meter long, but ranging
in size from cordwood to that of a baseball bat, and costing here from
35$ to 60$ a thousand.
Our meals were tolerable, for the region, built up about the ubiquitous
_pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_, with wine and condensed milk for those
who cared to pay for them. The greatest drawback was the service. Three
or four of the most disreputable urchins that could be picked up in
Manaos put everything on the table at once, then wandered about for some
time looking for the bell. Even when that had been rung, courtesy
required us to wait for the captain and the owner, by which time
everything was stone-cold. As in all Brazil, the diet was suited to
hearty men in the prime of life engaged in constant manual labor, rather
than to a sedentary life of forced inactivity that made us envy the crew
their wood-tossing at which caste did not permit us to help. I know no
country whose national cuisine seems less to fit the character of the
people and the climate than Brazil.
Toward dark we sighted the first bare spot of the trip, a tiny clearing
of four or five acres called Conceição, with a big tree here and there
and—what was more surprising—big granite rocks, the first native stone I
had seen since my journey into the interior of Ceará. There was a
thatched house, but no one showed up, so we set out the freight we had
for the place,—a huge piece of machinery something like a locomotive
piston, hoisting it with a derrick and standing it upright on a rock
protruding from the water, and sailed away. Next day, or the next, or
some time later the people who lived there could find the thing and know
what it was for, though it was hard to guess how they would transport it
to wherever it was needed. Later, in the dimly moonlighted night and the
densest wilderness of endless forest and water, we slowed down to a
snail’s pace and began whistling ear-splittingly, evidently calling for
someone in the untracked forest sea. For a long time there was no
answer. Then, far off through the ankle-deep trees, appeared a light. By
and by we could make out that it was moving toward us, and at length a
canoe paddled by an Indian, with a near-white man sitting in caste-rule
inactivity in the stern, slipped noiselessly out of the weird night, the
man boarded us, and we were off again.
Finally, on the afternoon of May 22, two hundred and ten miles above
Manaos, we turned from the Rio Negro, which goes on northwestward to
Ecuador and Colombia, into the Rio Branco, stretching almost due north.
This seemed a more sluggish river, gray in color with a slight brownish
tinge, much like the lower Amazon, though quite enough unlike the Negro
to warrant its name of “White River.” Born near the junction of Brazil,
Venezuela, and British Guiana, it is some 420 miles long from the mouth
to where two forks split it apart. In this land of water it was
astonishing that there was not always water enough to float even these
slight-draft river-boats. The name Guyana is said to mean
flooded-country, and includes all that region between the Amazon and the
Orinoco, so that there are not simply three Guianas, belonging to
European powers, but five, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.
It is estimated that the immense State of Amazonas, largest in America,
has only 150,000 inhabitants, of whom half are wild Indians. It was not
until late that afternoon that we came upon a hut on stilts, made
entirely of woven grass, yet with the exotic touch of a sheet-iron door
in one end, reached only by a crude ladder of two rungs. The inhabitants
had grubbed an acre out of the dense jungle on a little nose of land
where another small river flowed in, the ground being then about six
feet above water. They were almost entirely of Indian blood, but the men
wore trousers, jacket, and straw hat, and the women a loose single gown.
As in most of Amazonia, they were a curious mixture of shy, naïve
backwoodsmen and crafty traders. We left two letters and sent the crew
ashore to dig six enormous turtles out of a captive mud-hole, each man
carrying one upside-down on his back across the narrow sagging plank,
eyes, ears, nose and his entire body smeared with the soft yellow mud
that oozed from every crevice of the cumbersome animals. They were to
furnish us food on the way up the river; meanwhile the crew laid them
helpless on their backs on the lower deck. These mammoth Amazon turtles
will live thus for days without food or drink; or even for weeks if left
upright and wet now and then with fresh water.
About the hut was a small forest of mandioca stalks and banana plants,
and under it some “freeman” rubber, the usual large brown balls with a
hole through the center, resembling a bowling-ball, but which had been
gathered and smoked as the spirit moved them by semi-wild Indians, in
distinction to the “slaves” of the regular rubber plantations. The
_cabra_, or Indian-negro, owner sent this, too, on board, sold us
bananas and chickens, and took coffee, sugar, and soap in payment. There
are two trees that furnish rubber. The better kind, called _borracha_,
is procured by tapping the glossy-smooth rubber-tree, and the other, a
much coarser and cheaper stuff called _caucho_, as full of holes as
Gruyère cheese, is obtained by cutting down another kind of tree. All
dry lands of moderate altitude along the Amazon produce the _caucho_
tree, of which a full sized one yields fifty liters of milk or twenty
kilograms of _caucho_, inferior, but commanding a good market. When your
rubber quickly loses its stretch, the chances are that in some of the
many links from producer to consumer the _borracha_ has been replaced by
_caucho_.
There were said to be rubber trees of both varieties in considerable
abundance in the forests on either side of the Rio Branco, but in most
of the region the _bugres_, or wild Indians, made regular exploitation
difficult. On the night of May 23 I slept north of the equator for the
first time since walking across it in Ecuador, thirty-two months before.
The sun laid off most of that day, and it grew so cold that I had to put
on double clothing and wrap myself in my hammock. The trees no longer
stood ankle-deep in the water, sipping it with their branches, for the
bluff banks were from six to ten feet high, with a reddish soil. Since
leaving Manaos we had passed two other craft, smaller launch-barges, and
perhaps half a dozen canoes creeping along the lower face of the forest.
Otherwise there was no evidence of human life along the way, except two
or three huts in tiny clearings every twenty-four hours. The first white
men to enter the Rio Branco were the Carmelite missionaries who, in
1728, founded towns and began catechising the Indians. Seventy years
later an insurrection destroyed most of their settlements, and though
half a century ago some villages along the Rio Branco were reported to
have as many as “320 souls and 40 fires,” to-day a hut or two at most
represents most places marked on the map.
But if there was little human interest along the shores, there was no
lack of it on board. First and foremost among my fellow-passengers was
Dr. R—— of Sweden, a professional bug-chaser past middle life, whose
mild blue eyes blinked harmless innocence, and whose graying hair stood
up in pompadour mainly because it was never combed. He had spent so many
months pursuing bugs along the Amazon that he had become acclimated to
the pajamas and sockless slippers of all male travelers in the region,
and was just such a patient, plodding fellow as men of his profession
must be, carrying their own enthusiasm with them, and was ferocious only
in the pursuit of insects and an ostrich-like appetite. He spoke English
with difficulty and Portuguese scarcely at all, so that we soon took to
conversing in German, and I became unwittingly his unofficial
interpreter. Never have I known a man more splendidly fitted for his
calling. Bugs of every species and description had such an affinity for
him that he did not need to seek them; they sought him, and if there was
a single insect in the region, from a lone mosquito to the rarest
species known to entomology, it was certain to apply to the doctor for a
passage to Sweden, even though it was forced to crawl inside his pajamas
to make sure of the trip. With rare exceptions the touching request was
always granted, for the doctor was never without a large pill-bottle
filled with some sort of poisonous gas, and never a meal did we eat that
he did not jump up from table a dozen times to snatch out the cork of
his inseparable companion and slap the open mouth over some intruder on
some part of the ship’s, or his own, anatomy.
Rough living in Amazonia is at least mitigated by the outwardly gentle,
pleasant, and obliging manners of the inhabitants. It is the religion of
the region never to complain of hardships or lack of comfort, for
growling at all these things would make them and those suffering them
unendurable. Hence there was never any outward evidence of anything but
contentment and satisfaction, even in the face of the most primitive
selfishness on the part of the two masters of the ship. Captain Santos
was a spare but rather good-hearted Portuguese long resident in
Amazonia, who frankly considered his passengers an unavoidable nuisance.
Colonel Bento Brazil, the owner, was a “legitimate son of the Rio
Branco,” that is, born in the region, though pure white and much
traveled. Dressed in the thinnest of white pajamas night and day, he
looked the picture of hardiness even at fifty, which commonly means old
age in North Brazil. At times he was curiously swollen with his own
importance, seeming to feel the deepest scorn for such simple persons as
the Swede and myself; at others he displayed boyish curiosity about the
simplest things. He was careful in the exact degree of greeting he gave
those we met along the river, running all the gamut from an affectionate
embrace of a fellow estate-owner to a motionless word in answer to the
hat-off greeting of some _caboclo_ far below his own caste. All the best
things on board he considered his own; he hung his hammock in the
choicest place and kept the good shower-bath locked, leaving the one
with a spout in the roof to the passengers—though the captain always
loaned me the key to the better one—at every meal he had six eggs,
special fruit, and many extras, while the passengers beside him could
get nothing but the regular rough-and-tumble fare. His constant
selfishness was probably unconscious, for it is every dog for himself on
the Amazon; nature is too primitive and cruel to allow much else, and
like the backwoods estate-owners of Peru and Bolivia, these kings of the
jungle grow unwittingly autocratic and self-centered by living
constantly among dependents.
There were two typical Amazonian women of the well-to-do class on board,
one about fifty and the other nearing thirty. They corresponded in rank
to the half dozen Brazilian men on our upper deck, fairly well-educated
_fazendeiros_ of some means and of that peculiar mixture of world-wisdom
and rusticity common to the region; but, of course, being of the less
important sex, they were treated as a lower type of creation, as is the
Amazonian custom, and had the modest, almost apologetic, reserve of the
aboriginal women. One of the two bare little cabins that might have been
staterooms had been cleared out for them, and here they preferred to eat
seated on the bare floor, rather than come to table with strange men.
They never spoke to any male on board, except an occasional unavoidable
monosyllable, and their every look suggested densest ignorance,
superstition, and slavery to custom, a composite of the
woman-beast-of-burden of the American Indian and the Arabian seclusion
brought to Portugal by the Moors. One might pity them, but any advance,
even to make the trip a bit more pleasant for them, would certainly have
been misunderstood as something reprehensible. At night, like everyone
else, they swung their hammocks on deck, taking the off-side, and
separated from the men only by distance, but at daylight they quickly
crawled again into their little room and rolled about the bare floor the
rest of the day, never making the slightest physical exertion they could
avoid. In the morning they crowded together into the miserable little
“bathroom” aft and held the place two, and even three, hours, after
which, their greasy tresses dripping, they raced back to their room.
Evidently they squatted on the floor and poured water over each other
from the tin can the younger one carried. The most noticeable part of
the whole performance was that, in common with all the women of
Amazonia, as far as my experience carries, the longer they bathed the
less washed they looked. Whether it is due to the mixture of Indian and
Portuguese-peasant blood, with long generations without soap behind
them, or to the greasy Brazilian food oozing through their pores, every
native woman I met along the Amazon gave me an instinctive desire to
avoid the slightest personal contact with her. Yet men of the same
class, and largely the same customs, did not awaken this feeling.
The near-Indian servant girl of the pair aroused the same sensation,
though she, too, spent hours in the “bathroom”; even the little daughter
of the younger woman had this general repulsiveness of her sex. She was
a cunning little thing of four, with wavy locks and penetrating black
eyes; yet somehow one would have hesitated far longer to touch her than
her twin brother. Both were bathed together by the Indian girl every
morning, and for the next hour or two they scampered about the deck in
the costume of Eve before she came across the fig-tree, after which they
were each dressed in a short, thin chemise. Yet though they were
companions in many things, the boy by comparison was “spoiled,” mean,
selfish, quarrelsome, screaming whenever he was crossed, bawling for
everything he wanted until he got it, pounding, biting, and scratching
the Indian girl with total impunity, while if the little girl committed
the slightest fault, she was pounced upon by all three of her guardians.
This Brazilian custom of petting and spoiling the boys, while bringing
the girls up sternly as somewhat inferior beings, accounts for many of
the chief faults of the male character. In perhaps no other country on
earth does one more often meet men who need nothing so much as a good
man-sized trouncing, or where a plain frank word is so certain to arouse
childish, irresponsible resentment, if not actual attack.
That was all there were on our upper deck, except a white Brazilian
steward who seemed to be chronically suffering from the recent death of
his grandmother and the obsequiousness of his low caste, and the three
Indian boy waiters, with minds as ingrown as their generations of grime,
who did not even own hammocks, but curled up through the cold nights on
a wooden bench or the bare deck in the same two ancient blue-jean
garments they wore by day. On the lower deck were a few third-class
passengers, indistinguishable from the deck-hands, who ranged from burly
negroes to muscular Portuguese with almost as simian features, living as
best they might on the bare spots and barer food left over from the
upper world.
The river was often mirror-clear, incessantly reflecting flat, wooded
tongues of land jutting out into it as far as we could see, ever more
blue with distance. At rare intervals there was the splash of a big fish
springing out of the water; otherwise the almost unbroken silence of
primeval nature. Early in the afternoon of the fourth day we stopped at
a typical hut and clearing on the bank to unload bags of rice from
Maranhão, sacks of sugar, salt, and coffee from farther off, an American
sewing-machine and varied merchandise from New York, by way of which had
come also a box of Swiss milk. Among the things imported from abroad
into this land of unlimited timber were complete doors of matched
American lumber, threshold, lintel, lock and all. Unwashed and uncombed
half-Indians of jungle dress and manner watched us at close range, a
weather-beaten female keeping modestly in the background. The Dipper,
which for several years I had lost below the northern horizon, was now
well above it. The cool, moonlighted trees and river still slipped
slowly but incessantly by us into the south, but the river was getting
so low that it began to look as if we would soon run out of water.
At dawn of May 25 we found ourselves anchored at Caracarahy, four
hundred and sixty miles above Manaos, with the first open camp I had
seen in Amazonia, its tufts of bunch-grass quite green, and the joyful
sight of a _serra_, or range of hills, dimly visible to the north. Yet
the campo broke easily into dense woods in any direction. There were a
few scattered _barracões_, or thatched warehouses, and three or four
huts of natives. The place exists merely because there are falls above,
this being the beginning of rising and rocky country, around which all
goods must be transshipped. Here were twenty-four kilometers of
_cachoeiras_, or rock rapids, which may be passed in three ways,—in high
water by the Furo de Cojubím, a _paraná_ or natural canal flanking the
falls, but which in the dry season is a mere succession of mud-holes;
secondly, in certain seasons by dragging freight in small boats up over
the rock falls; lastly, by a _picada_, or trail cut through the dense
forest. I went ashore with the bug-catcher while the captain
investigated. On the boat we had rarely felt a mosquito or any other
form of insect pest, but the moment we landed we were in swarms of them,
especially annoying tiny flies. Later we were to find that the grassy
campo was alive with _mucuims_, an all but invisible red bug especially
active in dew-wet grass, which conceals itself in the pores of the legs
and sets them to itching fiercely a few hours afterward, keeping it up
for days.
We returned on board, to hear the bad news that the early rains had
slackened and that it would be impossible now for the smaller boat that
was following us to pass through the canal and carry us on up the river.
The water must be six feet higher, and as Colonel Bento Brazil put it
laconically, “We may have to wait a month or two, or it may fill up from
one day to another.” There were big cattle pens here, and cowboys who
tended the cattle in shipment as they grazed on the campo before being
jerked aboard the _batelões_ and carried off to Manaos, which is reached
in high water on the down-trip in forty-eight hours. Late that evening
the captain began filling our barge with the maltreated brutes, which,
after a hard drive across the country, were swung by a winch cable about
their horns from the shore corral to the boat, often breaking a rib as
they struck it and now and then a leg as they were lowered into the
hold. No wonder Amazon beefsteaks are tough! Cattle for the Manaos
slaughter-house are almost the only down traffic from this Rio Branco
region, which produces little else, being high open campo and almost the
only place in the entire State of Amazonas that can do so to advantage.
Here they sold for from 60$ to 100$ a head, and in the rainy season can
be transported to Manaos for about 60$. In the middle of the seventeenth
century the Portuguese established cattle-breeding stations here, so
that even to-day the great territory drained by the Rio Branco is known
as the “Fazenda National” and is federal property.
Even here there was no definite information as to whether one could cut
across through British Guiana. All I learned was that, if I could reach
Boa Vista, there were two or three ways of making toward the estate of
an Englishman over the boundary, but even he seemed to be more closely
in touch with Brazil and Manaos than with Georgetown. In the morning
there appeared on board a lively little man native to the region, whom
everyone called “Antonino.” He was dressed in slippers and the modified
pajamas all males find most convenient in Amazonia, had not shaved for
two or three weeks, and had the general appearance of a backwoodsman
with a little plot and a few cattle of his own, who might be able to
write his name with difficulty. In reality, he was the owner of a large
_fazenda_ far up the river on the edge of British Guiana, the boundary
being a stream at his front door. Beneath his lack of shave he knew
Europe well, though little of Brazil, and had an astonishing knowledge
on a wide variety of subjects. What was still more important, he was
going to walk or wade the twenty-four kilometers around the _cachoeira_
next morning to his own barge-launch waiting above the falls to take him
back to his ranch. I bequeathed my steamer-chair to Captain Santos,
packed my valise to the screaming point, with even my private papers and
twenty pounds in gold, and handed it over to a pair of Antonino’s Indian
employees in a canoe half-roofed with thatch, who rowed away into the
evening toward the falls.
Next morning I was disappointed to find that Antonino had hired
“horses,” as they called the wabbly, starved, and degenerate descendants
of those noble beasts that awaited us, eaten by vampire bats and beaten
stupid by their unconsciously cruel Indian-Portuguese owners. I should
much rather have walked, the cruelty of getting astride such miserable
animals aside, for my greatest immediate desire was physical exercise. A
broad-faced, independent Indian “guide” set off with us across open,
bunch-grass country, everywhere lively with birds, the long
scissors-tailed _tesoura_ most conspicuous among them. Mammoth ant-hills
stood higher than horsemen above the thin, tufty grass. Soon we entered
a wide road cut through a dense forest by the state government, at a
cost to taxpayers of 2000 contos! Yet it had never been more than a poor
clearing with a barbed wire fence on either side, and now it was half
grown up to jungle again. In the mass, an Amazon forest is deadly
monotonous; in detail there was an incredible mixture of species, with
the same plant rarely half a dozen times in the same spot, and all
showing a striking adaptability to environment. The great trees stood
always erect, as if striving, like good soldiers, to touch with the
crown of the head an imaginary object above them, spreading out at the
top like a parasol to catch as many of the sun’s rays as possible,
wasting no branches farther down, where the sunshine never penetrates.
There were many rivulets and mud-holes, with a jungle not unlike that of
tropical Bolivia, except that the growth was thicker and greener, with
more beautiful palms. Antonino, who had chosen the best animal, got out
of sight ahead, the Indian urging me to hurry; but as I saw no need for
that, I spared my wreck of a horse. Suddenly, toward noon, we heard a
distant boat-whistle, followed by half a dozen shots from a revolver.
The Indian redoubled his urging and I strove in vain to give my
miserable steed new life. Then more whistles sounded, and the Indian
said dejectedly, “There, the launch is gone.”
“Impossible,” I answered. “As it belongs to Antonino it must wait for
him.”
But we soon came upon the horse Antonino had ridden, tied to the
rail-fence of a cattle-corral in the woods, and I concluded that my new
companion had proved a true Amazonian in thinking of himself alone.
After taking down several fences and putting them up again, we came out
on a little nose of land above the river—and found Antonino looking
hopelessly away up it.
It turned out that Antonino, loving to boast, like most Latin-Americans,
really had not the slightest ownership in the boat we had hoped to
catch, and here we were apparently stranded at the Bocca da Estrada,
with one small, ragged, thatched roof on poles under which to wait for
days, if not weeks. Anyway, the baggage we had sent by canoe had not
arrived. Antonino professed to think that the launch had stopped just a
few miles up the river to overhaul its engines, but this sounded like
another bluff to save his face. I quenched my thirst with a dozen
gourd-cups of yellow river water, squeezing into it the juice of wild
lemons, swung my hammock, and prepared for whatever might be
forthcoming. It is fatal to lose one’s temper in Amazonia. A chunk of
cow that had been torn off the still palpitating animal that morning had
swung unwrapped from the Indian’s saddle during all the sixteen miles.
This we washed, spitted, and thrust into a fire. From it we slashed
slabs still oozing blood with the Indian’s _terçado_, as Brazilians call
a machete, and these being too tough to bite, we cut off each mouthful
below the lips with the huge knife in approved South American cowboy
fashion, after dipping them in coarse rock-salt, tossed handfuls of dry
_farinha d’agoa_ into our mouths with it, and washed it all down with
river-water tempered with the fruit of the wild lemon tree that shaded
our ragged roof. Our total resources were not enough for three meals,
and how long we might have to wait no man knew. To add to the pleasure
of the situation, we had struck a veritable colony of _puims_, as the
Bolivian _jejene_, or tiny gnat of bulldog bite, is called in Amazonia,
which quickly brought back memories of the tattooed skin with which had
I emerged upon the Paraguay sixteen months before.
But, strange to say, Antonino had partly told the truth. About three
o’clock the canoe arrived with our baggage and two sweat-dripping
Indians, and we piled in the rest of our belongings and started on up
the stream as if we really believed the tale that the launch was waiting
not far above. I wished to add to our speed by paddling, but there were
only three _pás_, and the Indians laughed at the thought of a civilized
man doing so. In all Amazonia, with labor so badly needed, the man above
the laboring class suffers most of all for physical exercise, and the
development of the region is under the tremendous handicap of the
ancient Iberian caste system. The Indians surely shoveled water behind
them, however, though even so we made little headway against the swift
current. If one of us spoke to them, they instantly stopped paddling to
listen; hence motionless silence was our only salvation.
Then all at once we rounded a point, and there, sure enough, was the
craft we were pursuing, barely a mile ahead. We quickly lost it to view
again, and I waited anxiously until another bend disclosed it barely a
stone’s throw away and tied to the bank! I should have been less worried
had I known that it would not move an inch forward for another
twenty-four hours.
We found her a battered old German launch attached to the most ancient
wreck of a barge that I had ever seen afloat. They were anchored to a
tree before the only dwelling in the vicinity, the home of a part-Indian
family of countless children and innumerable hangers-on, who lived in a
clearing with several primitive thatched huts. Among them was a youth
who had been blind from birth, yet who went anywhere in the vicinity,
through the dense forest or across the river in a dugout log, and did
the same work as the rest of the men, even to splitting wood in his bare
feet. Even here in the far wilderness the women were Moorish in their
attitude. When a little gasoline launch, with two thatched barges on
either side all but concealing it, arrived after a twenty-four hour trip
around the falls with a crowd of men and women packed like sardines,
these all came ashore for a full breath and to straighten out their
kinks. Barely once did they speak to us men, yet when they were ready to
leave, every woman and girl of the party went entirely around the
circle, limply shaking hands with each of us, though we were nearly all
total strangers. This courtesy is always expected in the far reaches of
Amazonia, and if the traveler chances upon a party of thirty or forty,
it takes an hour or more to get away.
Near the house was a fine specimen of the _japuim_ tree, hundreds of
oriole-like nests of the _japuim-oro-pendula_ hanging from its branches.
They are a noisy bird with a surprising vocabulary, black with white
wings having yellow spots, and yellow from the hips down, so to speak,
with a black end to the tail, and a long, whitish beak. Their nests are
cleverly woven, with the entrance near the top, and every morning the
birds clean them out as carefully as any New England housewife. The
_japuim_ has a saucy, noisy half-cry, half-whistle with which it keeps
up a constant hubbub from daylight until dark. But the most striking of
its habits is its love of company. It does not live in single nests,
like our northern oriole, but hangs scores and even hundreds of them
from the same tree, though there may be countless others without a nest
for miles roundabout. They choose trees near houses, perhaps because the
human inhabitants and their dogs scare off monkeys, snakes, bats, and
other creatures that might do them harm, and like apartment dwellers in
our large cities, they live so close together that the arrival or
departure of one bird shakes up a dozen or more of his neighbors.
We were to have left early next morning, but this was Brazil and we
finally crawled away at four in the afternoon. The _batelão_ was a
floating sty. The hold, directly under the rotten-board deck on which we
lived and where every step was precarious, sloshed with bilge-water
having a strong scent of livestock, and everything made a transatlantic
cattle-boat seem incredibly luxurious by comparison. I dipped my water
direct from the river, but the crew bailed bilge-water out of the bottom
of the barge, and then filled the drinking-water jar with the same
bucket without even rinsing it. I had grown faint with hunger before a
tiny cup of black coffee came to poison and deceive the stomach, and not
a mouthful of food did we get until three in the afternoon. Passengers
are not taken on these boats, though the man who presents himself will
not be put off; but he has no rights and can make no demands. We ate,
standing up at a dirty little workbench on the launch, some beef and
_farinha_ cooked and served by an Indian boy with a rotting forefinger
that suggested leprosy or something worse, and who had never heard the
word “wash.” There were three tin plates on board, which we took turns
in using. Bread is considered an extravagance along the Amazon, and I
had seen none since the first day out of Manaos. Potatoes are as unknown
as cleanliness. I would have given considerable to see a moving-picture
of a germ-theorist dropping dead at sight of us.
In such predicaments moderation is the only hope; eat and drink no more
than is absolutely necessary, and do not worry. My legs itched and
tingled from the _mucuims_ of two days before; indeed, our whole skins
were tattooed with all manner of abrasions, but there was nothing to do
but play Indian and smile at anything. With perfect weather one enjoyed
life, for all its drawbacks, and there was a certain satisfaction in
knowing that everyone else on board was as badly off, which is more
conducive to contentment than living on cattle-boat fare with the scent
of first-cabin mushroom steaks in the air. Still, active rather than
passive hardships would have been preferable.
The captain was a full-blooded Indian with filed teeth. Many aborigines
and part-breeds along the Amazon, some of them “civilized” and living in
the larger towns, file their front teeth to points. A native dentist
told me that this was not due to superstition, but because it keeps them
from decaying and saves people from one of the curses of wild
places—toothache. While I do not recommend the custom, I was frequently
assured, both by Amazonian dentists and the natives themselves, that a
filed tooth never spoils. An Indian who spoke Portuguese, and who was so
familiar with modern progress that he made no objection to my
photographing him and his wife with their pointed fangs displayed, said
that the work had been done when he was twelve, with a three-cornered
file—though the wilder tribes chip them off—that the only hurt was a few
days’ dull ache, and that the only purpose of the custom was to save the
teeth and at the same time be able to cope with the tough “green”
beefsteaks of Amazonia.
The owner of the barge, who sat _chupando canna_—“sucking” sugar-cane it
was, indeed—by the light of a brilliant full moon, tried to force his
cabin upon me; but I declined extra favors and swung my hammock with the
others on the lower deck over the sloshing cattle-water. In the
moonlight the mirror-clear river reflected every hump and turn of the
banks far ahead. When I finally fell into a doze in spite of the
constant hubbub on launch or barge, someone woke me and told me to take
my hammock away while the crew loaded wood, which they did for some
hours. Like a magnet, we seemed to pick up everything along the river
and drag it with us. When daylight came we were towing the launch of a
rival, which appeared to have broken down, our own clumsy old barge with
some three feet of odorous water in its hold, two very large boats,
roofed, and with tons of cargo, a dead gasoline launch, two large and
heavily laden rowboats, two empty rowboats, four canoes, and perhaps
seventy-five persons all told, some of whom had waited half a year to
get this trip up the river. To say that we made speed against the swift
current would be exaggerating.
We stopped for wood again during the day and I had my first swim in
Amazonia, for here the danger of _pirainhas_ was said not to be great.
This savage small fish, having double rows of teeth of razor edge with
which it tears the flesh even of man, is the horror of the swimmer in
nearly all the waters of the Amazon basin. Let the skin show the
suggestion of a wound, and whole schools of these bloodthirsty creatures
dart forward to the attack with lightning-like rapidity. The river
remained wide, but was now very shallow, and much of the year it is
almost completely dry. On the morning of May 28 we sighted the first
town since leaving Manaos. This was Boa Vista, founded forty years ago
on the left-hand bank of the river, where the dense forests begin to die
out into open campo. Its red-tiled roofs and other colors gave a
striking and welcome contrast after an unbroken week of watching the
monotonous unrolling of jungle-forested banks. There were perhaps forty
houses and huts, including a church in ruins, three shops, two dentists,
one of whom was also the pharmacist, and the self-complacent air of a
backwoods metropolis. Boa Vista is the “capital” of the cattle plains of
northernmost Brazil, and as such has an importance out of all keeping
with its size, like many another insignificant town in a boundless
wilderness. Yet it had the profound melancholy, the mournful
tranquillity that is the ordinary existence of _sertanejo_ populations,
where nearly every individual is true to his relaxed and indolent
environment. There was, however, really a “boa vista” for this region, a
far-reaching view across the river and the grassy plains to ranges of
hills purple-blue with distance.
For some days Antonino had been suffering from some violent throat
infection, and he was now speechless. Everyone advised him to stay in
Boa Vista, where at least there was a pharmacy and a dentist, if no
doctor—and the next boat, I recalled, would probably be at least a month
behind. I kept silence, however, rather than let my own convenience
tempt me to advise him; but after everyone else had tried their turn at
wheedling him to remain, he refused, and having had his throat sprayed,
we were off once more. In the brilliant moonlight that night we passed,
high up on a low hill, the snow-white chapel of the monks of São Bento,
and below it on the river stood Fort São Joaquim. The old fortress was
built by the Portuguese in 1775 to keep the Spaniards to the north and
west from stealing Portuguese territory. It is now in ruins, but there
was still a “garrison” of a dozen men living in thatched huts about it.
This was the junction of the Parima and the Takutú Rivers, which form
the Rio Branco. We turned into the latter and struggled on. The last of
our tows had dropped off at Boa Vista, and of passengers, there remained
only Antonino, his servant, and myself. In the morning we were skirting
the broad acres of the Fazenda Nacional. Across it, near the Venezuelan
boundary, was the legendary Lago Dourado and Manoa del Dorado, said to
have been built by Peruvians before the Conquest, where everything was
reputed to be made of pure gold. Even Walter Raleigh took the existence
of fabulous Manoa seriously, and planned an expedition to find and
conquer it. To this day, however, it has not been discovered. The Manoas
were the most numerous and valiant tribe in the Rio Branco region, but
they grew weak under missionary civilization and retreated to British
territory, though they left descendants in all the Amazon basin. It is
the boast of many of the “best families” of the Rio Branco Valley that
they are of the true aristocracy because some of their ancestors were
Manoas.
[Illustration: A lace maker on the Amazon]
[Illustration: The Municipal Theater of Manaos]
[Illustration: Here and there our _batelão_ stopped to pick up a few
balls of rubber]
[Illustration: Now and then we halted to land something at one of the
isolated huts along the Rio Branco]
If there had been water enough, the launch would have taken us on up the
Takutú to Antonino’s door, but we were lucky to be able to push on to
the home of the captain before the water ran out. From the shallow
Takutú we turned into the narrow Surumú, with barely sufficient water to
float us. This the English once claimed as the frontier, but the King of
Italy, as arbitrator, set it farther east. The thinly wooded banks grew
ever closer together, and in mid-morning we grounded the launch—the old
wreck of a _batelão_, had been left before the estate of its owner near
the mouth of the branch—at the captain’s _fazenda_, “Carnauba.” In the
baked-mud house we were welcomed by his good-hearted, if diffident and
laconic, part-Indian wife and family. I asked the captain how much I
owed him for my passage, at which he showed great surprise and after
long reflection remarked that he thought twenty milreis would be
generous. This was distinctly reasonable for Brazil, and especially in
Amazonia, where the higher you go and the poorer accommodations become,
the more exorbitant are apt to be the charges. Money is not the common
medium of exchange thus far up-country, where favors are usually
returned by some species of barter. Thus Antonino was welcome to ride
free because he often shipped cattle by this launch and _batelão_, and
the man who offers money is looked upon somewhat as a “tenderfoot” is on
our western plains.
Eager to stretch my legs, I would have pushed on without delay. But
Brazil is Brazil, even on its edges, and haste was difficult. First
coffee must be served; then came talk enough to settle the terms of a
treaty of peace, after which we finally packed all but the most
indispensable of our baggage and sent it away by canoe with Antonino’s
servant, who must descend again to the Takutú and paddle his way up it.
By this time “breakfast” was ready, and we sat down to a heavy Brazilian
meal of several kinds of meat, chicken included, and _farinha_ wet in
broth, ending with the unescapable black coffee. Then the nearest
neighbor, from several miles away, dropped in, and the chatter went on
while we lolled in _capechanas_ sipping more black coffee. This was my
first acquaintance with the typical seat of the region, a short hammock
made of dried cowhides and used not as a bed by night, for which it
would lack comfort and size, but as a lounging-place by day. There were
six of these _capechanas_ swinging under the veranda. Cowhide is so
plentiful in these parts that stiffened ones are often set upright as
walls or partitions. There was not a chair in the house, though there
were two American sewing-machines and a rusty American phonograph with a
hundred records, both so long maltreated that every song sounded like
the squawking of the same hen in a slightly different key. The most
prized product of the outside world seemed to be kerosene, used in
everything from launch-engines to lamps, and always eagerly sought. A
ten-gallon box of two cans cost 25$, say seven dollars, and for several
months a year it is not obtainable at any price.
First we were to start at ten, then at noon; now we must wait until the
sun was lower. A dozen horses were rounded up in the corral, where two
were lassooed, and for once it looked as if I were to have a real mount.
But the captain insisted on having him tried out first, and after
fiercely bucking and rearing for some time, he took the Indian peon on
his back for a gallop which he ended suddenly by throwing the rider over
his head into a shallow pool, breaking the ancient weather-rotted
leather of both saddle and bridle—which was lucky, for otherwise we
might never have recovered them. I was quite willing to try my luck, if
they would catch him again, but the captain insisted on choosing a
substitute, which turned out to be another of those equine rats it
seemed always my fate to ride in South America. Notwithstanding his
unpromising appearance, however, I was no sooner astride him than he
gave a splendid plea for admission to a Wild West show, bucking, jumping
up into the air and coming down stiff-legged on all fours, kicking,
rearing, and finally taking the cowhide “bit” in his teeth and galloping
wildly away across the bushy campo. For a time I was undecided whether
to stay on his back or catapult over his head, but decided that the
ground was hard and that the honor of my race depended on my performance
before those Amazonian gauchos. Somehow, therefore, even with the kodak
over my shoulder thumping me in the back at every jump, I kept aboard
and returned to the house, which astounded the natives so profoundly as
to imply that every other “gringo” of their acquaintance had toppled
limply off at the first jump.
Even when I got him quieted down, the animal was so ticklish that if a
foot or a bush touched him, he instantly went through the impersonation
of a bronco all over again, so that a dozen times that afternoon I had
the same sport. Antonino in time caught up with me and we rode on
together across a great plain, with scrub trees here and there, many
clusters of the _burity_ palm from the fan-like fronds of which all
roofs of the region are made, and countless _tepecuim_, conical
ant-hills from six to ten feet high. The range of hills, which I now
knew to be the Kanuku Mountains in British Guiana, stood out blue, yet
clear, against the far eastern horizon when, about five o’clock, we
stopped at the “Fazenda Maravilha” on a bank of the Takutú River. It was
a “marvel” only in its own estimation, though the part-Indian owners
showed all the hospitality of the region by not only serving the
ceremonious black coffee, but by insisting that we remain for the
evening meal. Here, also, there were leather hammocks, and a sadly
abused phonograph which did its best to entertain us. We were off again
at dusk, meaning to take advantage of the full moon; but the clouds were
thick, and even after it appeared we saw little of it. Before it rose we
stumbled upon what Antonino called a “_maloca_,” a cluster of huts built
and intermittently inhabited by more or less wild Indians. In the
darkness between two of the shanties we found a pair of Indian youths,
dressed in the remnants of cotton shirts and trousers and lying in their
only other possession,—old hammocks swung from posts under the
projecting eaves. They belonged to the Macuxy (pronounced “ma-coo-shée”)
tribe scattered through the hills of the three countries about the
source of the Rio Branco. My companion wanted them to go back to
“Maravilha” and help row his canoe and baggage home next day, and the
argument he was forced to put up resembled that of a spellbinder seeking
votes. In words of one syllable—for they understood little
Portuguese—and with such reasoning as one might offer a child of six, he
told them at least a dozen times that he would pay them two days’ wages,
either in food or money, and that they might be on their way again the
following evening. Though they admitted that they had not eaten that
day, that they had no water, and asked for tobacco, their unvarying
reply was an indifferent monosyllable, and it was only after half an
hour of pleading that they gave a grunted promise to roll up their
hammocks as soon as the moon was high and be in “Maravilha” in time to
start up the river at dawn.
Soon we came to a muddy _igarapé_ that our animals refused for a long
time to cross, and finally, toward what was perhaps midnight, the
barking of a pack of curs drew our attention to a hut and corral and
announced us to their unwashed owner. He invited us to swing our
hammocks inside, gave us each a nibble of miserable native cheese, and
eventually, a discussion of the news of the day having been exhausted,
let us fall asleep. The chief item of interest which Antonino had
brought with him was that a youth known to himself and our host had
resorted to the plan, still usual in those parts, of stealing a woman,
but who this time happened to be a widow. The hut-owner refused to
believe it, saying in a surly grunt that “of course Pedro is old enough
now to hunt him a woman, but whoever heard of stealing a _widow_!” The
scorn in his tone is inexpressible in words. Long before daylight we
saddled again, drank a glass of foaming milk still warm from the corral,
and struck out across bushy campo, rather sandy and very dry. An unusual
danger on these great savannahs is that wild horses, especially
stallions, roaming the plains attack mounted animals, sometimes biting
mouthfuls out of them, if not out of the rider. Several pursued us, and
one big black brute would not give up his nefarious project until I had
fired my revolver over his head. About seven we came upon another hut,
where the usual limp handshakes and mutual inquiries as to the health of
families—for, of course, Antonino knew everyone in the region—was
followed by the exchange of local gossip until coffee had been made and
served. An hour later there was a similar halt at a similar hut. Life in
Brazil is just one black coffee after another. Here there was a branch
of the Takutú, to be crossed in a canoe, swimming our horses and
re-saddling them, after which a long and fairly swift trot brought us at
last to the home of Antonino.
It was by no means as sumptuous a place as his choice of language had
led me to picture, but at least it was more comfortable than the mud hut
in which we had spent part of the night. There was a large thatched and
once whitewashed adobe house standing forth on a big bare spot at the
top of a slight bluff above the Takutú, and three or four smaller huts
and a corral, all of which, with several hundred dry and sandy acres
about them, Antonino had inherited six years before from his
mother-in-law. The site was on the extreme edge of Brazil, where the
Takutú makes an almost complete turn and the Mahú flows into it, and it
would have been easy to throw a stone from Antonino’s door over onto
British territory. I had looked upon my companion as almost a youth, yet
his wife, younger than he, was already old and gray, and his daughter of
thirteen was in the physical prime of life and visibly longing for a
husband. These, a son, and Antonino’s brother, dying of tuberculosis,
made up the household, though there was the usual swarm of Indian or
half-Indian servants.
[Illustration: Our _batelão_ loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals
on the banks]
[Illustration: The captain of my last Brazilian _batelão_, and his wife]
[Illustration: Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along
the Rio Branco]
After a swim in the boundary and a mammoth, though rough, dinner, I was
led to the “chaletsinha,” a small mud-and-thatched hut reserved for
visitors, for even here it would have been scandalous to lodge a male
friend in the same house with one’s women folk. The floor was of
unleveled earth and there were a dozen hammock-hooks, between two of
which I napped for a couple of hours. Meanwhile the fifteen-year old son
had been sent over into British Guiana to summon the “Americano.” Ever
since I first met him Antonino had insisted that a _compatriota_ of mine
lived just across the boundary from his _fazenda_, but I had so often
found in South America that men reputed to be my compatriots turned out
to be Italians, Syrians, negroes, or something else as un-American, that
I had given little attention, and no faith, to his assertion. My
surprise, as well as my delight, was all the greater, therefore, when
there suddenly walked in upon me a magnificently built, handsome type of
outdoor American in the early prime of life and the visible pink of
condition, his ruddy health in striking contrast to the chalky faces of
the indoor Brazilians. He was Ben Hart from South Dakota, who had gone
first to Panama, then to the Madeira-Mamoré, later had prospected for
gold around Sorata, and finally had come to British Guiana eight months
before with an American partner to start a cattle ranch. The partner had
an English wife, however, and when the war broke out he had gone to
London to enlist and left Hart alone. I was the first “white man” he had
seen in half a year, and though he could not assure me that I could
reach Georgetown, never having been there himself, he did “hope I would
come over and stay a few weeks with him.”
On the last day of May we walked a couple of kilometers over bushy campo
and dried bogs to a fringe of woods on the edge of the Mahú, across
which Hart hallooed to his Indian boys about a newly thatched hut
visible on the opposite bank. They soon appeared in an aged dugout, the
gunwales of which were under water, but with boards nailed above them, a
precarious craft that would have filled in ten minutes; but luckily the
trip lasted only three. Thus I was removed bag and baggage from Brazil
eleven months to a day from the time I had entered it from Uruguay. That
day I was firmly convinced that nothing short of penal servitude would
ever again get me back into the mammoth land of the imperial palm and
political corruption; but time cures most lacerations of the skin and
nothing is so disagreeable at a distance as it is close at hand. The
Brazilian bubbles over with faults. As my old friend, Professor Ross,
puts it, “he much prefers the lollipops of compliment to the pungent
olive of truth”; yet there is something fascinating about both him and
his gigantic, wasted national domain. Long after his grafting
politicians and his un-trounced men and boys have become the dimmest of
memories, his magnificent palms, swaying beneath peerless skies, his
incomparable capital and the songs of his _sabiás_ remain vividly etched
in a crowded recollection; and when, on a dark and dreary winter day in
the Puritan-weighted North, I read again some of the swinging,
color-flashing lyrics of Casimiro d’Abreu, nothing but the Portuguese
word _saudade_ expresses the longing that comes over me to behold again
those marvelous days and luminous nights of which he sings.