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If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: Working North from Patagonia - Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through - Southern and Eastern South America - -Author: Harry Alverson Franck - -Release Date: August 30, 2017 [EBook #55455] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA *** - - - - -Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive) - - - - - - - - - - WORKING NORTH - FROM PATAGONIA - - -[Illustration: Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana] - - - - - WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA - BEING THE NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY, EARNED ON THE WAY, THROUGH SOUTHERN - AND EASTERN SOUTH AMERICA - - - BY - HARRY A. FRANCK - - Author of “A Vagabond Journey Around - the World,” “Zone Policeman 88,” - “Roaming Through the West Indies,” - “Vagabonding Down the Andes,” etc., - etc. - - ILLUSTRATED WITH 176 UNUSUAL - PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR, WITH A - MAP SHOWING THE ROUTE - -[Illustration] - - NEW YORK - THE CENTURY CO. - 1921 - - - - - Copyright, 1921, by - THE CENTURY CO. - - - Printed in U. S. A. - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - FOREWORD - - -Though it stands by itself as a single entity, the present volume is a -continuation and the conclusion of a four-year journey through -Latin-America, and a companion-piece to my “Vagabonding Down the Andes.” -The entrance of the United States into the World War made it impossible -until the present time to continue that narrative from the point where -the story above mentioned left it; but though several years have elapsed -since the journey herein chronicled was made, the conditions encountered -are, with minor exceptions, those which still prevail. South American -society moves with far more inertia than our own, and while the war -brought a certain new prosperity to parts of that continent and a -tendency to become, by force of necessity, somewhat more self-supporting -in industry and less dependent upon the outside world for most -manufactured necessities, the countries herein visited remain for the -most part what they were when the journey was made. - -Readers of books of travel have been known to question the wisdom of -including foreign words in the text. A certain number of these, however, -are almost indispensable; without them not only would there be a -considerable loss in atmosphere, but often only laborious -circumlocutions could take their place. Every foreign word in this -volume has been included for one of three reasons, because there is no -English equivalent; because the nearest English word would be at best a -poor translation; or because the foreign word is of intrinsic interest, -for its origin, its musical cadence, picturesqueness, conciseness, or -for some similar cause. In every case its meaning has been given at -least the first time it is introduced; the pronunciation requires little -more than giving the Latin value to vowels and enunciating every letter; -and the slight trouble of articulating such terms correctly instead of -slurring over them cannot but add to the rhythm, as well as to the -understanding, of those sentences in which they occur. - - HARRY A. FRANCK. - - - - - CONTENTS - - - CHAPTER PAGE - I THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS 3 - II ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES 24 - III FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS 38 - IV OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE 64 - V CHILEAN LANDSCAPES 82 - VI HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY 111 - VII BUMPING UP TO RIO 138 - VIII AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO 173 - IX BRAZIL PAST AND PRESENT 193 - X MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS 215 - XI STRANDED IN RIO 242 - XII A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL 270 - XIII ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT 295 - XIV WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES 315 - XV NORTHWARD TO BAHIA 342 - XVI EASTERNMOST AMERICA 372 - XVII THIRSTY NORTH BRAZIL 399 - XVIII TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON 430 - XIX UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA 456 - XX STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN 502 - XXI ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS 554 - XXII THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA 610 - - - - - ILLUSTRATIONS - - - Bush Negroes of Dutch Guiana _Frontispiece_ - - FACING PAGE - - In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American - consul general 32 - - The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires 32 - - A Patagonian landscape 33 - - The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio - Negro of southern Argentine 33 - - A rural policeman of the Argentine 48 - - My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the - _Argentino_ calls a “soolky” 48 - - A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and - some of its inhabitants 49 - - A family of Santiago del Estero 49 - - A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand 64 - - Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_ - of southeastern South America 64 - - The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with - snow 65 - - A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of - May 65 - - At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the - Andes” in a bleak and arid setting 80 - - The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile 80 - - On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in - among the boulders 81 - - The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the - summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a - fertile valley 81 - - The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have - women conductors 96 - - Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit - less picturesque than Valparaiso 96 - - The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile 97 - - Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South - American cities built of wood, even the streets being - paved with planks 97 - - Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb 112 - - A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern - Chile 112 - - A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo 113 - - A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at - the loss of his life’s companion 113 - - A rural railway station in Uruguay 128 - - The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat - Hills) district 128 - - “Pirirín” and his cowboys at an _estancia_ round-up in - northern Uruguay 129 - - Freighting across the gentle rolling plains of the - “Purple Land” 129 - - A _gaucho_ of Uruguay 132 - - A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia 133 - - An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the - blood-red mud of his native heath 133 - - The parasol pine-trees of southern Brazil 140 - - Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande - do Sul 140 - - A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of - us and made our train half an hour late 141 - - A cowboy of southern Brazil 141 - - The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo 160 - - Santos, the Brazilian coffee port 160 - - A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in - Nictheroy 161 - - The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock - hills 161 - - An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo 176 - - Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose 176 - - The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the - National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on - the left, a shack-built hilltop 177 - - A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio - Branco 224 - - A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive - noise-producer 224 - - The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the - Brazilian capital 225 - - The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a - distinctive whistle 240 - - The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil 240 - - The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to - Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha 241 - - At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth - charged with the advertising painted his own portrait - of Edison. He may be made out leaning affectionately - on the right shoulder of his masterpiece 288 - - The central praça of Campinas 288 - - Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church - above the town 289 - - Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is - surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations 289 - - Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former - Brazilian president 304 - - Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes 305 - - The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello - Horizonte, are decorated with paintings 305 - - Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are - found some of its gold and diamonds 320 - - A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina 320 - - In the diamond fields of Brazil 321 - - Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them 321 - - Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a - tiny edition of picturesque Rio 352 - - Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João” 352 - - Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements 353 - - A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore 353 - - The site on which Bahia was founded 368 - - Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a - steam laundry of Bahia 368 - - Taking a jack-fruit to market 369 - - The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil 372 - - The waterworks of a Brazilian city of some 15,000 - inhabitants 372 - - A Brazilian laundry 373 - - Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival 373 - - The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay 380 - - Another Brazilian milkman 380 - - Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times 381 - - A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor - gasoline 381 - - Ladies of Pernambuco 384 - - A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper 384 - - Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk - and a dancing girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos - behind the drummer 385 - - The pungent odor of crude sugar is characteristic of - downtown Recife 400 - - In the dry states north of Pernambuco cotton is the most - important crop 400 - - Walking up a cocoanut palm to get a cool drink 401 - - Wherever a train halts long enough in Brazil the - passengers rush out to have a cup of coffee 401 - - The houses of northeastern Brazil are often made - entirely of palm leaves 416 - - Transportation in the interior of Brazil is - primitive—and noisy 416 - - Our advertising matter parading the streets of a - Brazilian town off the main trail of travel 417 - - The _carnauba_ palm of Ceará, celebrated for its utility - as well as its beauty 417 - - Rural policemen of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of - the region 432 - - From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street - car 433 - - A street of São Luis de Maranhão 433 - - My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every - station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky - negroes with nothing on their minds but a couple of - trunks 448 - - Dolce far niente between shows in Pará 448 - - The cathedral of Pará 449 - - Pará has been called the “City of beautiful Trees” 449 - - Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in - Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of - varicolored sails, a veritable fog rising from it - under the equatorial sun 464 - - Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native, - the other imported from India to improve the native - stock 464 - - A family dispute on the Amazon 465 - - The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both - Brazilians of the north 465 - - An Amazonian landscape 480 - - A boatload of “Brazil nuts.” The Amazonian paddle is - round 480 - - An inter-state customhouse at the boundary of Pará and - Manaos, and the Brazilian flag 481 - - A lace maker on the Amazon 496 - - The Municipal Theater of Manaos 496 - - Here and there our _batelão_ stopped to pick up a few - balls of rubber 497 - - Now and then we halted to land something at one of the - isolated huts along the Rio Branco 497 - - Our _batelão_ loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals - on the banks 500 - - The captain of my last Brazilian _batelão_, and his wife 500 - - Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along - the Rio Branco 501 - - Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open - campo of the upper Rio Branco 508 - - I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana - in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on - the further bank of the Mahú 508 - - Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme - edge of British Guiana 509 - - Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers 509 - - Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage - might not have got across what had been trickling - streams a few days before 512 - - We impressed an Indian father and son into service as - carriers 512 - - Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points 513 - - An Indian village along the Rupununi 513 - - The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills, - and paddled us down the Rupununi 528 - - Two of my second crew of paddlers 528 - - One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout 529 - - “Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo 529 - - We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old - dugout 532 - - “Harris” and his wife at one of their evening campfires 533 - - Battling with the Essequibo 533 - - More trouble on the Essequibo 540 - - High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana 540 - - Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea 541 - - The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne - have soft jobs and often wear shoes 541 - - A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a - negro boss 560 - - Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the - negroes of the French possessions in America 560 - - The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the - vultures 561 - - In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is - cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves 561 - - A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread 576 - - Homeward bound from market 576 - - French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne 577 - - White French convicts who would like to go to France, - rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who - would rather stay at home 577 - - Along the road in Dutch Guiana 580 - - A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana 580 - - A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native - headdress 581 - - A lady of Paramaribo 581 - - Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of - the Far East 588 - - Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_ - plantation in Dutch Guiana 588 - - Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their - native musical instruments 589 - - Wash-day in Dutch Guiana 589 - - An East Indian woman of Surinam 592 - - A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations 592 - - A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana 593 - - Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in - which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of - rubber 593 - - A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections - of the railroad to the interior 596 - - A Bush negro family on its travels. Less than half the - dugout is shown 596 - - A Bush negro watching me photograph our engine 597 - - A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush negroes, - returning from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor - of Surinam, with his “commission” from Queen - Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and - footsore valet 597 - - The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, - with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the - background 604 - - An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from - Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam - plantation in order to kill the ants that would - destroy it 604 - - Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will - eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and - cocoa 605 - - A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana 608 - - Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday - before one of their barrack villages 608 - - Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on - the Orinoco 609 - - The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela 609 - - An Indian family of eastern Venezuela 612 - - Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears - on his travels 612 - - A Venezuelan landscape 613 - - Hammock-makers at home 620 - - The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable - by rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning - before the dew has dried 620 - - Lopez buying hammocks 621 - - We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to - quench our raging thirst 621 - - Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a - fellow-traveler 624 - - Dinner time in rural Venezuela 624 - - Lopez enters his native village in style 625 - - The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family 628 - - Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city - waterworks 628 - - A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital 629 - - The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of - Caracas 629 - - A bread-seller of Caracas 636 - - The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the - “Washington of South America” 636 - - A street in Caracas 637 - - The Municipal Theater of Caracas 637 - - - - - WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA - - - - - CHAPTER I - THE SOUTH AMERICAN METROPOLIS - - -In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to -the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious -friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an -American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down from -Washington months before having been lost in transit. Moreover, being a -discerning as well as a kind-hearted man, the consul knew that even a -rolling stone requires an occasional handful of moss. The salary was -sufficient to sustain life just inside what another consular protégé -called the “pale of respectability,” and my duties as “outside man” -brought me into daily contact with all classes of _Porteños_, as natives -of what was reputed the most expensive city in the world are known in -their own habitat. - -Two years of wandering in the Andes and jungles of South America is, in -a way, the best possible preparation for a visit to the largest city -south of the United States. The man who approaches it from this corridor -will experience to the full the astonishment it is almost certain to -produce upon an unprepared visitor; he will be in ideal condition to -recognize the urban artificialities which make it so great an antithesis -of the rural simplicity of nearly all the southern continent. Like the -majority of Americans, I suppose, though I had now and then heard rumors -of its increase and improvement, my mental picture of the Argentine -capital was as out of date as the spelling “Buenos Ayres” that still -persists among even the best of English and American authorities. It was -the picture hastily sketched by our school books of not so long ago, -and, except in the matter of a few decades of time, it was essentially a -true one. - -A bare half century back the City of Good Airs had the appearance of a -Spanish town of the Middle Ages, and worse. Though it faced the River -Plata at a point where it is more than thirty miles wide, it had no real -harbor. Travelers landed from ships by first transferring to rowboats -far out on the yellow-brown horizon, then to ox-carts driven hub-deep -into the shallow, muddy stream. The streets were so innocent of paving -that business men often remained at home lest they find it impossible to -extricate themselves from the quagmires that masqueraded under the name -of _calles_. Temporary wooden bridgelets were laid across corners from -one scanty raised sidewalk to another; at the height of the rainy season -even horsemen were sometimes mired in the very heart of town. Men still -living tell of a pool in the present bustling Calle Rivadavia about -which sentinels had to be posted to keep careless people and their -horses from drowning in it. Municipal lighting was unknown. A few -public-spirited citizens hung up tallow candles before their houses; -wealthy residents, obliged to make their way through the bottomless -night, were attended by menials carrying lanterns. There were neither -water pipes nor sewers; each citizen dug his own well beside his garbage -heap. In winter the one-story houses, stretching in solemn yet -disordered array down the narrow, reeking streets and built for the most -part of sun-baked mud bricks, became slimy, clammy dens in which disease -bred and multiplied. The hundred and some thousand inhabitants, mixtures -of Spanish adventurers and Indians from the great pampas beyond, had but -little contact with the outside world and were correspondingly -provincial, conservative and fanatical. - -Such was Buenos Aires within the memory of men who do not yet consider -themselves old; such it is still in the average imagination of the -outside world. It is with something stronger than surprise, therefore, -that the newcomer finds the Argentine capital to-day the largest -Spanish-speaking city on the globe, second only to Paris among the Latin -cities of the world, equal to Philadelphia in population, resembling -Chicago in extent as well as in situation, rivaling New York in many of -its metropolitan features, and outdoing every city of our land in some -of its civic improvements. Personally, I confess to having wandered its -endless streets and gazed upon its unexpected cosmopolitan uproar in a -semi-dazed condition for some time after my arrival. It was hard to -believe that those miles upon miles of modern wharves, surrounding -artificial basins capable of accommodating the largest ships in -existence, backed by warehouses that measure their capacity in millions -of tons, were situated on the same continent as medieval Quito, that the -teeming city behind them was inhabited by the same race that rules -languid La Paz and sleepy Asunción. - -The greatness of Buenos Aires has been mainly thrust upon it. Of all the -cities of the earth only Chicago grew up with more vertiginous rapidity. -The city of to-day has so completely outreached the plans of its -unsuspecting founders that it is constantly faced with the problem of -modifying existing conditions to meet metropolitan requirements. It was -a comparatively simple matter to fill in and pave the old quagmires that -posed as streets; it was quite another thing to widen them to -accommodate modern traffic. Laid out by Moorish-influenced Spaniards in -a century when the passing of two horsemen constituted the maximum -demand for space, the streets of old Buenos Aires are narrower and more -congested than the tightest of those at the lower end of Manhattan -Island. In most cases the problem has been frankly abandoned, for -nothing short of destroying all the buildings on one side or the other -of these medieval passageways could improve them. The result is that a -walk through what was the entire city fifty years ago, and which is now -mainly the business section, is an ordeal or an amusing experience, -according to the mood or the haste of the victim. - -The _Porteño_ has made various bold attacks upon this problem of -congestion. Nearly thirty years ago he hewed his way for a mile and a -half through the heart of the old town, destroying hundreds of buildings -in his insistence on more space. The result is the Avenida de Mayo, -somewhat resembling the boulevards of Paris in the neighborhood of the -Opéra and stretching from the already old and inadequate _Casa Rosada_, -or presidential palace, to the new congressional building, which -resembles and in some ways outdoes in majestic beauty our own national -capitol. But this chief artery of downtown travel is, after all, of -insignificant length compared with the mammoth Buenos Aires of to-day, -and the older flanking street of Rivadavia, once the principal highway -to the pampa beyond, cutting the entire city in two from the waterfront -to the open plains, is quite incapable of handling the through traffic -which refuses to risk itself in the constricted _calles_ of the downtown -labyrinth. - -Similar heroic treatment has been applied in other parts of the old -town. Wherever the stroller wanders he is certain to come out often upon -an open space, a little park or a plaza, which has been grubbed out by -the bold demolition of a block of houses. I cannot recall another city -where parks are anything like as epidemic as they are in Buenos Aires. -There is not a point in town out of easy strolling distance of one or -more of them, some so tiny that they can be crossed in a hop, skip, and -a jump, the largest, aristocratic Palermo, so large that one may wander -for hours without crossing the same ground twice. - -Buenos Aires is not a city of skyscrapers. Built on a loose soil that is -quite the antithesis of the granite hills of Manhattan Island, with -unlimited opportunity to spread across the floor-flat plains beyond, it -has neither the incentive nor the foundation needed to push its way far -aloft. Custom in this respect has crystallized into requirement, and a -city ordinance forbids the height of a building to exceed one and -one-third the width of the street it faces. The result is that while it -has fewer architectural failures, fewer monstrosities in brick and -stone, the city on the Plata has nothing that can rival the epic poems -among buildings to be found at the mouth of the Hudson. From a distance -it looks curiously like one of our own large cities decapitated to an -average height of three or four stories, with only here and there an -ambitious structure peering timidly above the monotonous general level. -Flat and drab are perhaps the two words which most fully describe its -general aspect. - -On every hand the traveled visitor is reminded of this or that other -great city; it is as if one were visiting a newly laid out botanical -garden in which the origin of most of the plants, taken from old -established gardens elsewhere, is plainly evident, with only here and -there a native shrub or a curious hybrid to emphasize the changed -conditions of soil and climate. When one has noted the origin of nearly -all its human plants, it is no longer surprising that Buenos Aires seems -more a European than an American city. Architecturally it most resembles -Paris, with hints of Madrid, London and Rome thrown in, not to mention -certain features peculiarly its own. This similarity is the pride of the -_Porteño_ and every recognition of it is a compliment, for like nearly -all Latin-Americans, he is most enamored of French culture. Not only is -he accustomed to refer to his city as the “Paris of South America”—all -South American capitals are that to their own people—but he copies more -or less directly from the earthly paradise of all good _argentinos_. The -artistic sense of the Latin comes to his aid in this sometimes almost -subconscious endeavor; or, if the individual lacks this, there is the -guiding hand of the community ever ready to sustain his faltering steps. -City ordinances not only forbid the erection of structures which do not -fit into the general scheme of a modified Paris, but Buenos Aires -rewards those who most successfully carry out its conception of civic -improvement. Every year the building adjudged the greatest addition to -the city’s beauty is awarded a bronze façade-plate and is relieved for a -decade from the burden of taxes. - -It would be unreasonable to expect a community with such pride in its -personal appearance to permit itself to be disfigured by an elevated -railway system. Besides, as it is spread evenly over an immense space of -flat country, “B. A.’s” transportation problem is scarcely serious -enough to require this concession to civic comfort. Of street-cars in -the ordinary sense it has unlimited numbers, plying in every direction; -all they lack is freedom to go their way unhampered in the oldest and -busiest section of town. Their one peculiarity, to the American, is that -they refuse to be overcrowded. No one may enter a tramcar while its -seats are filled; nine persons, and nine only, may ride on the back -platform. If you chance to be the tenth, there is no use insisting that -you must ride or miss an important engagement. The car will refuse to -move as long as you remain on board, and if there happens to be within -call one of the spick-and-span, Britishly imperturbable, New-Yorkly -impersonal policemen of Buenos Aires, you will probably regret your -insistence. It will be far better to accept your misfortune with Latin -courtesy and hail one of the taxis that are forever scurrying past. Or, -if even the modest demands of these well-disciplined public carriers are -beyond your means, there is the ancient and honorable method of footing -it. The chances are that if your destination is anywhere within the -congested business section you can walk to it and finish your errand by -the time the inexorable street-car would have set you down there. - -I lost no time in exploring the luxuries of Buenos Aires’ new subway. -Only the year before the proud Avenida de Mayo had been disrupted by the -upheavals throughout its entire length, and already the “Subterraneo” -operated from the Plaza de Mayo behind the Pink House to the Plaza Once, -two miles inland and nearly a fifth of the way across the city. Like the -surface lines it belongs to the _Tranvías Anglo-Argentina_, a British -corporation, the concession requiring the company to pay the city six -per cent. of its gross receipts for fifty years, at the end of which -time the subway becomes automatically the property of the municipality. -The _argentino_ is fully awake to the advantage and possibility of -driving good bargains in the exploitation of public utilities and -resources. - -The descent to any of the subway stations along the Avenue carries the -mind instantly back to Manhattan. The underground scent is the same, -news-stands and advertising placards are as inevitable; along the -white-tile-walled platforms are ranged even penny-in-the-slot scales and -automatic vendors, though with the familiar plea, “Drop one cent,” -changed to “_Echad 10 centavos_,” which is significant of the difference -in cost of most small things in the chief cities of North and South -America. Yet the subway fare is a trifle cheaper on the Plata, being the -tenth of a _peso_ normally worth barely forty-three cents. One’s -impression of being back in “Bagdad-on-the-Subway,” however, is certain -to evaporate by the time he steps out of his first _tren subterraneo_. -The _Porteño_ believes in moving rapidly, but his interpretation of the -word hurry is still far different from our own. There are certain forms -of courtesy which he will not cast off for the mere matter of stretching -his twenty-four hours a few minutes farther; there are certain racial -traits of deliberate formality of which he is incapable of ridding -himself. Moreover, the “Subterraneo” is British, and it retains the -dignified leisureliness of its nationality. One buys a ticket of a man -who is intensely aware of the fact that he is engaged in a financial -transaction; at the gate another man solemnly punches the ticket and -returns it to the owner, who is warned both by placards and italicized -remarks on the ticket itself that he must be constantly prepared -instantly to display it to the inspectors who are forever stalking -through the cars; where he disembarks, it is solemnly gathered by still -another intense employee, who will infallibly make the passenger who has -carelessly mislaid the valuable document in question produce another -ten-centavo piece and witness the preparation and cancelation of a -_billete suplementario_ before he is granted his freedom. There are no -express trains; the locals are rather far apart; they cease their labors -soon after midnight, and do not begin again until dawn. On the other -hand, the cars are roomy, spotless and as comfortable as a club -easy-chair; the noisy ringing of bells and slamming of doors by -disgruntled guards is lacking; signs to “Prepare yourself to leave the -coach before arriving at the station of destination” take the place of -any attempt to hustle the crowd. The company loses no courteous -opportunity of “recommending to the passenger the greatest rapidity in -getting on or off the cars, in order to accelerate the public service,” -but mere placards mean nothing to the Spanish-American dowager of the -old school, who is still inclined to take her osculatory and deliberate -farewell of friends and relatives even though the place of parting be -the open door of this new-fangled mode of transportation, surrounded by -inwardly impatient, but outwardly courtier-like, subway guards and -station employees. - -Three important railway companies operate five lines to the suburbs, and -every evening great commuters’ trains, more palatial than the average of -those out of our own large cities, rush away into the cool summer night -with the majority of “B. A.’s” business men. It is perhaps a misnomer to -call the score or more of residence sections suburbs, for they are -compactly united into the one great city, of which they constitute fully -three fourths the capacity. But each district bears its own name, which -often suggests its character and history. Even a total stranger might -guess that Belgrano and Flores are rather exclusive dwelling-places; -Coghlan, Villa Malcolm, Villa Mazzini, and Nueva Pompeya recall some of -the races that have amalgamated to form the modern _Porteño_; one would -naturally expect to find the municipal slaughter-house and less pleasant -living conditions in Nuevo Chicago. In these larger and newer parts of -Buenos Aires the broad streets are in striking contrast to the crowded -and narrow ones down town. Though the _Porteño_ has inherited the -Spaniard’s preference for taking his front yard inside the house, -neither the sumptuous dwellings of the aristocratic north suburbs nor -the more plebeian residences of the west and south have that shut-in air -of most Latin-American cities, where the streets slink like outcast curs -between long rows of scowling, impersonal house-walls. - -The far-flung limits of Buenos Aires inclose many market gardens, and -the land side of the city belongs to the backwoods it faces. But the -thousands of makeshift shacks which fringe it are not the abode of -hopeless mortals, such as inhabit the hovels of less progressive South -American towns. The outskirt dwellers of Buenos Aires have the -appearance of people who are moving forward, who insist that another -year shall find them enjoying something more of the advantages of -civilization. Indeed, this atmosphere pervades the entire city, bringing -out in pitiless contrast the social inertia of the great Andean region. -There are fewer slums in Buenos Aires than in New York; the children of -the poorer classes are less oppressive in appearance; beggars are -scarcer. Though there is squalor enough, the _conventillos_, or -single-story tenement-houses of the larger west-coast cities are almost -unknown. Economic opportunity has here given birth to new hope and -brought with it the energy and productiveness which constitute a great -people, and by the time the visitor has wandered with due leisure -through the vast length and breadth of Buenos Aires he is likely to -conclude that there the Latin is coming into his own again. - -Though it is not quite so difficult to find a native _argentino_ in -Buenos Aires as to run to earth a genuine American in New York, there -are many evidences that its growth has come mainly from across the sea. -The city is not merely European in its material aspects, but in its -human element. The newcomer will look in vain for any costume he cannot -find on the streets of Paris or Rome; the wild _gauchos_ from the pampa, -the beggars on horseback, the picturesque Carmelite monks and nuns that -troop through the pages of “Amalia” and kindred stories of the past -century are as scarce as feather-decked Indians along Broadway. No city -of our own land is more completely “citified” than the Argentine -capital. Though there has as yet been far less European immigration to -the Argentine Republic than to the United States—a mere five million who -came to stay up to the beginning of the Great War—a disproportionate -number of these have remained in Buenos Aires. Fully half the population -of the city is foreign born, with Italians in the majority. The -long-drawn vowels and doubled consonants of Italian speech are certain -to be heard in every block, though more often as a foreign accent in the -local tongue than in the native dialect of the speaker. For the Italian -fits more snugly into his environment in the Argentine than in the -United States. He finds a language nearly enough like his own to be -learned in a few weeks; there is a Latin atmosphere about the southern -republic, particularly its capital, which makes him feel so fully at -home that he is much less inclined to segregate than in the colder -Anglo-Saxon North. Add to this that the climate is more nearly that of -his homeland, that the Argentine welcomes him not merely with five days’ -free hospitality and transportation to any part of the country, but with -the communal _abrazo_ as a fellow-Latin and a near relative, and it is -easier to understand why ships from Genoa and Naples are turning more -and more southward on their journey across the Atlantic. Were it not for -the reversal of the seasons on the two sides of the equator, the -Argentine would have a still larger permanent Italian population. But as -it is summer and grape-picking time in the boot-leg peninsula when it is -winter on the pampas, large numbers of Italians flit back and forth like -migratory birds from one harvest to the other, or go to spend the money -earned where it is plentiful in the place where it will buy more. - -The Castilian lisp also stands out frequently in the sibilant native -speech of “B. A.” and the _boína_ of the Basques is so common a -headdress in the city as to be inconspicuous. After the Spaniard there -are French, English, and German residents, decreasing in proportion in -the order named, and Americans enough to form a champion baseball team. -Jews are less ubiquitous than in our own metropolis, but they are -numerous enough to support several synagogues and a company of Yiddish -players for a season of several weeks, after which the Thespians find -new clientèle in the larger cities of the interior. - -It is surprising to most Americans to find that Buenos Aires is strictly -a “white man’s town.” The one negro I ever saw there was posted before -the door of a theater, as an advance attraction. In the country as a -whole African blood is scarcer than in Canada; while the United States -has twelve non-Caucasians to the hundred, the Argentine has but five. -Nor do there remain any visible remnants of the aborigines, at least in -the capital. The caste of color, so intricate and unescapable in the -Andes, is completely lacking. Nor are the places of importance in its -social structure confined to those of Spanish origin. Along with the -Castilian and Basque names that figure in its society and big-business -columns are no small number not only Italian and French, but English, -Baltic, and Slavic, some of them more or less Spanicized by long -Argentine residence. As in Chile there is a little aristocracy of third -or fourth generation Irish, retaining the original spelling of their -family names, but pronouncing them “O-co-nór,” “Kel-yée,” “O-bree-én” -and the like. It was an ordinary experience in running consular errands -in Buenos Aires to come across business men with English or Irish names -who spoke only Spanish, or men who spoke English with both an Irish -brogue and a Spanish accent and accompanied their remarks with a wealth -of Latin gesticulation. - -To say that these transplanted Irish are active in local and national -politics is to utter a tautology. Strictly speaking, Buenos Aires is not -self-governing; as a Federal District—the most populous one in the -world, by the way—it is ruled by an _intendente_ appointed by the -national executive. But its influence on the national life is more -potent than that of Washington and New York combined; as it has more -“influential citizens” and large property owners than all the rest of -the republic, it has roundabout ways of imposing its own will upon -itself. Not that those ways are devious in the cynical sense. It is -something of a traditional hobby among the heads of aristocratic old -families, most of them with ample wealth, to accept municipal office and -to seek public approval in it out of family pride, and their privilege -to be free from the handicap of listening to every whim of an ignorant -electorate. Thus Buenos Aires enjoys the distinction among large cities -of the western hemisphere of being for the most part rather well -governed. On the whole, perhaps a larger percentage of public funds are -actually and advantageously spent in municipal improvement than in the -case of most “self-governing” cities. Besides, it is one of the -distinctions between North and South America that while the cry of -“graft” is more frequent in our municipal than in our national affairs, -our neighbors to the south seem more capable of handling a city than a -nation. - -It is as easy to become a citizen in the Argentine as in the United -States, but it is not quite so easy to remain one. The duties of -citizenship are more nearly those of continental Europe than of the free -and easy Anglo-Saxon type. There is compulsory military service, for -instance. In theory every male citizen must enter the army or navy for -two years when he reaches maturity; practically there is by no means -room for all in the armed force which the Argentine considers it -necessary to maintain. Hence the requirement reduces itself to the -necessity of drawing lots, and of serving if designated by the finger of -fate. This is no new and temporary whim in the Argentine, but was -already in force long before the European war. The _argentino_, however, -goes his models of the Old World one or two better. The man who does not -serve, either for physical or lucky reasons, pays a yearly tax toward -the support of the force from which he has been spared. As in -continental Europe, every citizen must have a booklet of identity, -issued by the police and duplicated in the public archives. This -document is so essential that, though I spent less than three months in -the country, I found it advantageous to apply for one, that is, the -simpler _cédula de identidad_ for non-citizens. The temporary resident, -and even the citizen, may “get by” for a time without this little -volume, but the day is almost sure to come when he will regret its -absence. Of two men whose public altercation chances to attract the -attention of the police, the one who can produce his _libreto_ is far -less likely to be jailed than the one who cannot. The chauffeur who has -an accident, the man who is overtaken by any of the mishaps which call -one’s existence to the notice of the public authorities, is much better -off if he has been legally registered. Moreover, the citizen can neither -vote nor exercise any of his formal rights of citizenship without -displaying his booklet. It contains the photograph, a brief verified -biography, the signature, and the thumb-print of the holder. The -_argentinos_ have carried the use of finger-prints further than perhaps -any other nation. Even school children taking formal examinations must -often decorate their papers with a thumb-print. Both photograph and -_cédula_ are produced by a well-trained public staff in well-arranged -public offices, in which prints of all the applicant’s fingers are filed -away under the number inscribed on his _libreto_, and where courteous -attendants bring him into contact with the lavatory facilities which he -requires before again displaying his hands to a pulchritudinous public. -In addition to the essentials contained in all booklets, that of the -citizen has several extra pages on which may be inscribed from time to -time his military and civic record. - -But to come to the polls, now that we are armed with the document -indispensable to any participation in an election. A new election law -had recently been passed, one so well designed to express the real will -of the people that pessimists were already prophesying its attempted -repeal by the oligarchy of wealthy property owners, from whom it would -wrest the control of government. As in most Latin-American countries, -Sunday was the day chosen for the casting of ballots. About each -polling-place, most of which were in sumptuous public buildings, rather -than in barbershops and second-hand shoe stores, were a few of Buenos -Aires’ immaculate, imperturbable policemen and the three or four -officials in charge. Otherwise there was little animation in the -vicinity. The new election law forbids voters to approach the polls “in -groups,” and makes electioneering or loitering within a certain -considerable distance of the booths penal offenses. Glancing cautiously -about him, therefore, to make sure that he was not a group, the -_Porteño_ stealthily yet briskly stepped forward to do his civic duty. -The officials rose to greet him with dignified courtesy, and requested -permission to peruse his booklet. This being found in order, his -military service honorably completed, or his military tax paid, they -permitted him to cast his ballot, at the same time recording that act on -the proper line of his _libreto_. This latter formality is of such -importance that the voter himself would protest against its inadvertent -omission. For the new law in the Argentine _requires_ each citizen to -vote. Unless he can show unquestionable proof that he was seriously ill -or unavoidably absent from his home district on election day, the -citizen whose _libreto_ does not show, at the next revision by -authority, the mark of the election board is subject to a fine. - -The most cynical of observers could scarcely have suspected any -“crookedness” in the election as it was carried out that day in Buenos -Aires. Outside the capital things were perhaps a trifle less ideal; at -least tales of strife drifted in for some time afterward from the remote -provinces, where the familiar old South American experience of seeing -the _cacique_, the hereditary “boss,” impose his will with a heavy and -sometimes a bloody hand was still repeated. But there was considerable -evidence that the entire country is improving in this respect. Those who -lie awake nights worrying about the future development of foreign lands -need not lose much sleep over the Argentine, for here at least is one -South American country unquestionably able to work out its own destiny. - -The _argentino_ is in no such breathless haste as the American to know -the result of his elections. The newspapers of the following morning -carried many columns of comment on the aspect of the capital and the -principal towns of the provinces under the new law, but not a hint of -the future make-up of the legislative body. Weeks later the retiring -congress met in their new palace, and laboriously fell to counting the -ballots from all the republic, announcing the results piecemeal from day -to day, and causing the votes to be publicly burned in a corner of the -still unfinished grounds when the count had been verified. - -It goes without saying, since military service is one of the duties of -citizenship, that Argentine women do not vote. In fact, there is almost -no evidence of a desire on their part to do so. A very small group of -_sufragistas_ did make a demonstration in the capital on election day, -sending through the streets an automobile decorated with banners, -flowers, and femininity. But as the four young ladies in the tonneau -were both comely and exquisitely dressed, the apathetic by-standers took -the attitude of considering them rather as exhibits in national beauty -and charm than for what they purported to be—all, that is, except the -police, who ungallantly took the group into custody for violating the -new law against electioneering on the day of balloting. - -Perhaps the greatest personal surprise which befell me during the -election was to be asked by a policeman at one of the polls before which -I illegally loitered for a moment whether I desired to vote. One is so -palpably, so noticeably a “gringo” in other Latin-American countries -that it had never occurred to me that I might be taken for a citizen in -the Argentine. In nearly all the rest of South America the foreign -resident remains an _estranjero_ all his days; even his native-born -children are apt to be called “_hijo de inglés, de italiano, de -alemán_”; in the Argentine he is soon accepted as one of the -cosmopolitan race of the Silvery Republic. The Argentine, and perhaps -Uruguay, seems to be the only country south of our Rio Grande capable of -giving the immigrant an entirely new deal in the game of life and of -completely absorbing him into the body politic, at least by the second -generation. The sons of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Italians who took up -their residence below the Plata are no more English, French, and Italian -than they would be if their fathers had come to the United States. If -any reference to their origin comes up in conversation, it is as -something casual, unimportant, like the color of their hair and eyes. -During my stay in the southern republic the son of an American dentist -who had established himself in Buenos Aires a generation ago lost his -life in a foolhardy airplane flight undertaken for the delectation of a -group of admiring young ladies, on the eve of an official attempt to fly -over the Andes. The temperament which caused him to accept such a -challenge under the circumstances was as typically Latin-American as -were the flowers, poems, and street names which were heaped upon “our -national hero” by his bereaved Argentine fellow-countrymen. In Peru or -Colombia his exploit might have been noted, but he would still have been -an _americano_. - -The people of the Argentine, and particularly of Buenos Aires, have much -the same feeling toward the _madre patria_ as the average American has -toward England—forgiving, though perhaps still a bit resentful of the -past, aware of the common heritage, on the whole a trifle disdainful. -The popular term for a Spaniard in Buenos Aires is “Gallego” (or, in the -slurring Argentine pronunciation, “Gajego”), and the Galician has stood -for centuries as all that is stupid, servile, and clumsy, the unfailing -butt of Spanish drama. The _Porteño_ never says he speaks Spanish, -though his tongue is as nearly that of Spain as ours is that of England; -even in his school books he calls it the _idioma nacional_. - -But the _argentino_ is still largely Spanish, whether he admits it or -not; he is distinctly of the Latin race, for all the influx of other -blood. The types one sees in his streets are those same temperamental -Latin-Americans to be found from Mexico to Paraguay, a more glorified -type, perhaps, more in tune with the great modern moving world, almost -wholly free from non-Caucasian mixture, larger and better nourished, and -with the ruddiness and vigor of the temperate zone. But they have much -the same overdeveloped pride, the same dread of demeaning themselves by -anything suggestive of manual labor. No _Porteño_ of standing would -dream of carrying his own valise from station to tramway; even the -Americans sent down to set up harvesting machinery on the great -_estancias_ cannot throw off their coats and pitch in, lest they -instantly sink to the caste of the peon in the eyes of the latter as -well as in those of the ruling class. Caste lines are sharper in the -Argentine than anywhere in western Europe; as in all South America there -is little or no “middle class,” few people of moderate wealth, tastes, -and station to fill in the great gulf between the day-to-day workman and -the powerful landed proprietors who dwell sumptuously in the capital on -the income from their vast estates out on the pampas, which they see far -less often than the medieval lord did his feudal domain. - -The prevailing attitude toward life, including as it does an exaggerated -pride in personal appearance, gives Buenos Aires a plethora of -labor-fearing fops whose main purpose in life seems to be to establish -the false impression that they are the scions of aristocratic old -families of uncomputed wealth. Behold one of these frauds in his daily -peregrination, for he is too typical of the Buenos Aires point of view -to be passed over as a mere individual. At an aristocratic hour of the -afternoon he may be seen descending the steps of the far-famed, more -than ornate Jockey Club (pronounced “Shocky Cloop” in the Argentine) in -the patrician Calle Florida. His faultless black felt hat, carefully -creased at the front and back of the crown but full in the middle, the -bow of the band at the back of his head, is set at the twenty degree -angle, tilting to the rear, of the “last cry” of fashion. A silk scarf -of much yet subdued color, a tan suit cut low in front and retreating -suddenly below, the two coat buttons close together, displaying much -silver-and-gray waistcoat, the cuffed trousers razor-edged, surmounting -patent-leather shoes topped by silver-gray spats, one lavendar glove, -with what may be a diamond ring bulging through one of the fingers, its -wrist folded back over the hand it covers and in which its mate is -carried, completes his attire, though not his make-up. A brilliant -carnation in the lapel, a green-black overcoat of camel-hair, -blanket-like texture, drawn together behind by a half-belt fastened to -buttons on the sides, the skirts of the wide-spreading variety, thrown -with ostensible carelessness over the left arm, and a silver-headed cane -grasped by the middle at the latest approved angle, in the bare hand, -complete the sartorial picture. On the chronically disappointed face -cultivated by the gilded youth of Latin-America there is an aristocratic -pose, beneath which lurks a faint hint of the Bowery, particularly when -its possessor turns to ogle those of the passing ladies who are -ogle-worthy. Arrived in the street, he opens with grand manner a silver -cigarette-case and lights in the latest fashion a monogrammed cigarette, -summons a taxi with a languid, world-weary air by slightly raising his -cane, steps in and rides out of sight of the Jockey Club, alights, pays -the sixty centavos fare of the first fifteen hundred meters—and walks to -the ten-dollar-a-month room he shares with a companion. At the Jockey -Club races hundreds of these real or counterfeit favorites of fortune -may be seen on the hottest days in those same lavendar gloves—or rather, -their spotless replica—pulling out little pocket mirrors every few -minutes to reassure themselves on their personal charms, or attempting -to add to them by giving a new curl to their mustaches. - -[Illustration: SOUTH AMERICA] - -Physical exertion, even for exercise sake, has little place in the -scheme of life of these dandies, or of the majority of youths even of -the genuinely wealthy and patrician class. Of late certain influences -have been working for improvement in this matter, but they are still -hampered by the awkwardness of inexperience as well as laggard -_costumbre_. Out at Tigre, a cluster of islands and channels some miles -up the bank of the Plata, young men of the class that in the United -States would pride themselves on a certain expertness in sports may be -seen rowing about with the clumsiness and self-consciousness of old -maids, their shirts bunched up under their suspenders, their bodies -plainly uncomfortable in trousers inclined by the dictates of fashion, -as well as by the unwonted exertion, to climb to their chests, the -occasional young woman in the back seat sitting as stiffly as the model -in a corset-shop window. - -The feminine sex of the same class does not, of course, yield to the -males in the matter of personal adornment. At the races, along the -shaded drives of Palermo of an afternoon, above all in the narrow Calle -Florida a bit later in the day, fashion may be seen preening itself in -frank self-admiration. In the material sense the Calle Florida is merely -another of those inadequate streets of the old town, four or five blocks -back from the waterfront, and given over to the most luxurious -shops,—jewelers, _modistes_, _tailleurs de luxe_. But Florida is more -than a street; it is an institution. For at least a generation it has -been the unofficial gathering-place of the élite, in so far as there can -be any such in so large a city, taking the place in a way of the Sunday -night promenade in the central plaza of smaller Latin-American towns. Up -to a few years ago the carriages drove directly from the daily promenade -in Palermo to join the procession that crawled back and forth along the -few blocks of Florida between the Avenida de Mayo and the Plaza San -Martín, the ladies in them affecting that air of lassitude which seems -to be most attractive to the frankly admiring cavalier south of the Rio -Grande. But the day came when the narrow _callejón_ could no longer -contain all those who demanded admission to the daily parade and mutual -admiration party, and the _intendente_ solved the problem by closing the -street to vehicles during certain hours of the late afternoon. There is -still a procession on wheels from eleven in the morning until noon, -given over particularly to débutantes ostensibly on shopping tours, -though invariably surrounded by long lines of gallants and would-be -_novios_; but the principal daily _corso_ is now made on foot, and -admiring males may without offense or conspicuousness pass near enough -in the throng that fills the street from wall to wall to their -particular ideal to catch the scent of her favorite perfume. Nor does -that require undue proximity, for the most circumspect ladies of Buenos -Aires see nothing amiss in making an appeal to the olfactory senses -which in other lands would lead to unflattering conclusions. - -The gowns to be seen in such gatherings are said by authorities on the -subject to be no farther behind Paris than the time of fast steamers -between French ports and the Plata. To the bachelor more familiar with -the backwoods they seem to be as thoroughly up to the minute as their -wearers are expert in exhausting every possibility of human adornment. -Unfortunately, many of the demure, semi-animate ladies prove on close -inspection to be not so beautiful as they are painted. Not a few of them -could readily pass as physically good looking, despite the bulky noses -so frequent in “B. A.” as to be almost typical, were they satisfied to -let nature’s job alone. But the most entrancing lady in the world would -risk defeat by entering a beauty contest disguised as a porter in a -flour-mill. There are, to be sure, ravishing visions now and then in -these Buenos Aires processions, but unpolished candor forces the -admission that what to us at least is the refined and dainty type is -conspicuous by its rarity. It is a standing observation of critical -foreign visitors that the décolleté gowns seen at the Colón during the -opera season often disclose cable-like shoulder muscles bequeathed by -recent ancestors who carried loads on their heads. That to me is one of -the promising signs in Buenos Aires, a proof that the new “aristocracy” -is near enough the laboring generations which built it up not to have -lost its muscle and its energy; it helps to explain the youthful -enthusiasm of the Argentine, similar to our own and so unlike the blasé -hopelessness of much of South America. For the southern republic is as -truly the land of opportunity as is our own, inferior perhaps only in -extent and resources. Along with the fops lounging in the Jockey Club it -has many such types as Mihanovitsch, arriving half a century ago with no -other possessions than the porter’s rope over his shoulder and retiring -recently from the active ownership of the largest steamship company -south of the United States, with palatial steamers plying wherever -Argentine waters are navigable. - -The gaudy ostentation of this _nouveau riche_ city of Latin-Iberian -origin is nowhere seen to better advantage than at the Recoleta, the -principal cemetery. This is a crowded cement city within a stone wall, -as much a promenade and show-ground as a last resting-place. Men sit -smoking and gossiping on the tombs; women take in one another’s gowns -with critical eye as they turkey-walk along the narrow cement streets -between the innumerable family vaults. The tombs are built with the all -too evident purpose of showing that one’s dead are, or at least were in -life, of more importance in the world than those of one’s neighbors. -They have four or more stories below ground, with shelves or -pigeon-holes for several coffins on each “floor,” and marble steps -leading down to them. On the upper or ground floor, usually surrounded -by elaborate statues sculptured in white stone, are ostentatious chapels -with plate-glass doors, locked with the latest American safety locks. -Everywhere reigns a gaudy luxury wholly out of place in a city of the -dead. The self-respecting corpse must feel as if he had been set up in a -museum instead of being disposed of in a sanitary and inconspicuous -manner. Here and there a tomb bears the sign “For Sale,” with the name -of the authorized real estate dealer under it. The seller, who in some -cases seems to have tossed out the bones of his forgotten ancestors in -the convenient old Spanish way, is certain to benefit financially from -the transaction, for the Recoleta is _the_ cemetery of Buenos Aires, -absolutely limited in space now by the city that has grown up about it, -and accommodations in it are as eagerly sought as boxes at the opera or -seats on the stock exchange. - -“Le cheval est la plus noble conquête que l’homme ait jamais fait,” runs -an inscription, from Buffon, over the portals of the far-famed -race-track in Palermo, which, from the intellectual heights of the -Jockey Club, is no doubt true. It suggests, however, an attempt on the -part of the _argentinos_ to deceive themselves into believing that they -attend the races in such hordes every Thursday and Sunday because of -their love of horses, rather than to indulge their genuinely Spanish -infatuation for gambling. This same hint of hypocrisy, of kow-towing to -Mrs. Grundy, which is ordinarily little in evidence in the -Latin-American character, also smirks from the tickets of the lottery -maintained by the Federal Government, which calls itself the “Loteria de -_Beneficencia_ Nacional.” How widespread is this Iberian desire to get -something for nothing is shown by the fact that the Argentine not only -maintains the national lottery, with regular drawings every ten days and -frequent special drawings with enormous prizes, but two other official -games of chance, run by the Provinces of Buenos Aires and of Tucumán. - -The gambling at Palermo is on the _pari mutuel_, or pooled bets system. -That is, those who wish to place a wager on a race—and virtually -everyone on the grounds seems to have that desire as often as a race is -announced—crowd their way to one of the many windows, and purchase as -many bet-tickets as inclination or the state of their pocketbooks -suggests. These tickets are of two kinds,—_Ganador_ (Winner) and -_Placé_. All money wagered on that race is pooled, the Jockey Club, to -which the whole establishment belongs, skimming off ten per cent. for -itself and distributing the rest among those holding winning tickets. -Thus when a favorite wins there are so many players to share the returns -that one often gets little more than his money back. There are none of -those hundred-to-one chances to make the excitement of large hopes worth -the risk of a small loss. Now and again an “outsider” wins at Palermo, -but it is a far more common experience to wager two pesos, to see one’s -choice come in a neck or a length ahead of the entire field—and to be -paid two pesos and ten centavos at the booking windows. - -The _Porteños_ seem to get much entertainment out of their race-track, -for all the slimness of the average winnings. The sumptuous pavilion, -confined to the use, free of charge, of members of the Jockey Club and -their guests, is always well patronized; the adjoining concrete stand, -called the “Paddock,” has its throng of seven-peso spectators even on -days when weather and grounds are not inviting to the sport; the swarms -of garden variety men and women who surrender two pesos for the -privilege of jostling one another in the other stands and about the -betting booths show an even less blasé interest. On fine days many -canopied tea-tables are set out on the smooth gravel space before the -Jockey Club pavilion, and there may be seen _Porteño_ fashion at its -gaudiest. The entire place is honeycombed with passageways for the use -of an army of officials, contestants, bet sellers and bet payers, the -latter superhuman in their facility in mental arithmetic. From the upper -seats one may look off across three complete racetracks, one within the -other and enclosing a lake and a small park, to the red-brown Plata, -stretching dull and featureless to the horizon. One might moralize and -point out the burden imposed on the mass of the population to support -the Jockey Club, perhaps the most ornate place of its kind in the world, -and surround the few thousand club members with luxury, could one -overlook the fact that if the average _argentino_ were denied the -privilege of risking his money on the races or in the lottery, he would -find other ways to hazard it, if only by betting on the number of rains -a year or the number of traffic blocks per hour in the downtown streets. - -Of other forms of public entertainment Buenos Aires has its fair share. -The theater list for a given day numbers twenty-five performances, -ranging from the opera to a circus and a _frontón_ given over to the -Basque game of _pelota_—this, too, without counting the ubiquitous -“movie.” Serious drama has comparatively little standing, the popular -taste running to flippant one-act Spanish _zarzuelas_ or to the maudlin -and undress, with the audiences overwhelmingly male. Vaudeville bills -are apt to be cosmopolitan, each “artist” speaking his mother tongue, -for there is slight native “talent,” and an American negro doing a clog -dance that would not win him a single “hand” at home is much applauded, -since, coming from abroad, he must be good. A “national company” giving -native plays of real literary and histrionic merit was conspicuous by -its rarity. - -Night life in Buenos Aires is brilliant at least in the material sense. -Though there are fewer blazing advertisements in all the town than along -Broadway, municipal lighting is more generous than in pre-war Paris. -Entertainments rarely begin before nine, and midnight usually finds the -streets crowded. By night, perhaps even more than by day, the visitor is -struck by the lack of rowdyism. As the city is less noisy than our own -metropolis, thanks to the absence of an “L,” among other things, so it -is less “tough.” Even the saloons—it seems more fitting to call them by -their local name of café—have little objectionable atmosphere; in them -one may order “soft” as well as “hard” drinks without arousing an -insinuating look from the waiter. The _Porteño_, like the southern -European from whom he is mainly descended, is temperate in his use of -liquor, and he expects his drinking-places to be as gentlemanly as any -other public rendezvous. Fully as numerous as the “cocktailerías,” often -presided over by expert mixers exiled from the United States, are the -_lecherías_ at which one may sit down at any hour of the day or evening -to a glass of the best of milk at a reasonable price. - -The Latin-American privilege of ogling all attractive women has not, of -course, been eradicated even in Buenos Aires. But a recent ordinance -makes it a penal offense to speak to a woman on the street unless first -addressed by her, and the few respectable women who go out after dark -without escort are rarely subjected to anything worse than staring, and -perhaps an ostensibly unconscious little whispered monologue or popular -air. The same restriction has not, however, been placed on the fair sex, -and cases of blackmail turning on the point of who spoke first have not -been unknown in the municipal courts. - -“B. A.” is particularly gay during the winter season, from June to -September. Then “Society” has returned from Mar del Plata, the Argentine -Atlantic City, or from the Córdoba hills; the few wealthy _estancieros_ -who have residences on their estates come in from the pampa; gilded -loafers, opera singers, adventuresses turn up from the four points of -the compass, and the capital becomes doubly pretentious, expensive, and -crowded. Several times I came to it from journeys into the “camp,” as -the large English-speaking colony, anglicizing the Spanish word _campo_, -calls the country outside the capital, and each time I found it more -breathlessly in pursuit of pleasure. With the same latitude as Los -Angeles, the South American metropolis does not, of course, have what we -would call a real winter. Only once within the memory of the present -generation has snow fallen in sufficient quantity to cover the ground. A -temperature around the freezing point is the usual limit, and even in -the coldest days of July or August the sky is apt to be brilliant and -the atmosphere radiant. The cold, when it comes, seems extraordinarily -penetrating, just as the _pampero_, the suffocating norther of the -summer-time, seems hotter than anything the tropics have to offer. His -winter season is so short that the average _argentino_ makes little or -no preparation for it, with the result that he probably suffers more -from cold than those who live in really cold countries. Both law and -custom now require steam heat in hotels and the more important public -buildings, but the rank and file rarely come into contact with -artificial warmth. - -A few years ago Buenos Aires caught a virulent case of puritanism from -some unknown source and made a concerted attack on notorious immorality. -The more vulgar features of night life were driven across the Riachuelo, -a filthy little stream that bounds the city and the federal district on -the south. There, beyond the jurisdiction of the city police—since the -section is subject only to the laws of the Province of Buenos Aires, -with its capital far away at La Plata—though still virtually within the -city limits, are gathered sailors’ recreation houses and the most -squalid vice. In _Porteño_ speech “beyond the Riachuelo” is the -equivalent of “outside the bounds of decency,” and in the moral shambles -of this region public entertainments reach a degradation which is beyond -American imagination. - -In the capital itself things are not yet morally immaculate. The -_argentino_ looks upon the “social evil” rather in the French than the -American manner,—as something unavoidable, not particularly -reprehensible, and to be regulated rather than driven under cover. Vice -may be more widely spread than in our own large cities, but it is less -openly crude and vulgar, with more of the frankness and at the same time -of the chic naughtiness of the French. This is perhaps natural, for not -only is Paris the Porteño’s beloved model, but probably at least half -the women of this class come from France. Many other nationalities are -represented, but the rarest of all are native women. Whether Argentine -girls are “virtuous by constraint,” as some cynics have it, or the -national wealth is so great that few are forced to resort to the last -means of winning a livelihood, the fact remains that the predatory -female of Buenos Aires is almost certain to be a foreigner. Yet there -are few opportunities for women outside the home. Typists, clerks, and -the like are almost all men; in the biggest, and almost the only, -department store in Buenos Aires 2360 men and 640 girls were employed on -the day that official duties caused me to investigate the question. -Women, however, are steadily forging ahead as teachers in the numerous -and increasingly excellent public schools. Buenos Aires, by the way, -shows an illiteracy of barely ten per cent. for all its continuous -immigration. It has given insufficient attention to the development of -school playgrounds; its boys do not grow up with that love for athletics -which brings with it the worship of good health and physical perfection -of the body that is so potent an enemy of bad habits. Moreover, their -elders treat certain matters with a levity both of speech and example -which is not inclined to reform the rising male generation. In the moral -attitude of the Argentine capital there is much that could -advantageously be corrected, but there are civic beauties that would be -the pride of almost any city of our own land. For all the deadly -flatness of its site and its lack of landscape, it has a certain charm; -like all great cities it is cruel and heartless, with wrath-provoking -contrasts; and on the whole it is not particularly lovable. - - - - - CHAPTER II - ON THE STREETS OF BUENOS AIRES - - -In my daily rounds as “errand boy” I soon discovered that the _Porteño_ -is not a particularly pleasant man with whom to do business. To begin -with, he is overwhelmed with a sense of his own importance, of that of -his city as the greatest, or at least soon to be greatest, city on the -footstool, and seems constantly burdened with the dread of not -succeeding in impressing those importances upon all visitors. There is -as great an air of concentrated self-sufficiency in Buenos Aires as in -New York, a similar self-complacency, the same disdainfulness of -anything from the insignificant bit of backwoods outside the city -limits, a frank attitude of disbelief in the possibility of ever -learning anything from those uncouth persons who have the misfortune not -to be _Porteños_, and with it all a provincialism scarcely to be equaled -off the Island of Manhattan. But the _Porteño_ has less reason to boast -of efficiency in his business methods than has his prototype of the -North. From the American point of view he is decidedly slow. The -telephone, for instance, has never been developed into a real aid to -business in Buenos Aires. The service is incredibly deficient, not -simply sometimes imperfect, but deficient in the sense which that word -has to those who have lived and attempted to telephone in Paris. At the -time of my erranding there were seven thousand telephone subscribers in -Buenos Aires—with a population rapidly approaching two million; and it -was so impossible to be added to the list that persons surrendering -their instrument had only to mention that fact in the “Want” columns of -a newspaper to sell at a price equal to the bonus paid for an opera box -the privilege of being the next to rent it. Yet once the telephone is -in, one’s troubles have only begun. Most _Porteño_ business men prefer -to do without one and go in person to see their professional -adversaries. In fact the atrociousness of the telephone service was the -chief raison d’être of my position in the consulate. - -Having squirmed and shouldered one’s way through the narrow human -streams of the business district to the door of the building sought, -there begins the serious problem of reaching the desired individual. The -elevator service, in the few cases where there is one, is on a par with -the telephone. Nor is it reassuring to the timid, for on the -ground-floor cage there is almost certain to be a conspicuous sign to -the effect that, “As there exists a stairway, persons riding in the -elevator do so at their own peril.” Buenos Aires has not quite shaken -off the suspicion of a diabolical nature in all such new-fangled -contraptions. A man was killed by an elevator in an office building -during my days in the capital; when I chanced to pass the place nearly -two weeks later, the entire elevator-shaft had been gutted by municipal -order and three policemen were still stationed at the foot of it, -apparently to prevent anyone from climbing the shaft instead of using -the stairway. - -Arrived at the proper floor, you find yourself face to face with the -greatest difficulty of all. From that moment you must wage pitched -battle, for the inevitable door-keepers are insolent beyond measure, -though sometimes with a veneer of Latin-American-style courtesy, and so -numerous that to pass them is like running a gantlet. To get as far as -the subsecretary’s subsecretary is often a strenuous day’s work. It -makes no difference how important your errand may be. These stupid -Cerebuses see no distinction whatever between the official spokesman of -the august _Consul General de los Estados Unidos de Norte América_ and a -book agent. Nor will foresight help you. For the great man inside is -invariably behind his schedule, scores of other applicants are sure to -be lined up in the anteroom, and though you have an appointment with him -for two, you are more likely than not to be still waiting at four. This -waiting in the anteroom is so customary in the Argentine that -_antesalar_ has become an accepted verb of the _idioma nacional_. Public -officials, from ministers to the lowest class of secretary, have mobs -before their doors during all their office hours, but instead of -increasing the latter until they cover the work to be done, or hurrying -things up in order to receive all applicants, they come late, fritter -away much of their time in non-essentials, and leave early, so that most -of the crowd has the pleasure of coming again the next day, and the -next. Doctors and dentists are particularly remiss in this form of -inefficiency. They, by the way, charge an admission fee, that must be -paid to the door-keeper before the patient can get in, and which has no -bearing on the regular charges “for professional services.” - -The reason for this stagnation in the anteroom becomes apparent when you -at last step across the magic threshold. The American business man -presses a button as soon as he has heard you, and the thing is done at -once; the _argentino_ hems and haws, spends considerable time on -drawing-room courtesies and formalities, murmurs, “Ah-er-why-sí, -señor-er, come around to-morrow at three,” though it would be quite as -easy to make his decision at once. Most _Porteño_ business men with whom -I came in contact seemed to keep their minds on ice, or in a safety -vault somewhere, and to require time to go and consult them—for no one -who knows the Latin-American can even suspect that they wished to talk -the matter over with their wives. The saddest part of the whole story is -that when you come around mañana at three, the man either will not be -there or will be conferring with those who have appointments from twelve -to one, and will not have given your question an instant’s thought since -his door closed behind you. - -There is a certain English and German influence in “B. A.” business -houses, and a corresponding native influence on the rather numerous -English and German business men in the city which makes them almost as -prone to procrastination as the _Porteño_. Five o’clock tea is served in -all offices, including congress and newspaper rooms. Of late years this -is often really tea, rather than _mate_, though black coffee and -liqueurs are still found on most portable sideboards. A British air of -deliberation pervades the commercial caste, though the pressure of -competition and high cost of living is gradually having its effect, both -in the increased pace of business and the lengthening of office hours, -which, if they begin late and are broken by tea-time, often last until -seven or even eight in the evening. “B. A.” still retains, however, a -few of those features which visiting Americans below the Rio Grande are -wont in their exasperation to dub “Spig.” There is the post-office, for -instance. It is as unsafe to assume common sense on the part of Buenos -Aires postal officials as of those in the most backward parts of South -America. Red tape, indifference, languor, and stupidity flourish almost -as vigorously in the _correo principal_ in the Casa Rosada as at the -crest of the Andes. You will probably find your letters filed under the -name “Esquire,” if your correspondents affect that medieval title; if -you wish to buy a stamp, the customary way is to go to one of the -tobacco-shops obliged to keep them, and buy it at a premium. Those who -insist on getting their stamps at the legal price must travel long -distances to the post office and shove and jostle their way through a -throng of Italians bent on sending home a part of their wages, to reach -at last a wholly inadequate hole in the wall behind which the female -clerks are deeply engrossed in gossip. - -There is a reminder of some of our own overambitious towns in the -_argentino’s_ eagerness to boost population, as if there were some -virtue in mere figures, even though those be false. The national census -was taken during my sojourn in the republic—all in a single day by the -way, which was declared a holiday—and the method of computing the -population was not one to cause it to shrink. Long beforehand walls and -windows were covered with so many placards resembling those of a -vaudeville performance that the cynical observer might easily have been -justified in supposing that the printers had a special influence with -the government. On the day set not only was every foreigner included, -even though he happened only to be spending a few hours in crossing the -country, but orders were issued to count, through the consuls, all -_argentinos_ living abroad and all persons of whatever nationality at -the moment under the Argentine flag, whether on the high seas or on -steamers far up the Paraná and Uruguay rivers quite outside the national -jurisdiction. I was counted at my hotel, filling in a blank under the -eye of the Italian proprietor, though I had only the day before returned -from a foreign country and was on the point of leaving for another. The -enumerators received ten _centavos_ for each person enumerated, which -naturally did not tend toward a decrease of population, that sum being -paid by the government—though it turned out later that in many backwoods -districts it had also been collected from the enumerated. Placards were -then posted ordering any person within the republic who had not been -counted on the date set to come to town and present himself before the -Census Commission. These intensive methods resulted eventually in the -announcement that 1,490,675 persons were living in Buenos Aires on the -day in question. - -If there chanced to be no “outside work” for the moment to keep me -scurrying through the avalanche of taxicabs, or no “office boy” duties -about the consulate, there was always plenty of recreation to be found -in watching the assorted humanity that filed in and out of the outer -office. Now a penniless sailor would drift in, to address the -work-swamped vice consul in such words as, “General, I ayn’t goin’ t’ -tell you no stories, ’cause you’re a bright man an’ you’d ketch me up at -it an’ make a fool out o’ me. Only, I took just that one drink, general, -just that one drink, an’ they shanghaied me an’ ’ere I am an’ I ’as a -family in the States, general, s’welp me Gawd, general, an’ what am I -goin’ t’ do ...” and so on, until to my multitudinous duties was added -that of bouncer. Or perhaps a clean, neatly dressed young American, -perpetual outdoors in his face, would step up with, “I come from Texas, -that’s where my paw an’ maw lives, an’ I come down here to raise hawgs -an’ I thought I’d come in an’ tell you I was in the country an’ now -where can I get the best land to raise hawgs on an’ ...” another task -for the overworked “office boy.” If it was one of those rare days when -this continual procession of human quandaries was broken, I had only to -reach at random into the files to pull out a written one: - - Buenos Aires, April 25, - To the Consol of the U. S. A. - - HON. SIR: - - I am reading now the news of the war (it was the time of our sending - marines to Vera Cruz) and the call at the arms to volunteers. If you - remember, about 7 or 8 month ago, I have writen to you from Rosario, - offering my blood for your Republica. Not answer have I received - about. Now if you like to take in consideration this letter, I wish - to start for the war and to be incorporated in the volunteer’s - corps. This is not a strange offering. I am Italiaman and I cannot - to forget the time passed in the U. S. A. and the generous heart of - the Americaman when my country was troubled by the sismic movements. - - I live in New York six year, left the North America three year - before, and am desiring now to see and live in that blessed country. - Here has the hungry, and indeed to die starved in the streets. I - wish better to die for the North American states. I love your land - more than my country and severals of the Italiamen living in the - States, believe me, Sir, will be incorporated for the war. I would - to be at present in New York, not here: I well know that the - international respects forbidden to answer me about, but I have not - money in this poor country, and for that I can’t to start at my - expenses. If you like to give me a passage, I am ready to start - rightaway, and not body shall know my resolution. - - Hoping in your favorable answer, I am glad to be, - - Yours respectfully, - MIKE ALBANESE. - -Nor does Buenos Aires take a back seat to New York in the amusement the -stroller may find in its streets. There was the incident of Easter -Sunday, for instance. I went to church, but there was no special music, -only a cluster of priests in barbarically resplendent robes going -through some sort of silent service, so I drifted out again. There was -not even the parade of new spring hats to which to look forward, for -spring was still far off in Buenos Aires. In fact, the oppressive heat -of early March in which I had arrived had only begun to give way to a -refreshing coolness. The early autumn skies were brilliant, leaves had -scarcely begun to turn color. I bought a copy of _La Prensa_, tucked it -under an arm, and went strolling lazily up Rivadavia beyond Calle -Callao, the Forty-Second street of “B. A.,” flanking the gleaming new -congress building. Mounted policemen in rich uniforms, with horsetail -helmets and the white gloves of holidays, here and there decorated the -landscape. For some time I sauntered dreamily on at random, a trifle -bored by the monotony of life, for I had already been more than a month -in Buenos Aires and had tasted most of the excitement it has to offer. - -I was half aware of crossing the broad Plaza Once de Setembro, still -covered with earth from the digging of the new subway. Finally, up in -the 2700 block, a man standing on a corner asked me if I could tell him -where Dr. Martinez lived. I replied that I was a stranger in those -parts. So was he. That was fairly evident to the naked eye, for he was -decidedly countrified in appearance and actions, though he was clean and -well dressed. He had just come up from Bahía Blanca, he said, and when -he got off the train in the station, he had met one of those men with a -_huascar_, a rope, over one shoulder and a number on his cap—a -_changador_, or porter, I explained—who asked him if he wanted his -baggage carried. He did, and gave the man his _maleta_ and also the slip -of paper with the address of Dr. Martinez on it. Then the _changador_ -said it was customary to pay in advance, and as he had no change he gave -him a ten-peso bill and told him to bring back the small money. - -The poor fellow was so evidently a simple, good-hearted countryman who -had never been in a large city before that I could not but admire, as -well as pity, his unsuspecting nature. Of course the _changador_ had -disappeared with the valise, the ten pesos, _and_ the address; and as -the _campesino_ did not even know the doctor’s first name, things looked -rather dark for him, for Martinez rivals Smith in directories and -telephone books. Still, it was no concern of mine, so after giving him -my sympathy and advising him to report the matter to the police, just -for form’s sake, I turned to go on. - -Just then another man passed us at a brisk pace and the poor countryman -appealed to him for advice. The newcomer was quite evidently a -_Porteño_, a man under thirty, good-looking, with the frank and open -countenance one recognizes at once as belonging to an honest man. His -appearance was that of a clerk or small merchant. Knowing the countryman -was in good hands, I turned away again. - -But he called me back, apparently feeling more secure with me nearby. -Then he told the newcomer of his hard luck. Naturally the latter was as -sorry as I was. He expressed his sympathy and started on, but the -countryman begged not to be abandoned in his trouble. The newcomer -yielded good-naturedly to the whim of the yokel and we fell into -conversation. - -“You are English?” remarked the townsman, casually, but before I could -answer, the countryman said with an air of finality, “No, he is German,” -and as it was easier to let it go at that than to bother to correct him, -I nodded. We strolled along for a block, puzzling over the sad -predicament of the countryman. At length the _Porteño_ asked pardon for -butting into any man’s private affairs, but, “Did this changador get -away with any of your money in the grip, too?” - -“Ah, no; there I am lucky!” cried the estanciero. “Just before the train -got into the station I opened the _maleta_ and took out this roll of -billetes; it is seven thousand pesos”—in the utmost innocence the fellow -drew out the roll, large as a man’s forearm, a hundred-peso bill in -plain sight on top. I was about to protest when the other man did so, -crying: - -“But, my dear sir! Do you know me? Or do you know this gentleman? Then -don’t you know better than to flash seven thousand pesos around in the -public streets? Why, if we were not respectable men we might tell you we -knew where this Dr. Martinez lives and then lead you into any old corner -and give you a _puñalado_ and....” - -“Oh, I can tell you are honest men,” replied the countryman, with a -childlike smile, at which the other turned to me with: - -“You see these country people live so simply and honestly at home they -never dream of the dangers of the cities.” - -“Yes,” I replied. Then to the countryman, “But one mustn’t always judge -people by their faces,” for it was evidently up to me to say something -of a harsh nature to the simple rustic. - -“Exactly,” said the _Porteño_; “we can see a man’s face but not his -heart.” - -Still the countryman seemed to prefer to trust to his own judgment of -physiognomy and implored us to help him find this Dr. Martinez, saying -that if it was a matter of giving us ten or twenty pesos each for our -trouble he would be glad to do so. The _Porteño_ forestalled my protest -by saying we were not that sort of men but that we would be glad to give -him any assistance possible, out of charity. So we set out along a side -street, telling the countryman to walk ahead. - -“What do you think of that poor fellow?” said the _Porteño_; “and what -if he had fallen in with some dishonest shyster instead of us? Say, you -know I think the man is ill and....” - -“Oh, _señor_,” he called to him, “you won’t think I am prying into your -private affairs, but is it some medical matter you want to see this Dr. -Martinez about? Because if it is, you know there are so many fakes -posing as doctors here in the city....” - -“No, no; it is not for a medical matter at all,” returned the -countryman; “it is merely a family affair,” and he went on again. But -before long he turned back and to my astonishment there were tears -visible on his cheeks. - -“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is true I do not know you, but I have seen and -talked with you and I am sure you are honest men, not the kind who would -outwit a poor countryman who knows nothing of the city and its ways. So -I am going to tell you just how things stand so you can advise me what -to do. - -“My father and I own a big estancia down near Bahía Blanca. We are very -well-to-do—you will excuse my mentioning that—though we do not know much -of cities and their ways. Some time ago a man living on our estancia -died. He was thought to be a beggar, but when we came to disinfect his -hut what was our surprise to find inside his old mattress seven thousand -pesos in these little round gringo gold pieces....” - -“Ah, he means English sovereigns,” put in the _Porteño_. - -“Father was going to turn this over to the authorities,” the countryman -went on, “but our lawyer laughed at the idea, as the fellow had no heirs -and the authorities would only stick it into their own pockets. And as -the man had lived and died on our estancia, surely no one was more -entitled to the money than father. So he put it away in his strong -boxes—though, to be sure, it was a small amount to us and we never -needed it. Well, a few weeks ago my poor papá”—here he wiped away a -tear—“was riding along when his horse ran into a _cerco de alambre de -púas_. But perhaps you city gentlemen do not know what a _cerco de -alambre de púas_ is?” - -“Oh, yes,” we both cried, and the _Porteño_ added, “it is that wire with -sharp points on it that you use out in the country to keep the cattle or -horses in a field.” - -“Well, my poor father rode into one of those fences and his face was so -cut and torn that it has all turned black on that side, and the doctor -came and told us it was scurvy or cancer or some of those awful diseases -with a long name, and that poor papá would never get well.” - -When he had blown his nose the campesino went on, and one could not help -pitying the poor chap, trying to hide his grief, for the people of South -America certainly have much family affection, especially those from the -country: - -“The doctor told us to call the priest, so I went and got Father Acosta, -our old family padre, who baptized me, and when he confessed father, he -found out about the seven thousand pesos. Well, he said at once that -father could not go to heaven with that on his conscience. So he told me -to take the money and come to Buenos Aires at once—for of course there -is no hope now of finding any of the beggar’s heirs—to see this Dr. -Martinez and, giving him two thousand pesos for his poor patients, as a -sort of commission, to have him take the other five thousand and send -half of it to some church to say masses for the repose of that poor -aviator who was killed the other day, and the other half to some good -hospital, to be used for the poor and those with bad hands and feet....” - -“Ah, he means cripples,” put in the _Porteño_; “that’s what we call that -kind of poor people here in the city,” smiling upon our simple -companion. Naturally we two had looked at each other frequently during -this tale, for it scarcely seemed possible that even a _campesino_ from -the utmost pampa could be so unsophisticated. Now, was it a question of -the priest and this Dr. Martinez being confederates, or was the priest -as simple as the other yokels? - -“If you don’t mind another personal question,” said the _Porteño_, “do -you know this Dr. Martinez?” - -“Ah, no, but he has his name in the paper, in _La Prensa_.” - -“My dear señor!” gasped the townsman. “Why, don’t you know that either -I, who am no doctor, or this gentleman, whom I think I am right in -saying is none either, can pay a newspaper sixty or eighty centavos to -put in an announcement that we are doctors, or anything else? Why, my -poor compatriot, a newspaper is merely a beast of burden that carries -anything you put upon it.” - -“But,” gasped the countryman, “don’t the editors know people before they -put in their notices?” - -“Poor simpleton,” murmured the _Porteño_. “Now, I must be getting on, -for I have friends coming to see me, but I’ll tell you what I should do -in your case. I should go to some of the largest and most respectable -commercial houses here in the city and turn this matter over to them, -taking their receipt and....” - -“Ah, señores,” cried the countryman, almost in tears, “this is purely a -matter between my father and his conscience. I would not have it become -public under any circumstances; and besides, my poor father is so sick -that I must take the evening train back to Bahía Blanca at all odds. -And—excuse me, gentlemen, for mentioning it, but I have an infirmity—and -where can I go and sit down for a few minutes? Here on the sidewalk?” - -[Illustration: In Buenos Aires I became “office-boy” to the American -consul general] - -[Illustration: The new Argentine capitol building in Buenos Aires] - -[Illustration: A Patagonian landscape] - -[Illustration: The government ferry to Choele Choel Island, in the Rio -Negro of southern Argentine] - -“Válgame Diós, no!” cried the _Porteño_, catching him by a sleeve, “not -in the street, or you will have a crowd gathered around you. I’ll tell -you what you can do. Go down that way a block and you’ll find a saloon. -Go in and buy a drink of something and ask them where you can sit down -to drink it.” - -The countryman left us, and the _Porteño_ took advantage of the -opportunity to talk things over with me. - -“It is evident that the simple fellow is in great danger of being done -by this Dr. Martinez, or somebody else, for how do we know he will not -take and keep the whole seven thousand? Now I am an honest man, and I -believe you are, too; are you not? Then it is our duty to take care that -this money gets where it belongs. You surely must know some German -church here in town where they can say masses for that poor aviator. We -can go and give the priest twenty-five hundred; and then there are -plenty of good hospitals, the German, the English, and so forth, where -they will accept and use for the poor the other twenty-five hundred. And -then we will not only have seen that the money goes where it was -intended, but there will be a _linda_, a pretty little commission of two -thousand pesos to divide between us. Can I depend on you to help me save -this poor fellow and his money?” - -I was, of course, considerably surprised at such a proposition from a -man apparently so straightforward, and for the first time felt it my -duty to stay in the case until I had seen the money properly disposed -of; the equivalent of three thousand dollars was no sum to see scattered -among sharpers. So I nodded, and when the countryman came back, the -_Porteño_ explained to him: - -“Now, my friend, you do not know this Dr. Martinez. How do we know he -will not take the money and spend it on himself, on dissipation, in -short, to talk plainly between men, on _francesas_?” - -“_Francesas_?” cried the countryman, with a puzzled air. - -“Yes, on bad women, on those who sell their love,” explained the -_Porteño_; “we call them _francesas_ here in the city because so many of -them come from France.” - -“Ah, yes, I have heard there are such women in the cities, poor things,” -said the farmer. “Also, it is only too true that this doctor may not be -honest. But tell me, gentlemen, what am I to do? My poor papá dying down -there in Bahía Blanca and——” again the poor fellow was weeping and it -was lucky we were on a small side street behind the Once station or we -should soon have had a crowd about us. - -“Now, you do know us,” went on the _Porteño_, “even if only for a short -time, and I propose that you turn this money over to us, let us place -the five thousand in churches and hospitals we know of, and then divide -the two thousand between us as our commission for our trouble, which we -would surely be as much entitled to as Dr. Martinez, whom no one knows.” - -To my astonishment the simple countryman jumped at the idea, either -because he was too unsophisticated to suspect anyone, or too anxious to -get back to his sick father to give any thought to the possibilities of -fraud. - -“Only, it is a commission of two thousand _between_ you,” he specified, -“not for each.” - -“Surely, surely, we know that,” answered the _Porteño_. - -We continued our stroll down the back street. The countryman, quite -evidently relieved to have the matter off his mind, reached for the -seven thousand pesos. Then an idea seemed to strike him, as if all our -talk about the dangers of the city had at last awakened a bit of -suspicion in his breast. He left the roll in his pocket and said -smilingly ingenuously: - -“But, señores—you will excuse my suggesting such a thing—but before I -turn this seven thousand over to you—and I shall place it in the hands -of _this_ gentleman” (indicating me) “since I met him first, and you -will give me a paper with your names saying you will use the money as my -poor father desires—but just so I can say to him when I get back that I -turned the commission over to two honest gentlemen, who will carry it -out, I—you will excuse me, gentlemen, I am sure, if I speak frankly—I -just want you to show me in some way that you are not indigent persons. -In short—you will pardon me, señores—but just so my poor father can die -in peace”—here he wiped another large tear from his wind-and-sun-burned -cheek—“I wish to be able to tell him that you are persons of enough -wealth so that you will not need to spend this money on yourselves, just -some little proof, gentlemen.” - -“Surely, most just and wise,” cried the _Porteño_, “and I am certainly -not the man to be unwilling to show you that I am a respectable person. -Of course I am not carrying about with me any such large sum as _you_ -have, but if it is a matter of a thousand or so pesos, I never go about -without that amount on my person.” - -Here he pulled back his coat a bit and displayed a smaller roll of -bills, though with the extreme circumspection of the city-bred man. The -countryman seemed entirely satisfied with this proof of honesty and, -shaking hands with the other most heartily, assured him that he had -every confidence in him. Then he turned his simple face questioningly -upon me. - -I could not, of course, being a mere vagabonding “errand boy,” make any -display of wealth. But it seemed so eminently my duty to keep an eye on -the _Porteño_ until the countryman’s money had come into indisputably -honest hands that I determined to invent myself a small fortune with -which to keep my standing in the case. I drew out the nine pesos and -some change in my pocket with an apologetic countenance and addressed my -companions: - -“I’m sorry not to be able to show at once that I am a person of means, -but I am so well aware of the dangers of large cities that I never carry -with me more than enough for the day’s expenses, and of course you are -not interested in seeing this tiny amount,” which I then put back into -my pocket. - -“But you must have money somewhere,” asked the _Porteño_, anxiously, -“just enough to show this gentleman we can be trusted to carry out his -commission? Come over here a moment. You will excuse us for a minute, -won’t you?” he added, addressing the _campesino_. - -“Yes, but señores,” cried the latter, almost in tears, “you are not -going to talk about anything to my hurt?” - -“On the contrary, it is entirely for your good,” answered the townsman. -“Just excuse us a moment until we arrange this matter to your -satisfaction.” - -The two of us crossed the street, where the _Porteño_ asked me again if -I could not show I had money. - -“Why, yes,” I lied, determined now at all costs not to let him take -unfair advantage of the incredibly simple _estanciero_, “I have money in -the—er—the German bank and in the German consulate. But how can I get it -out, to-day being Sunday? Of course, if the bank-book would be -sufficient proof for our friend, I could hurry home and get that.” - -“Where do you live?” - -“Tucumán 1671.” - -“Well, now, how could we arrange?” puzzled the townsman. “You could go -and get the bank-book. Or shall I go with you? No, it will be better for -me to stay here with our friend, for with seven thousand pesos in his -pocket, which anyone might take away from him—but you could run home and -get the bank-book, and that perhaps would keep him interested until -to-morrow, when the banks open—for of course, being a man from the -pampa, he won’t know that a bank-book is proof of having money—and -to-morrow you could get the money out and.... How much money have you in -the bank?” - -“I can’t say exactly,” I answered, ostensibly cudgeling my brains to -remember, “perhaps a little over six thousand pesos.” - -“Ah, that’s fine,” said the _Porteño_, his eyes shining, “because that, -with what I have, will just about equal the seven thousand our friend -has, and give him full confidence.” We turned back toward the -countryman. - -“Of course,” went on my companion, bringing his lips close to my ear, -“when we get that seven thousand—and I know you are not the sort of man -who will beat me out of my share just because it is going to be put into -_your_ hands. Are you?” When I shook my head he grasped my hand and -shook it fervently. “When we get that seven thousand it won’t much -matter whether the priest and the hospital—you understand me, as man to -man, don’t you?” - -I gave him a wise look as we rejoined the countryman, who was nursing -his feet as if city pavements were already blistering them. When we told -him that if he wished to see my six thousand—for, as we expected, he had -little knowledge of, or faith in, bank-books—he would have to stay over -until the next day, he protested, naturally, that he must take the -evening train, his poor father being likely to die at any moment. But he -was apparently as tractable as he was simple, for when it was all -explained to him, that I would go home at once and be back within half -an hour, or forty minutes at the most, with my bank-book, that then we -would all three spend the afternoon and night together somewhere until -the banks opened in the morning, he admitted that that was probably the -best way out of it, that “papá” always had had a strong constitution -after all, that the money _must_ be properly placed before he returned -home, and after drawing out and looking at the roll of seven thousand -again and asking if we wanted him to count it to show that it was really -that amount, to which the _Porteño_ hastily protested and begged him to -get it back into his pocket as soon as possible, he agreed to our plan. -I was to catch a car home at once, get my bank-book, and return to them -on that same corner. - -There being no car in sight, I set off at a swift pace along the tram -line. As I looked around to see if the car was coming, the two waved to -me to come back. I rejoined them, and the countryman again begged me not -to say a word to anyone about the matter, since it was entirely a -problem between his father and his conscience. I quieted his almost -tearful fears by assuring him that I lived all alone, that I had -scarcely a friend in Buenos Aires, and that I was naturally of a most -taciturn disposition. As I turned away again, the townsman took a few -steps after me and murmured in my ear, “If you will bring along your -rings and jewels, too, that will help to win his confidence.” I assured -him I would bring every piece of jewelry I possessed, and hurried off -once more down the street car line. - -A couple of blocks beyond, where the street curved and hid my friends -from view, I turned a corner. A man who seemed to have been peering out -from behind it asked me if I knew “those two persons.” - -“No,” I answered, “we were merely passing the time of day.” - -“But don’t you know _esos son ladrones_—those are thieves!” he cried. - -“Señor,” I replied, “my very best thanks for your kind warning, but I -discovered that about half an hour ago.” - -Whereupon I continued for where I had started—to keep an engagement with -a fellow-countryman at the afternoon races in Palermo, a rendezvous I -had for a time feared I should have to miss unless I cut short my very -entertaining Easter morning with the bunco steerers. - - - - - CHAPTER III - FAR AND WIDE ON THE ARGENTINE PAMPAS - - -The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry -away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national -capital in the world so far in advance of, so out of proportion to its -nation as is the great city on what the English called the “Plate.” We -of the northern hemisphere are not accustomed to cities which _are_ -their countries to the extent that Buenos Aires is the Argentine. -American editors and publicists expressed astonishment, and in some -cases misgiving, when our latest census showed that one tenth the -population of the United States dwells in its three largest cities. Of -all the people inhabiting the Argentine Republic virtually one fourth -live in the capital. - -The contrast between this and the great background of pampas is -incredible; Buenos Aires is far more closely allied to Paris or Rome -than to the broad country over which it rules. There are several reasons -for this disparity, besides the general South American tendency to dress -up the capital like an only son and trust that the rest of the country -will pass unnoticed, like a flock of poor relatives or servants. The two -principal crops of the Argentine, cattle and wheat, do not require a -compact rural population. Being the chief port as well as the metropolis -and capital, Buenos Aires has first choice of those who cross the sea -seeking new occupations and homes. It sucks the life blood from the -constant stream of immigration, leaving the “camp” a sparsely settled -expanse of boundless plain and the other cities mere provincial towns, -sometimes pleasant places to live in, but wholly devoid of metropolitan -features. Buenos Aires is as large as Philadelphia; the second city of -the Argentine is smaller than Akron, Ohio. - -Numerous efforts have been made to bring about a better balance. The -government offers the immigrant free transportation to any part of the -country. Down on the Paseos of Colon and Julio, beneath the arcades of -which Spanish and Armenian petty merchants, cheap Italian restaurants, -and den-like second-hand shops make first appeal to the thin purse of -the newly arrived fortune seeker, the broad brick pillars are covered -with the enticements of employment agencies,—a _cuadrilla_ of such a -size wanted for railroad work three hundred miles west; so many laborers -needed on an _estancia_ in a distant province, free fare, nominal -fee—just such signs as may be seen on the corner of Madison and Canal -Streets in Chicago and in a score of our western cities. The wages -offered are from twenty to thirty per cent. lower than for the same -grade of labor in the United States at the same period, and the cost of -meals somewhat higher. But it is something more than this that causes -the majority of immigrants to pause and read and wander on in quest of -some occupation financially less attractive in or near the capital. -Possibly it is a subconscious dread of the horizonless pampas which -stretch away into the unknown beyond the city; some attribute it to the -now happily decreasing autocracy of grafting rural officials and the -lack of government protection in districts out of touch with the -capital. Or it may be nothing more than the world-wide tendency to -congregate in cities. The fact remains that Buenos Aires is congested -with the very laborers who are sadly needed on the great undeveloped -plains of the interior. - -A railroad map of the Argentine is a striking illustration of this -concentration of population. As all roads once led to Rome, so do all -railway lines of the Argentine converge upon Buenos Aires. Tracks -radiate from the capital in every direction in which there is Argentine -territory, a dense network which suggests on a larger scale the railroad -yards of our great centers of transportation. No other city of the land -is more than a way station compared with the all-absorbing capital. -There is probably no country in the world in which it is easier to lay -rails, though it is sometimes difficult to keep them above the surface. -With the beginning of its real exploitation, therefore, new lines sprang -up almost overnight. As in the United States beyond the Alleghenies, -railroads came in most cases before highways; for though Spaniards -settled in the Argentine four centuries ago, the scattered _estancieros_ -and their peons were content to ride their horses across the open -plains, and the modern movement is as yet scarcely a generation old. -There are many regions where the railroad is to this day the only real -route; those who do not use it drive or ride at will across the -trackless pampas, with thistles or waving brown grass threshing their -wheels or their horses’ knees. To-day there are railways not only from -Buenos Aires to every town of the adjoining provinces, but to Bolivia -and Paraguay on the north, to Chile on the west, and Patagonia in the -South. Long palatial trains roll out of the capital in every direction, -entire trains bound for cities of which the average American has never -heard the name, the destination announced by placards on the sides of -the cars as in Europe—and as it should be in the United States. - -With the exception of a minor French line or two, and some rather -unimportant government roads of narrow gauge, all the railways of the -Argentine are English, very English, in fact, with British managers and -chiefs of departments, engines without bells, and with the nerve-racking -screech of European locomotives, to say nothing of the British “staff” -system which forces even “limited” trains to slow down at every station -enough for the engineer to snatch the sort of iron scepter which is his -authority for entering another section. The rolling stock, however, is -more nearly American in appearance. The freight cars are large, the -passenger coaches—of two classes—are built on a modified American plan, -without compartments. Both in comfort and speed the main Argentine lines -rival our own, though there are fewer through expresses which maintain -what we would call a high rate throughout their runs. For one thing the -government assesses a fine against those trains which are more than a -little late without palpable excuse, and it is natural that the -companies so arrange their schedules as to make such punishment -unlikely, with the result that many trains have a tendency to wait at -stations for the time-table to catch up with them. Nor, with the -exception of the through lines to the neighboring republics, do most of -the tracks forming that great network out of Buenos Aires fetch up -anywhere in particular. Nearly all of them have the air of pausing in -doubt on the edge of the great expanses they set out to explore, with -the result that while the provinces bordering Buenos Aires are so -thickly strewn with tracks that the map suggests there is not room to -set down a foot between them, there are enormous tracts of territory in -the central and western portions of the country wholly untouched by -modern transportation. Life slows down on these many arteries of travel, -too, in exact proportion to the distance from the heart from which all -the Argentine is nourished. But there are indications in most cases that -the pause at nowhere is only temporary, that presently the lines will -summon up breath and courage to push on across the still trackless -pampas. - -The great drawback to travel in the Argentine is the cost, both in time -and money. Distances are so great, places of any importance so far -apart, that while fares are not much higher than in the United States, -it takes many hours and many pesos to get anywhere worth going. Towns -which look but a cannon-shot apart on the map may be reached only by -several hours of travel, saddened by the despairing flatness and -monotony of the desolate pampas, where there is rarely a tree to give a -pleasing touch of shade, no spot of green to attract and rest the eyes, -a landscape as uninviting as an unfurnished apartment. - -In my double capacity of consular protégé and prospective “booster,” -however, I was furnished with general passes by all the important -railways, and time is no object to a mere wanderer. But for this -official recognition of my unstable temperament I should probably have -seen little of the Argentine, for even the man who has tramped the -length of the Andes would scarcely have the patience to face on foot the -endless horizon of the pampas; and “hoboing” has never been properly -developed on Argentine railways. Rarely had I been given temporary carte -blanche on almost every train in the country when, as a second stroke of -fortune, consular business turned up which took me into various sections -of the “camp” without cutting me off from my modest official income. I -hastened to lay in a supply of heavy garments, for the first trip was to -be south, and the end of April had brought an autumn chill even in -Buenos Aires, over which birds were flying northward in great V-shaped -flocks. - -A general pass is more than a saving of money; it gives train officials -an exalted notion of the holder’s importance, and it permits him to jump -off anywhere on the spur of the moment. Yet for many miles south I saw -nothing worthy of a stop. When one has already visited La Plata, capital -of the Province of Buenos Aires, a short hour below the metropolis and -noted for its university and its rows of venerable eucalyptus trees, -there remains little to attract the eye in the flat expanse of that -province as it unrolls hour after hour on any of the lines of the “Great -Southern.” Several dairies, which maintain their own _lecherías_ -throughout the federal capital, punctuate the first miles; otherwise the -landscape is a mere reminder of our own western prairies. Here is the -same scanty grass and clumps of bushes resembling sagebrush, the same -flat plain with its horizon barely rising and falling perceptibly with -the motion of the train. The only unfamiliar note is the ostrich, -scattered groups of which go scuttling away like huge ungainly chickens -as the express disturbs them at their feeding. At least we should call -this Argentine curiosity an ostrich, though science distinguishes it -from a similar species in the Old World under the name of _rhea -darwini_, and to the natives it is a _ñandú_. Time was when tawny -horsemen pursued these great birds across the pampas, entangling their -legs in the _bolas_, two or three ropes ending in as many heavy balls, -which they swung over their heads as they rode; but that is seen no -more. Even the waving plains of grass, across which the nomadic Indian -roamed and the gaucho careered lassooing wild cattle, are gone. Wheat -fields, bare with the finished harvest in this autumn season, alternate -with short brown grass, cropped by the cattle which everywhere dot the -landscape for hour after monotonous hour. - -The gaucho, with his long, sharp _facón_ stuck through his belt, who -lighted his _fogón_ out on the open pampa to prepare his _asado con -cuero_, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning -beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in -his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather -seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon, -usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a -night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered -remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show -the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners -were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners -of the country. - -Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a -hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at -monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly -and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of -men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen -of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups -gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily -halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more -pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the -unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In -these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, _mestizos_ -with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines, -yet with a stronger hint of European origin. - -Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains -had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often -flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were -knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an -experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and -there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a -sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or -liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby, -it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English -sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from -the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen, -sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending -passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in -clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of -England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to -town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town -was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an -unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary -stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s -notice. - -The chief characteristic of Argentine towns is their roominess. The -space they cover is several times that of Andean cities of equal -population. Though the houses often toe the street in the Arab-Spanish -fashion, they are frequently far apart and the streets are wider than -even Buenos Aires would care to have in her most congested section. No -doubt each hamlet has a secret hint that it is soon to become a great -city, and lays its plans accordingly. Next to their spaciousness and the -dreary plainness of their architecture, these towns of the pampas strike -the experienced South American traveler by the scarcity of their -churches. The largest of them seldom shows more than a single steeple; -many seem to have no places of worship whatever. Nowhere is there that -suggestion common to the atmosphere of the languid cities of the Andes -of a present world so unpromising that life can most advantageously be -spent in preparation for the next. - -The “Great Southern” carried me so far into the south that only by -straining my neck could I see the Southern Cross, a tilted, less -striking constellation now than when I had first made it out in far-off -Central America by standing on tiptoe and peering over the horizon. The -journey might almost better be made by night than by day, for Argentine -sleeping-cars are comfortable and the dreary, unfurnished landscape is -almost oppressive. The only natural features to arouse a flicker of -interest are some rock hills near Tandil, duplicated farther on in -another little rocky range known as the Sierra de la Ventana. In the -first of these Buenos Aires quarries some of the stone for its building -and paving, the rest being brought across the Plata from Uruguay. Few -large countries have been more neglected than the Argentine in the -matter of natural resources, other than agricultural. Its rare deposits -of stone are far distant from where the material is needed, it has no -precious minerals, almost no forests, even the coal used on its -railroads must be brought from abroad. Yet it would gladly be rid of -some of its stone. Through much of the south it is hampered by a -_tosca_, a shelf of limestone a few feet below the surface, which -neither water nor the long roots of the alfalfa can penetrate. In the -more tropical north, particularly along the Paraná, the _alfalfales_ -produce luxuriantly for twenty years and more without renewal. In the -south the calerous soil makes vigorous pastures on which fatten -succulent beef and mutton, highly prized by the _frigorí ficos_; but the -frequent droughts are disastrous in the thin soil regions, and at such -times endless trains carry the sheep and “horned cattle,” as the local -distinction has it, a thousand miles north to feed in the Córdoba hills. - -The plain which seems never to have an end converges at last, like all -the railroads to the south, in Bahía Blanca. This bustling port and -considerable city, with its immense grain elevators and its facilities -for transferring half the produce of the Argentine from trains to ships, -is the work of a generation. It is nearly a century now since the -federal government sent soldiers to establish in the vicinity of this -great bay a line of defense against the Indians of Patagonia, but the -town itself took on importance only toward the end of the last century. -From a cluster of huts among the sand-dunes it sprang to the size of -Duluth, to which it bears a resemblance in occupation, point of view, -and paucity of historical background. The Argentine is third or fourth -among the wheat producing countries of the world, and of later years -Bahía Blanca, natural focal point of all the great southern pampas, has -outstripped even Buenos Aires as a grain port, to say nothing of the -frozen meat from its immense _frigorí ficos_. Of all the cities of the -Argentine it is the most nearly autonomous, for though La Plata remains -the provincial capital, the overwhelming commercial importance of Bahía -Blanca has given it a self-assertiveness that threatens some day to make -it the capital of a newly formed province. - -A long vestibuled train carried us on into northern Patagonia, better -known now in the Argentine as the territories of Rio Negro, Chubut, and -Santa Cruz. I say “us” because I had been joined by a former assistant -secretary of agriculture of our own land, recently attached as an -adviser to the similar Argentine bureau. He was as profoundly ignorant -of Spanish as I of agricultural matters, and our companionship proved of -mutual advantage. All that night we rumbled south and west, halting now -and then at little pampa stations, if we were to believe the time-table. -For we were both snugly ensconced in our berths, the ex-secretary doubly -so, since nature had provided him with a more than imposing bulk—until -the breaking of a rail over a wash-out bounced us out of them. -Sleeping-cars are as customary in the Argentine as in our own land of -long distances, and more comfortable. At the height of the season at Mar -del Plata as many as a hundred sleepers a night make the journey between -that watering-place and Buenos Aires. The normal Argentine railroad -gauge is nearly ten inches wider than our own, which is one of the -reasons why the _dormitorios_ seem so much more roomy than a Pullman. As -in the international expresses of Europe, these have a corridor along -one side of the car, from which open two-berth staterooms, with doors -that lock and individual toilet facilities. The cross-car berths, one -soon discovers, are easier to sleep in than our lengthwise couches, and -the _dormitorios_ do away with what Latin-Americans consider, not -entirely without reason, our “shockingly indecent” system of forcing -strangers, of either sex, to sleep in the same compartment, shielded -only by a curtain. - -The unconvertible cabins, preferable by night, become mere cells by day, -however, and drive most of the passengers to sit in the dining cars. -Here the waiters, like the _dormitorio_ porters, are white, with -king’s-bed-chamber manners; and the six course meals are moderate in -price and usually excellent—except the dessert, the ubiquitous, -unfailing, never-varying _dulce de membrillo_, a stone-hard quince jelly -which brings to a sad end virtually every public repast in the -Argentine. The trains are not heated; instead there are thick doormats -under each seat, and it is a rare traveler in the south between April -and October who does not carry with him a blanket bound with a -shawl-strap. - -The mud-bespattered countrymen at the stations that appeared with the -dull autumn daylight seemed to be largely Spanish in origin, some still -wearing _boínas_ and other reminders of Europe that looked out of -keeping with the soil-caked saddle horses awaiting them behind the -railroad buildings. Most of them appeared to have ridden in to buy -lottery tickets, or to find which tickets had won in the latest drawing; -the raucous-voiced train-boys sold more to these modern gauchos than on -the train, especially the list of winning numbers at ten centavos. The -thought came to us that even if there are no other reprehensible -features to a national lottery, the habit it breeds among workmen of -spending their time hoping for a prize a week, instead of pitching in -and earning a weekly prize, is at least sufficient to condemn it. - -My companion was making the trip for the purpose of studying the soil. A -splendid chance he had to do so with most of it under water! The -distribution of rain seems to be poorly managed in the Argentine. If the -country is not suffering from drought, it is apt to be complaining of -floods, or, in the warmer and more fertile north, of the locusts, which -sometimes sweep in from the wilderness of the Chaco in such clouds that -the project has seriously been considered of erecting an enormous net, -supported perhaps by balloons, to stop them. - -We brought up late that afternoon in the frontier town of Neuquén, in -the national territory of the same name. A _garçon_ corseted into a -tuxedo served us dinner, for so they dared call it, in a rambling -one-story wooden hotel scattered over the block nearest the station, the -only thing worth considering on the bill of fare being “bife” (beefee) -or, as the waiter more exactly put it, “asado de vaca,” requiring the -teeth of a stone-crusher and the digestion of a _ñandú_. There is -something of the atmosphere of our own frontier towns in those of the -Argentine, but not the same studied roughness of character, no display -of shooting-irons. The tamest of our western cowboys would probably have -shot on sight those prancing, tuxedoed waiters and sent the proprietor -to join them for the atrociousness of his meals. Just what would have -been his reaction to the beds to which we were afterward assigned—sky -blue and pink landscapes so gorgeously painted on foot and headboards -that we thought it was dawn every time we woke up—is more than I can -guess. - -The line which the “Great Southern” hopes soon to push over the Andes to -join the railways of Chile in the vicinity of Temuco ran no trains -beyond Neuquén on the Sunday which finally dawned in earnest over our -picturesque beds, but as pass-holders we had no great difficulty in -foisting ourselves upon a young English superintendent westward bound on -an inspection tour. In his track automobile we screamed away across the -bleak pampas of Patagonia, a hundred and twenty miles and back to -Zapala, the vast monotonous plain steadily rising to an elevation of -seven thousand feet and bringing us almost to the foot of the great -snow-bound range of the Andes forming the Chilean border. The air was -cool, dry, and bracing even down at Neuquén; at Zapala the -winter-and-mountain cold was so penetrating as to cause us not only to -wonder at but to protest volubly against the strange strain of -puritanism which had invaded even this distant corner of the Argentine -and made it a felony for the frontier shopkeeper to sell anything -stronger than beer on Sundays. Forty years ago all this region was an -unproductive waste across which roamed half-naked Indians, _boleando_ -the _ñandúes_ for their sustenance and living in _toldos_, easily -transportable skin tents like those of certain tribes of Arab Bedouins. -To-day we were not even armed. Nowhere was there a remnant of those -“Patagones,” people of footprints so large that the southern end of -South America was named for them. The young Argentine general who was -once assigned the task of clearing northern Patagonia of the nomadic, -bandit-like aborigines had done his work with such Spanish thoroughness -that the entire tribe was annihilated, their chiefs dying as prisoners -on the island of Martín García. The government paid the expenses of this -expedition by dividing among the officers (not, be it noted, the -soldiers) the hundred million acres of land it added to the national -domain, and by selling the rest of it in enormous tracts at such -magnificent prices as three cents an acre. To-day intelligent -_argentinos_ are figuratively kicking themselves that they did not issue -government bonds instead and save this immense territory for the -homesteaders who would now gladly settle upon it. - -To tell the truth the region did not look like one for which men would -die of home-sickness,—dry and bushy, like parts of Texas or northern -Mexico, with chaparral and bristling clumps of stunted growth bunched -out here and there across a plain that struck one as essentially arid -for all the pools of water left by the unprecedented rain. My -authoritative companion assured us, however, that it had every sign of -great fertility, though requiring irrigation on a large scale, a -beginning of which has already been made in the vicinity of the Rio -Negro. Yet only a rude and solitary nature surrounded us on all the -journey, the same flat monotony, dotted here and there with flocks of -sheep guarded by lonely half-Indian or Gallego shepherds, which -stretches all the way to the Straits of Magellan. - -Flocks of pheasants flew up every little while as we screamed past them; -the hoarse cry of the _chajás_, a species of wild turkey, alternated -with the piercing call of the little _teru-teru_. Only at rare intervals -did a scattered flock of sheep or an isolated makeshift _rancho_ with a -saddled horse behind it give a human touch to the monotonous desolation. -Where the foothills of the Andes began to send us undulating over great -smooth ridges, like a bark rocked by a distant storm at sea, there -appeared wagon caravans bound for Chile, still days away over the lofty -pass ahead. Gradually the great snow-thatched wall of the Andes, endless -to the north and south, rose to shut off all the horizon before us, -wind-rent clouds dashing themselves to shreds against it. Yet here in -the temperate south the snow and ice-fields seemed less striking, much -less beautiful than when towering above the sun-flooded tropics. - -On our return to Buenos Aires we stopped at an agricultural station near -the town of Rio Negro, where irrigation was already showing results. -Baled alfalfa lay in quantities at the stations; large vineyards, much -as they looked out of place in this landscape-less region, were -producing well. There being no passenger train to rescue us, we got -telegraphic permission to take the first east-bound freight. Before the -delay became unduly monotonous a train rose over the flat horizon and -rolled in upon us. We made our way along the thirty-odd cars loaded with -sheep to what in our own land would have been a comfortable caboose—and -climbed into an ordinary box-car that had all too evidently been -recently and often used for the transportation of coal. There was not -even an improvised seat in it; trainmen and the sheep care-takers sat on -the bare floor with their backs against the sooty wall and bumped along -like penniless and unresourceful hoboes. I would have given several -pesos to have heard the remarks of an American brakeman who could have -looked in upon his Argentine fellows as we jolted across the apparently -level plains with the bitter chill of the pampas settling down upon us. - -We gladly dropped off at Darwin, where we hired next morning what the -_argentino_ calls a “soolkee” and drove to the island of Choele-Choel, -with the assistance of a cumbersome government ferry. This thirteen -square leagues of fertile loam soil between two branches of the Rio -Negro is one of the most prosperous communities in southern Argentine, -with half a dozen villages, roads sometimes passable even in the wet -season, and noted for the variety of immigration with which it has been -peopled. My companion, weary perhaps of talking through an interpreter, -was particularly eager to see what remnants remained of a Welsh colony -once established here. We drove zigzagging along the wide checkerboard -earth roads between endless wire fences behind which many men were -plowing with oxen and a few with up-to-date riding gang-plows. Once we -paused to talk with one Villanova, political boss of the island, but -when my companion brought up the subject nearest his heart, the man -instantly showed opposition to the establishment of agricultural -schools. - -[Illustration: A rural policeman of the Argentine] - -[Illustration: My travels in Patagonia were by rail and in what the -_Argentino_ calls a “soolky”.] - -[Illustration: A typical “boliche” town of the Argentine pampa, and some -of its inhabitants] - -[Illustration: A family of Santiago del Estero] - -“We have no middle class in the Argentine,” he explained, “and we do not -want one. We want only absentee landlords—or at least we have no way of -getting rid of them—and laborers, men who actually work and produce. -Agricultural schools would give us a class too proud of their schooling -to work, and at the same time without property. The distinction between -the man who toils and the man who owns is wide in the Argentine, but it -would be no improvement to fill in the gulf with a lot of haughty, -penniless drones.” - -My companion had all but given up hope of using his native tongue -directly when there was pointed out to us a farm said to be owned by a -Welshman. But only his lanky daughter of sixteen was at home. The -ex-secretary addressed her eagerly; here at last he would get first-hand -information. The girl shifted from one undeveloped shank to the other, -backed away toward the unpainted frame farmhouse from which she had -emerged, struggling to answer a question in English, then turning to me, -she burst forth, all suggestion of embarrassment gone, in rapid-fire -Spanish: - -“You see I was born in the Chubut, and English is only my third tongue, -for Spanish is my native language and father and mother always speak -Welsh at home and I almost never hear English and ...” - -My companion bowed his head in resignation and turned our weary horse -back across the island toward the ferry. - -The chill of autumn gradually disappeared from the air as the fastest -train in South America dashed in less than five hours, with only one -three-minute stop to change engines, from Buenos Aires to Rosario, two -hundred miles northwest of the federal capital. The rich-green immensity -of the well cultivated fields bordering the River Paraná were a contrast -to the bleak, bare, brown prairies of the south, and the gang-plow, -up-to-date methods of our great West were everywhere in evidence. In the -seat behind me two men were assuring each other that “the lands of this -region are worth ten times those of the interior,” and it was easy to -believe them. The rich black loam soil that came to light behind the -plows is said to produce two crops of splendid potatoes annually without -the use of fertilizer and with no change in crops for twenty years. -Though the day was warm and sunny, the cars remained hermetically sealed -throughout the journey, for the _argentino_ is true to type in his dread -of a breath of fresh air. Scarcely a glimpse of the River Paraná did we -catch, though we skirted it all the way to Rosario. - -This second city of the republic has been called the Chicago of the -Argentine. It is more nearly the Omaha or Atlanta, not merely in size -but in the material prosperity, and the appearance and point of view -that go with it, which its position as a river port open to large ocean -steamers and as the natural outlet of all the fertile provinces of -northern Argentine has given it. Like Buenos Aires it has almost no -factory chimneys to emphasize its air of activity, which concentrates in -the vicinity of the wharves. A stroll through its busy, citified streets -is worth the exertion, or, better still, a round of its electric car -lines; but one would no more expect to find the picturesque and the -legendary past in Rosario than in Newark. Large and prosperous as it has -grown, it is not the capital of its province, much to the disgust of its -energetic citizens, but is ruled from Santa Fé, a languid little town of -several times the age but scarcely one eighth the population of the -bustling provincial metropolis. There are advantages in being a capital -in the Argentine which we of the north would hardly suspect. - -I slipped on up the Paraná to have a look at this capital which the -Rosarians so universally tongue-lash. A splendidly fertile, softly -rolling, velvety-green country, with dark-red cattle standing in groups -here and there to give contrast, was the chief impression left by a -journey of several hundred kilometers through the province of Santa Fé. -Yet for some reason the city of the same name, though barely a hundred -miles north of Rosario, was humidly hot and swarming with flies, its -atmosphere that of an ambitionless town of the tropics content to dawdle -through life on what the frequent influxes of politicians bring it. Far -across the river, which here spreads out into an immense lagoon, lay -hazy white on a distant knoll the city of Paraná, capital of the -province of Entre Rios, between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay, which -unite at length to form the Plata. - -Another floor-flat, fertile plain, with many ranchos and villages, with -“soolkees” jogging along the broad earth roads between wheat and alfalfa -fields and pastures dotted with fat cattle and plump sheep until the -eyes tired of seeing them, marked the trip westward from Santa Fé. Here, -to all appearances, was the best farming land imaginable, though one -could easily imagine better farming. Crowds of shaggy yet -prosperous-looking countrymen gathered at every station. The alfalfales -were still deep-green, though it was already becoming late autumn; -golden ears of corn of a size that even Kansas would envy were being -husked from the standing stalks and heaped to overflowing into huge -_trojes_, stack-shaped bins made of split palm-trunks or other open-work -material. - -I came at length to one of the oldest and most famous of Argentine -towns, a yellow-white city in a shallow valley, with an almost Oriental -aspect, and backed by hills—and hills alone are noteworthy enough to -bring a city fame in the Argentine. In fact, Córdoba sits in the only -rugged section of the country, except where the Andes begin to climb out -of it to the west. Among these ranges, sometimes called, with the -exaggeration natural to young nations, the “Argentine Switzerland,” are -many summer hotels and colonies, strange as it may seem to go north for -the summer in the south temperate zone. - -Córdoba, the geographical center of the Argentine Republic, is centuries -old, with more traditions, more respect for age, than Buenos Aires, with -many reminders of old Spain and of the conservative, time-marked towns -of the Andes. In Córdoba it is easy to imagine the atmosphere of the -federal capital of a century ago. There is still a considerable -“colonial” atmosphere; respect for old customs still survives; age -counts, which is rare in the Argentine, a country like our own full of -youth and confidence in the future, and the corresponding impatience -with the past, with precedent. Peru had already been conquered and -settled when Córdoba was made a halfway station between the unimportant -river-landing called Buenos Aires and the gold mines of the former Inca -Empire, and it was founded by Spanish nobles of a better class than the -adventurers who followed Pizarro on his bloody expedition. Many of the -families of Córdoba boast themselves descendants of those hidalgos, -though to most _argentinos_ ancestry seems as unimportant, compared with -the present, as it does to the average American. The Córdobans, like the -ancient families of the Andes, look down upon newly won wealth as -something infinitely inferior to shabby gentility, though the latter has -been refurbished of late years by increasing incomes from the -neighboring estates. The _Porteño_ has little sympathy for the Córdoban -attitude toward life. He pokes fun at the conservative old city, calling -it the “Mecca” of the Argentine because of the pilgrims who come at -certain seasons of the year to worship its bejeweled saints; he asserts -that its ostensibly “high-brow” people “buy books but do not read them.” -The Córdoban retaliates by rating Córdoba, and perhaps Salta, the only -“aristocratic” towns in the Argentine, and has kept the old Spanish -disdain of commerce, which is naturally a disdain of Buenos Aires. - -The conservative old families do not, of course, accept newcomers -easily. There is a strong race, as well as class, prejudice. Up to half -a century ago no student was admitted to the university unless he could -show irrefutable proof of “pure” blood, that is, of unbroken European -ancestry. That rule might be in force to this day but for the strong -hand of the federal government. The famous university, founded in 1605 -by the Jesuits, and ranking with that of Lima as the oldest in America, -is outwardly an inconspicuous two-story building, though there are -artistic old paintings and cedar-of-Tucumán carvings inside that are -worth seeing. The students who attend it are, however, by no means -unobtrusive, though they do not seem to give quite such exclusive -attention to the color of their gloves and the brand of their perfumes -as do their prototypes in the federal capital. It is natural, too, that -such a community should retain an air of piety. Its ancient moss-grown -cathedral, likewise of Jesuit construction, with a far-famed tower, is -but one of some thirty churches in a town of a scant thirty thousand -inhabitants. Priests and monks give it by their number and -conspicuousness an atmosphere quite unlike Buenos Aires, with its -scarcely noticeable low Grecian cathedral, its lack of church towers, -and its rare priests. In Córdoba there are even beggar monks who make -regular tours of the province, reminiscent of medieval Spain. The church -and its functionaries own many fine estancias, for pilgrims have always -come in numbers, and society is pious to the point of fanaticism. If one -may believe the _Porteño_, the conservatism and fanaticism of Córdoba -would be worse than it is had not the central government sent to the -university a number of German Protestant professors, who have had some -influence on the community, not so much in Germanizing as in breaking -down ancient prejudices. - -Among the amusing old customs that remain are some that lend a touch of -the picturesque to offset a certain tendency toward the modern. Cows are -still driven through the streets, attended by their calves, and are -milked before each client’s door; the conservative Córdoban will have -none of this new-fangled notion of having his milk brought in bottles, -in which there may be a percentage of water. Here there is still the -weekly band concert and plaza promenade, with the two sexes marching in -opposite directions; here the duenna is in her glory and prospective -husbands whisper their assertions through iron-grilled windows. The -_gente del pueblo_, or rank-and-file citizens, nearly all with a -considerable proportion of that Indian blood almost unknown in Buenos -Aires, live in adobe thatched houses in the outskirts and have the -appearance, as well as repute, of little industry, with the Andean -tendency to work only a few days a week since foreign industry has -raised their wages to a point where frequent vacations are possible. -Cactus and donkeys add a suggestion of Andean aridity in the outskirt -section, over which floats now and then a subtle breath of the tropics. - -Córdoba in its shallow valley, veiled by thick banks of white mist, was -more beautiful on the morning I left than when more plainly seen. As our -train rose above it to the vast level pampa the city disappeared, but -all along the western horizon lay its famous mountains, a long ridge, -saw-like in places, turning indigo blue when the sun went down on a -brilliant day. On the other side of the train still lay the monotonous, -flat, low Argentine pampa, without hedges, ditches, almost without -trees, the roads mere wide spaces reserved for travel. The law requires -that federal roads be fifty meters broad, but in this land of unlimited -space and little stone no law can keep them from being impassable -sloughs in the rainy season and rivers of dust in the dry. Even here -were many enormous _estancias_, single estates of half a million acres, -which the train took hours to cross, though they are small compared with -some in the frontier country of the south. Here are _estancieros_ who -have the impression that the sun rises and sets on their property—which -is not without its influence on their characters and especially on those -of their children. In the “good old days,” which were not so long ago in -the Argentine, persons with money, political influence, or a military -record could acquire vast tracts of territory at trifling cost, and up -to the present generation these landed proprietors, among them most of -the old families of Córdoba, were virtually monarchs of all they -surveyed. Now the government, once so prodigal with its land, is -beginning to see the error of its ways, and is forming the habit of -talking in terms of square kilometers instead of square leagues, as well -as favoring bona fide settlers, though it still does not require those -who buy public lands at a song to settle upon and improve them. - -Perhaps once each half hour did a more pretentious _estancia_ house, -surrounded by its thin grove of precious eucalyptus, break the monotony -of flat plain and makeshift _ranchos_. It is the scarcity of trees no -doubt that makes birds so rare in the Argentine. The two-compartment, -oven-shaped mud nests of the _hornero_ on the crosspieces of the -telegraph poles were almost the only signs of them, except of course the -occasional _ñandúes_ loping away across the pampa. The more and more -open-work reed shacks began to suggest almost perpetual summer. Then all -at once I ceased feeling the increasing heat, suddenly put down my -window, and a moment later was hurrying into a sweater. For a _pampero_ -had blown up from the south, and seemed bent on penetrating to the -marrow of my bones. - -When I peered out of my sleeping-car cabin next morning, a considerable -change of landscape met the eye. The “rápido” was crawling into Santiago -del Estero, and I seemed to have been transported overnight from the -rich green fields of the Paraná back to the dreary Andes, or, more -exactly, to the coastlands of Peru or Bolivia. Founded in the middle of -the sixteenth century, on the bank of a river that becomes salty a -little farther on, and forms in the rainy season large _esteros_, or -brackish backwaters and lagoons, “St. James of the Swamp” still suffers -intensely for lack of water. It is unfortunate that nature does not -divide her rains more evenly in the Argentine. Farther south only the -tops of the fence posts were protruding from the flood in some places; -here the country seemed to be habitually dying of thirst. - -The main line of the “Central Argentine” does not run into Santiago, but -operates a little branch from La Banda (“Across the River”), because of -the treachery of the wide, shifty, sandy stream on which it lies. To-day -the railroad has a great iron bridge some two miles long, successor to -the several less hardy ones, the ruins of which may be seen just -protruding from the sandy bed along the way. The company asserts that it -spends more to keep up its road into Santiago than it gets back from -that city in traffic, but its concession requires it to maintain contact -with what is reputed the most “native” capital of province still left in -the Argentine. Center of what is said to be the least fertile section of -the country, it remains, for a time at least, to the part-Indian race -which the South American calls native, the ambitionless _cholo_ or -_mestizo_, with his Mohammedan indifference to the future, his inertia -before modern progress. In other words, Santiago is an example of how -immigration is driving the native town as it is the native individual -into the most distant and poorest corners of the Argentine. - -The town is built of crude bricks or baked mud, the only material -available, and except in the center it is a disintegrated collection of -huts with ugly high fronts and the air of never having reached maturity -in growth, though they have long since in age. It has few paved streets -and no street-cars, though it is overrun by a veritable plague of those -noisy, impudent hackmen who swarm in rural and provincial Argentine and -over whom the police seem to have neither influence nor authority. A -dead-dry, yellow prairie grass spreads wherever the ground is not -frankly sterile; chaparral and other desert brush grows even within the -town. Its thatched _ranchos_ of reeds, to be found anywhere a few blocks -back of the central plaza, are overrun with goats, pigs, cur dogs, and -naked children, like the most backward towns of the Andes. Here are to -be found the _choclo_, _locro_, _chicha_, and other corn products common -to the Andean cuisine, the same thin sheets of sun-dried beef, the -swarming _gente del pueblo_ so common to Peru and Ecuador, so unknown in -Buenos Aires. The popular speech is again the Quichua of the Incas, -Santiago being the only Argentine town of any size where it has -survived, though it is a Quichua as different from that of Cuzco as the -Italian of Florence is from that of Naples. Most of the children and -many of the adults go barefooted, a rare custom in the Argentine; -virtually all citizens have the incorrigible Latin-American habit of -stopping all talk to gaze open-mouthed at a passing stranger, entire -groups of men on the street corners turning their heads to stare after -him until one feels genuine misgiving lest they permanently dislocate -their ostrich necks. - -There are reminders, too, of the gypsy section of Granada or Seville, -hints of Luxor or Assuan in Upper Egypt, as well as of the somnolent -towns in the half-tropical valleys of the Andes. The thatched mud huts -are surrounded with cactus hedges on which the family wash hangs drying; -everything is coated with the fine white dust of the unpaved streets, -through which the half-Indian women wade almost ankle deep, their -slattern skirts sweeping it into clouds behind them. Now and then there -passes one of these _chola_ females leading through the dust-river a -donkey bestridden by a girl of the same race and drawing by two ropes -tied to knobs in its ends a rolling barrel of water, the -chocolate-colored river water on which the town seems chiefly to -subsist. A dry, cracked soil under an ardent sun, thin animals eating -greedily at poor tufts of scanty vegetation, cactus used as field fences -as well as inclosing the miserable _ranchos_, cactus with twisted trunks -that look like enormous snakes about to strike, immense cactus -candelabras of ten or fifteen branches, a few poor chickens picking at -the sterile soil about the _ranchos_ by day and roosting by night in the -rare scraggly trees, scores of hungry-looking goats browsing on nothing, -yet somehow keeping energy enough to gambol about a scene usually devoid -of any form of unnecessary activity, a few almost leafless scrub trees -on which hang rags of raw meat sun-drying into _charqui_, or, as they -call it in southeastern South America, _tasajo_—these make up the -background of almost any picture of Santiago. Against this stand out in -slight relief bronzed _cholos_ loafing in the shade of the huts, pigs -and children disputing the same dreary playgrounds, men shirtless or in -shirt sleeves, with rather lifeless, inexpressive brown features, women -dressed in shapeless thin cotton gowns of brilliant colors—apple-green, -pink, shrieking red—their rarely washed faces surmounted by masses of -coarse, thick, straight black hair knotted carelessly together at the -neck, little girls carrying naked babies almost as large as themselves, -nearly all holding in one hand the dried-gourd bowl of _mate_ heated -over a fagot fire in the open air, sucking it eagerly yet languidly -through the straw-shaped metal _bombilla_. A completely naked gamin of -five gallops about astride a stick, his slightly older and no more -expensively attired brother doing the like on a scrubby horse without -saddle or bridle, both scattering the pigs, dogs, and chickens at every -turn. From the hut doors or the midst of such families seated _al -fresco_ and taking their _mate_ from a single bowl that circulates round -and round the group come languid calls of “Ché Maria!” “Ché compadre!” -“Ché Gringa!” “Ché” is the popular nickname of affection or familiarity -in southern South America, corresponding roughly to our once widespread -pseudonym “kid.” - -I had the customary _santiagueño_ pleasure of rising at an unearthly -hour to catch the morning train to La Banda, only to find there that the -“mixed” daily from Buenos Aires into the sugar-fields of the far north -was seven hours late. Over the way stood a hotel poetically named “El -Dia de Nosotros,” but that day was evidently past, for the place was -irrevocably closed, and it was only by a streak of luck that long after -my customary breakfast hour I got from an uninviting street stand a cup -of what purported to be black coffee. During the delay I fell into -conversation with two young Austrians who had been all the way up to -Salta in quest of fortune. The best chance for work they had found was -at cutting sugar-cane at terms under which no one but the most expert -could earn more than two pesos a day. Much as it resembles our own land -in some ways, the Argentine does not give one the impression of being -any such Eldorado for the newcomer whose stock in trade consists solely -of two brawny arms. - -The _mixto_ crawled in at last, covered with a thick blanket of fine -dust. At the station of Araoz, on the boundary line between the -provinces of Santiago and Tucumán, the sterile, bushy country suddenly -gave way to sugar-cane, vast fields, veritable prairies of cane, not the -little patches of light-green that dot and decorate many an Andean -landscape, but prosaic, heavily productive stretches as unromantic as -Iowa cornfields, spreading as far as the eye could see in any direction. -Cutting had begun, for it was late April, and all the way to Tucumán the -dull, sullen rumble of the massive rollers was as incessant as the -pungent smell of molasses in the air, while everywhere great brick -stacks rose from the flat green landscape, belching forth their heavy -clouds of smoke on the hazy, humid atmosphere. - -Tucumán, my farthest north in the Argentine, in a latitude similar to -that of southern Florida, was once under the Inca, though the casual -observer would scarcely suspect of any such past this bustling modern -Argentine town and capital of the smallest yet most prosperous province -of the republic. It is a town that lives, breathes, and dreams sugar, -accepting proudly the national nickname of the “City of Sugar.” A -checkerboard place, some of its wide streets paved with wooden blocks, -its houses of the old Spanish one-story style, yet often seventy or -eighty meters deep, with two flowery patios hidden away behind the bare, -though gaily smeared, façades, it has mildly the “feel” of the tropics -intermingled with its considerable modern activity. Electric tramways -and lights are very much in evidence, yet horsemen resembling those of -the Andean wilds may be seen riding along under the trolley wires. In -the central Plaza de la Independencia are orange-trees laden with ripe -fruit, pepper-trees, palms, and cactus, not to mention a highly -unsuccessful marble statue of Liberty, holding in her hands the links of -her broken chains as if they were considerably too hot for comfort. -About this never-failing civic focus are the government buildings, the -cathedral, the bishop’s palace, and several pretentious clubs, though -the entire circuit brings to view no architecture of interest. In one of -several other squares there is a statue of Belgrano, who defeated the -Spaniards in this vicinity in 1812 with the aid of “Our Lady of -Mercies,” whom the general rewarded by appointing her a generalísimo of -his armies. Near the central plaza, surrounded with an almost religious -atmosphere, is Independence Hall, in which was signed what amounts to -Argentine’s Declaration of Independence. It is a little adobe structure, -long and low, like many of the poor men’s _ranchos_ scattered about the -pampas, carefully whitewashed, with a restored wooden roof and other -improvements to make it look new and unnatural, after the approved -Latin-American style of disguising what it is feared may be taken for -the commonplace. All this is covered by a large modern concrete building -in charge of a _chinita_, who is theoretically always on hand to admit -visitors who desire to see the two good bronze reliefs, the medals, the -portraits of the signers of the declaration, to sit down in the -century-old presidential chair long enough for a snapshot, and to add -their autographs to the register locked away in the former presidential -desk, in approved tourist fashion. From Tucumán one can make out the dim -blue outline of the lower Andes to the west, and in clear sunny weather -the snow peaks of Bolivia stand out distinctly to the north. Indeed, it -is within the district embracing Tucumán and Santiago del Estero that -Argentine life begins to shade imperceptibly into the Bolivian or -Andean. - -Virtually the entire province of Tucumán is covered with sugar-cane and -orange groves. The rivalry between these two products has been acute for -decades, now one, now the other usurping the center of the stage. Toward -the end of the last century the northern part of the republic “went -sugar crazy” and burned whole forests of orange-trees in order to plant -cane. The result was a year of overproduction, the only period in which -the Argentine exported sugar, though she should easily be able to supply -half South America. On the contrary she habitually imports sugar, her -own in many cases, for the crude sugar shipped to Europe is often the -very sugar which was served in tissue-wrapped lumps in nearly every -restaurant and _lechería_ of Buenos Aires long before that sanitary -provision was thought of in the United States. But then, so does the -Argentine import garlic, and onions, peppers, _garbanzos_ (the Spanish -chickpeas of which she is still so fond), cheese, and millions of -“fresh” eggs, not only from Uruguay across the river but from Spain and -Portugal across the sea, though all these commodities might easily be -produced at home. Sugar pays what we would consider a heavy internal -duty, which is reputed to be one of the causes why there are so few -national refineries. In her one year of overproduction Tucumán province -gave the country nearly twice the sugar it could consume. The terrified -planters banded together to build up the export trade, got a bounty from -the federal government, which was later forbidden by the Brussels -convention, and forced the provincial government to pass a law limiting -sugar plantations. In carrying this out the _tucumanos_, who had burned -forests of orange-trees a few years before to plant cane, now burned -square leagues of cane-fields that were producing too generously. The -government indemnified the men who fired their fields and furnished them -free seeds of corn, wheat, and barley with which to replant them. But in -time the pendulum swung back again and to-day the province has little -interest in anything but sugar. - -Tucumán retains none of the primitive methods by which cane is turned -into brown lumps of _panela_ or _chancaca_ on the little plantations -scattered through the Andes. Some sixty immense _engenios_ grind -incessantly during the rather short but exceedingly busy season. The -capacity of many of these mills is large, though they work less than -those of Cuba. These, and the often enormous estates about them, are in -most cases owned by English or other foreign firms, the American being -most conspicuous by his absence. Not only are we unrepresented in -ownership but in the machinery used, which is with rare exceptions -British, French, Belgian, and German, for the _argentino_ seems to have -an instinct which draws him toward Europe and causes him to avoid all -unnecessary contact with what he calls the “North American.” It is not -that he fears the “Collosus of the North,” like so many of the smaller, -bad-boy republics nearer the Gulf of Mexico, rather is he firmly -convinced that his country is as powerful and self-sufficient as our -own, but he is inclined by temperament and custom to turn his eyes -eastward rather than northward. - -In this busy season of the Argentine autumn and winter Tucumán province -is a hive of activity. Thousands of workmen of many races are scattered -among the horseman-high plants which stretch to the horizon in every -direction, slashing off the canes at the ground, clearing them of leaves -and useless top with a few quick swings of the machete, and tossing them -with graceful easy gesture upon piles often several meters away. Along -the wide and soft dirt roads which cut into squares the dense jungles of -cane, there is a constant stream of cumbersome two-wheeled carts, -usually drawn by five mules, the _meztizo_ driver in his ragged garments -and soiled, broad-brimmed hat astride the off hind animal, as they -strain toward the points of concentration. There the load is weighed and -lifted in a single bundle by huge cranes which are the only American -contribution to the average estate, and dropped into the cars of the -private railroads that crisscross all the province, or directly into the -carriers that feed the three sets of mammoth inexorable rollers. The -_bagasa_ left over from the crushing is burned at once in the mill -engines, along with the wood brought in from constantly increasing -distances; the _mosta_, or saccharine residue so poor and dirty that it -will not produce even the lowest of the three grades of unrefined sugar, -is turned into alcohol. Every important factory has a village clustered -about it, a community complete from bakers to priest. Field workers have -an unalienable right to the two finest canes they cut or load during the -day, and at dusk long broken lines of them may be seen returning from -the fields carrying their poles over one shoulder, like homeward bound -fishermen, or seated on the ground, machete in hand, peeling the cane -and cutting it into sections, to thrust these in their mouths, crush and -suck them, and spit them out upon the earth about them. - -No traveler with a bit of time to spare should leave the Argentine -without visiting her chief “holy place,” presided over by _La Virgen de -Luján_. If we are to believe all we are told, it is this patron saint -who has made the Argentine the prosperous, happy land it is to-day. To -her groups of pious women, headed by the archbishop, made pilgrimage -from Buenos Aires when the bill of the new socialist deputies threatened -to become a divorce law; to her the country turns when it gets too much, -or too little, rain; here the Irish-Argentinos gather en masse on St. -Patrick’s day. - -Genuine pilgrims are expected to fast on the day they visit Luján. -We—for a friend made the journey with me—came nearly carrying out this -requirement in spite of ourselves, having missed the train we planned to -take and unwisely set out on foot without waiting for the next. For once -outside the city limits, it is a long way from Buenos Aires to the next -shop or restaurant. Luján is something more than forty miles west of the -capital, the usual “boliche” town of the pampas and a slough of mud in -this autumn season, the unfinished dull-red brick “basilica” bulking -high above it and visible many miles away. The legend, which still finds -a surprisingly large number of believers in the Argentine, runs that in -the time of the Spanish dominion a community of Spanish monks set out -with great ceremony to transport a statue of the Virgin from Buenos -Aires to Peru. Arrived at the hamlet of Luján, the cart in which it was -being carried stopped. Nothing could induce it to move on. No doubt it -was the rainy season and there was excellent reason for its -immovability, but the good monks concluded that the Virgin was -expressing a desire to remain where she was, and her wishes were -respected. A small chapel was erected and her cult perpetuated. When -immigration increased and swarms of devout Italians, not to mention the -Spanish and Irish, began to settle in the vicinity and make frequent -pilgrimages to the shrine, the bishop in charge took it as an indication -that the powers of a better world wished the Virgin to be housed in a -building befitting her increasing popularity. He undertook the erection, -from popular subscriptions, of a “Gothic cathedral” which should be the -most imposing in the Argentine, though this, to be sure, is not saying -much. It was planned to spend six million pesos, half of which are -already gone, and as soon as the walls had been raised the bishop -insisted on opening the building, which perhaps is why there is so -little suggestion of Gothic about the bare brick, towerless, -façade-less, on the whole dismal structure. - -Though we might be willing to fast, when there was no choice in the -matter, not all the patron saints on the globe could have forced us to -wallow through the mile or more of black mud between the station and the -“basilica.” For that matter, we noted that even the pious pilgrims who -had arrived with us in their gleaming patent-leather shoes climbed -unhesitatingly into the comfortable, if tiny, horsecar, and that not one -of them gave a suggestion of dropping off to finish the journey on his -knees, or even on foot. We were no less astounded, if secretly more -pleased, to find that one of the rascals keeping the restaurants tucked -away among the many _santerías_, shops in which are sold tin “saints” -which _los fieles_ may carry home to perform their cures by hand, was -willing to jeopardize our future salvation by providing us, before we -had consummated the object of every visit to Luján, with as much of a -repast as one learns to hope for in an Argentine “boliche” town. - -Inside the unfinished but already richly decorated “basilica” the -curved-stone back of the altar and the stairway rising above it was -already carved with the names of those who credited the Virgin with -curing them of incurable ailments. There were other less conspicuous -places for similar testimonials from those with less mesmerism over the -root of evil. About the altar were gathered groups of pilgrims engaged -in the preliminary formalities of the faithful who come seeking aid. -Peasants still wearing the garb of Lombardy or Piedmont, and no doubt -come to ask the Virgin for a little less rain and a better price for -their corn, that they might buy the coveted piece of land next their own -or send more money to the old people they had left behind in Italy, -mingled with richly garbed _Porteñas_ who were praying perhaps for -motherhood or the welfare of a lover. - -“But where is the statue?” asked my impious companion of a young priest -who was marching back and forth committing to memory some password to -heaven. - -“Why—er,” gasped the startled ecclesiastic, “do you mean the Blessed -Virgin?” - -“Yes,” returned my companion, carelessly. - -“Follow those broad curving stairs and you will find our Blessed Lady of -Luján in that little room above the altar,” replied the horrified youth, -crossing himself fervently. - -Above we found a single worshipper, a working woman dressed in the most -nearly whole and spotless gown she possessed, kneeling on the marble -floor, to which she bowed her forehead now and then, her eyes fixed on a -doll some two feet high overdressed in heavy gilded robes and covered -with bracelets, necklaces and girdles of false pearls and diamonds—for -the real ones, worth a king’s ransom, are deposited in a safety vault in -Buenos Aires and are used only on the anniversary of the Virgin’s halt -in Luján. Back of the woman her son of five was climbing high up the -iron grill surrounding the chapel, in his own particular effort to reach -heaven. I lifted him down before he broke his neck, whereupon he sidled -over to the lunch-basket the pair had brought with them and, keeping a -weather eye on his devout parent, stealthily drew out a quart bottle of -wine wrapped in a newspaper. Setting his teeth in the protruding cork, -he tugged at it for some time, like a puppy at a root, drew it at last, -and with an eye still on his mother, deep in her communing with the -Virgin, gulped down nearly half a liter, re-corked the bottle, and -slipped it back into its place. - -On the way down we halted to speak with a well-dressed warden, who -assured us that he had personally known of “thousands of supernatural -cures” performed by the Virgin of Luján. - -“Why,” he cried, growing more specific, “I have known many rich ladies -to come out here from Buenos Aires on crutches, make a promise to our -Blessed Virgin and go back home and—and by and by _they would send out -the crutches_ as proof of being cured, and perhaps a diamond necklace to -show their gratitude to Our Lady. There is no ailment that Our Lady -cannot cure.” - -“Curious,” I mused, “but as I came in I noticed just outside the gates -four beggars,—a blind woman, a one-legged man, a man without legs, and a -paralytic.” - -“Ah, _esa_ gente! _That_ class of people!” cried the warden, with a -world of disgust in his voice and a deprecatory shrug of the shoulders. - - - - - CHAPTER IV - OVER THE ANDES TO CHILE - - -It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest -bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me -outside the Argentine and beyond the jurisdiction of our overworked -consulate. But with a handful of gold sovereigns to show for my -exertions in running errands and eluding _Porteño_ prices, the day -seemed at hand for continuing my intensive tour of South America. The -“International,” of the “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” leaves the capital -three times a week on what purports to be a trip clear across the -continent. In spirit its assertion is truthful, for though the -“International” itself halts where the Argentine begins to tilt up into -the Andes, other trains connect with it and one can, with good luck and -ample wealth, reach Santiago de Chile, or Valparaiso on the Pacific, -thirty-six hours after bidding the _Porteños_ farewell. - -On a crisp May morning I set out westward from “B.A.,” lying featureless -and yellow-white in the brilliant early-winter sunshine, not a church -spire, scarcely a factory chimney, though many unsightly American -windmills, rising above its monotonous level. The heavy “limited” train -made scarcely half a dozen stops all day, though no extraordinary speed. -At the rare stations a few passengers hastened to enter or leave the -cars; between them trees and windmills rose or receded hull-down over -the horizon of the dreary pampas. Outside each uninspiring town was an -ostentatious city of the dead; in the sodden fields were flocks of -sheep, cattle, and horses, fat as barrels, some snorting away at sight -of the train, others gazing disdainfully after it. In many places the -pampa was flooded, sometimes for miles, the shallow temporary lakes -dotted with wild ducks, the roads mere rivers of mud, with only the tops -of the fence-posts out of water, in which dismal looking animals were -huddled up to their bellies, or crowded together on little muddy -islands. Many mud houses were half under water, their thatched roofs and -adobe walls turned into velvety green lawns; hay-stacks had grown -verdant with sprouting grass; several pairs of horses dragging along the -churned roads a load of baled alfalfa was one of the rare signs of -activity. Even the _ñandúes_ seemed to have fled to some modern Ararat. - -[Illustration: A woman of Córdoba, _mate_ bowl in hand] - -[Illustration: Even a lady would not look unladylike in the _bombachas_ -of southeastern South America] - -[Illustration: The highway over the Andes into Chile was filled with -snow] - -[Illustration: A bit of the transandean highway in the wintry month of -May] - -Farther west the country was somewhat drier, or at least more often -above water. Here the vast pampa was divided by wire fences, producing -the illusion of an immense cobweb, broken only rarely by a dense blue -grove of eucalyptus trees planted about the central house of an enormous -_estancia_, estates in most cases too large for the economic health of -the country. Up to recent years the great mistake of the Argentine -government was to grant mammoth tracts of land to men who quickly became -so wealthy that they moved to private palaces in the capital, leaving -little or nothing for the homesteads of what might be a host of -productive freehold farmers. The railway company is striving to get -these huge estates broken up, encouraging colonization by offering -prizes for the best crops along its lines, as well as special -inducements of transportation. For much of the region through which the -“Buenos Aires al Pacífico” runs is so thinly populated that, as in some -of our western states, the common carrier is forced to help produce -something to carry. But the big landed proprietors have a Spanish pride -in the size of their holdings, and with it an abhorrence not only of -manual labor but even of living on their estates, from which the income -is large enough for their comfort under the poorest systems of farming, -or mere grazing, and it is not easy to induce them to sell even those -portions lying wholly idle. The company has various ways of combatting -this attitude. The most common is to build stations only where wealthy -_estancieros_ donate not merely the land needed for immediate use, but -room for future railroad development and sometimes for the building of a -village and the beginning of more intensive agriculture about it. - -A few of these have developed into true frontier towns, with enormously -wide mud streets and electric lights, stretching far out into the -country, as if the inhabitants expected to wake up any morning and find -the place trebled in population. They were like a country without a -history,—prosperous, contented—and uninteresting. There being almost no -stone or wood all the way from the Córdoba hills to Tierra del Fuego, it -was not strange that the majority even of town houses were made of the -only material at hand, mud, as the Esquimaux build of snow and ice; yet -the most dismal of these structures were by no means the comfortless -dens of the Indians and _cholos_ of the Andes. It was Sunday, and -especially on that day is it the custom in the smaller provincial towns -to _hacer el corso_, to parade back and forth, at the station at -train-time. Groups of comely girls, well dressed for such districts, -powdered and perfumed, with flowers in their hair, their arms -interlocked, were not content to display their charms to their rustic -fellow-townsmen outside the station barriers, but invaded the platforms -and strolled from end to end of the train as long as it remained. As -attractive members of the fair sex are never without their attendant -groups of admirers in South America, the latter increased the platform -throng to a point where it was a lucky traveler who could find room to -descend and make his way across it. - -For long distances there were almost no signs of animate life except -occasional flocks of _ñandúes_ cantering away like awkward schoolgirls. -About every _boliche_, country store and liquor shop, were groups of -shaggy pampa ponies and their no less shaggy riders, the animals -prevented from deserting their owners by rawhide thongs binding their -front feet together. _Bombachas_, the bloomer-like nether garments of -the pampas, were much in evidence among these modern _gauchos_. A few of -these, no doubt, were independent farmers; the majority were plainly -hired men whose greatest likeness to the hardy part-Indian cowboys of a -generation ago is the ability to absorb some five pounds of meat a day, -washing it down with copious draughts of boiling _mate_. Vegetables are -as little grown in the Argentine as in most of South America, and the -employees, only the _mayordomos_ and the pen-driving class missing, who -gather daily about the _asado_ provided by the _estanciero_, still live -almost entirely on meat, with occasionally a few hardtack _galletas_ -from these pampa stores. Boys of seven or eight, with true _gaucho_ -blood in their veins, who sat their horses as if they were part of them, -galloped about some of these smaller towns, _boleando_ cats and dogs -with astonishing skill. At the more important crossings an old man or -woman, sometimes a little girl, stood waving as solemnly as if the whole -future of the railroad depended upon them the black-and-yellow flag that -means “all safe” to Argentine trainmen. Country policemen were almost -numerous, riding along the miserable roads or dismounted at the -stations, covered with dust or mud and mingling with the hardy, -independent countrymen. The rural Argentine police still have a far from -enviable reputation, though they no longer tyrannize over the new style -of _argentino_ as they once did over the bold but unsophisticated -_gaucho_ of the “Martín Fierro” type. Yet on the whole they were not a -body of men to inspire confidence. One felt at a glance that, far from -trusting to their protection, it would be better to have someone else -along in the more lonely sections of the country to protect one from the -police. - -Mendoza, metropolis of western Argentine and capital of the province of -the same name, lies at the very base of the Andes, six hundred miles -inland from Buenos Aires and barely one fourth as far from the Pacific, -though with the mighty Andean wall intervening. Built on plentiful flat -ground in what is sometimes called the “Argentine California,” the city -is laid out in wide checkerboard streets, some of them shaded by rows of -magnificent trees of abundant foliage. Each street is bordered with -ditches made of mosaics of small cobbles, for the torrents that pour -down from the Andes at certain seasons are worthy of man’s attention, -and though the town is not tropical, banana, acacia, and mulberry trees -bathe their feet in these intermittent streams and take on an -extraordinary vigor. The central section has a number of modern business -buildings, but the dwellings are nearly all still in the old Spanish -style, often large houses, but capacious chiefly in depth, so that one -only half suspects the several flowery patios they inclose. Few -buildings are of more than one story, and even the stylish habitations, -with columned façades and _corredores_ paved with colored marble -_dalles_, are made of mud baked with straw and lime. For Mendoza still -remembers the days, sixty years ago, when an earthquake destroyed the -entire town, burying nearly the whole population of ten thousand in the -ruins. Nothing remains now of the old town except the ruins of a church -or two that are preserved as historical souvenirs and warnings against -high buildings, mere masses of bricks standing like monoliths on the -summits of walls that seem ever ready to fall down and on which a bush -or a plant has here and there taken root; yet the _mendocinos_ are only -beginning to put their faith in reinforced concrete. Many of the houses -are smeared pink, saffron, blue, or other bright color, and when it -rains the mud roofs run down over the façades, streaking the colors or -washing them out to a leprous gray. - -Being almost entirely a one-story town, and retaining the Moorish style -of architecture, even the hotels of Mendoza have no windows on the -streets, the only openings to the rooms being the door on the patio, so -that the guest who needs a bit of light must disclose to servants and -fellow-clients all his domestic activities; and to reach the bathroom, -if there is one, means parading the entire length of the courtyard. -Sidewalk cafés are thronged even on “winter” evenings; as elsewhere in -the Argentine, every workingman’s restaurant has its _cancha de bochas_, -a kind of earth-floored bowling-alley native to rural Italy. There are -electric street-cars, and the electric lights, outdoors and in, outdo -our own in size and brilliancy. While the English own the important -Argentine railroads, Germans hold most of the concessions for electric -light and power in the provincial towns, and Mendoza is no exception to -this rule. - -The modern _argentino_ is not only a transplanted European, but in most -cases has come over within the past century. Only Caucasian immigration -is welcome, no negroes and none of the yellow races being admitted. As -in Buenos Aires, there is in the capital of each province an immigration -bureau, with attendants speaking the principal tongues of Europe, which -strives to place the newcomer to his and the country’s advantage. Thus -there is a decidedly European atmosphere even in towns as far back in -the depths of America as Mendoza, one that all but obliterates the -purely American aspect. The city retains a suggestion of Spanish -colonial days, but the native _bombachas_ are no more familiar sights -than the Basque cap of the Pyrenees and the hemp-sole sandals, the short -blouse with wide sash of contrasting color, and the clean-shaven -features of the hardy Spanish peasant and _arriero_. - -Like several of the more important cities far distant from the federal -capital, Mendoza enjoys a certain local autonomy, though the prevailing -political party in the Argentine advocates a strongly centralized -government more nearly like that of France than that in the United -States. The province prints its own small money, legal tender only -within its limits, for the national currency not only becomes scarcer -but more and more ragged and illegible in ratio to the distance from -Buenos Aires. A not entirely unjustified fear of revolution, too, causes -the province to maintain a large police force, for the Argentine has -nothing like our National Guard. It is easy for the federal government, -often looking for just such a chance, to intervene at the first -suggestion of trouble in a province, and as such intervention means a -suspended governor, a legislature forced out of office, and the loss of -nearly all political patronage, the provincial authorities find it to -their advantage to have a dependable police force. Persistent rumor has -it that the police of Mendoza, however, are far from perfect, that they -lose few opportunities to force bribes from, and otherwise tyrannize -over, the population. Many fines may legally be imposed and collected -directly by the police, and the story runs that it is particularly -unfortunate to attract their attention toward the end of the month. They -are then apt to be penniless, and are given to wandering the streets -after dark, seeking whom they may run in and threaten to lock up if he -does not at once pay the “fine” then and there levied by the police. If -the victim asks for a receipt, rumor adds, he is instantly clapped into -jail, or rather, is sent to stand all night or sit down in mud in the -prison yard. Even important citizens of Mendoza hesitate to go out alone -after dark at the end of the month. - -I spent May twenty-fifth, the Argentine Independence Day, in Mendoza. An -official salute woke the town at sunrise, to find itself already -fluttering with flags, the blue-and-white Argentine banner -predominating, but with many others, the yellow-and-red of Spain in -particular—and one lone Stars and Stripes, in front of a sewing-machine -agency. The uninformed stranger might have suspected that there is more -patriotism to the square yard in the Argentine than in any other land. -Had he inquired a bit, however, he would have learned that the law -requires all inhabitants—not merely citizens, be it noted—to fly the -national flag on May 25 and July 9, as it requires all men to uncover -when the national anthem is played, and all school children to learn by -rote certain chauvinistic platitudes. Nor should the fact be overlooked -that the “Veinticinco de Mayo”—for which Argentine towns, streets, -shops, cafés, and even dogs are named—is perilously near the end of the -month. - -In the morning everyone went to church, from white-haired generals -lop-shouldered with the weight of the gleaming hardware across their -chests to newly-rich Spaniards who still wore shoes with less ease than -they would have cloth _alpargatas_. Scores of police, dozens of firemen, -still wearing their hats or helmets, as is the custom throughout South -America, lined the aisles from entrance to altar. When all the élite and -high government officials had gathered, the archbishop himself preached -a sermon founded on the not wholly unique assertion that politicians -seek government places for their own good rather than for that of the -governed, ending with the warning that the Argentine was sliding -pellmell to perdition because the teaching of the Catholic religion is -not permitted in the public schools. The governor of the province lent -an attentive ear throughout this harangue, and watched the service with -attentive Latin-American politeness; but it was noticeable that he did -not show enthusiasm, and that no ceremony was included that required -kneeling or crossing oneself on the part of the congregation, for -Argentine government officials are often noted for their anticlerical -attitude. There was an entirely different atmosphere here than at the Te -Deum I had attended on Colombia’s Independence Day two years before in -cloistered Bogotá. - -The municipal band met us outside the cathedral and led the parade of -police and firemen—marching like men long accustomed to drilling—of -citizens and ecclesiastics, the archbishop, still in his purple, -surrounded by a guard of honor with drawn bayonets. The procession broke -up at the entrance to the Parque del Oeste, said to be the largest city -park in South America. Miniature trains, astride which human beings look -gigantic, carried those who did not care to walk, or hire other -transportation, out to this extensive civic improvement, spreading over -all the landscape at the base of the Andes to the west of the city. The -crowning feature of this enormous new park, with an artificial lake -nearly a mile long, concrete grandstands, and broad shaded avenues, is a -solid rock rising from the plain on which the city is built, the first -outpost of the Andes that bulk into the heavens close behind it. The -entire top of this hill, reached by a roadway cut in a complete circuit -of it, has been blasted off, and on this great platform has been reared -a gigantic creation of granite and bronze called “The Armies of the -Andes.” It commemorates the passage of the Andes by San Martín’s troops -early in the last century to free Chile from Spanish rule, one of the -most heroic expeditions in American history,—a badly equipped, half -starved force struggling through snow-blocked passes on what seemed then -an almost quixotic mission. Yet the conception and execution of the -monument, magnificent in proportions, rarely surpassed in dignity, is -worthy of its subject. Behind and above the splendid equestrian statue -of San Martín are his officers and the army of liberation, ranging all -the way from low relief to detached figures, the whole surmounted by an -enormous winged victory, while around the monument hover huge bronze -condors. All this, be it noted, was planned and carried out by a -provincial town of fifty thousand inhabitants. Of the view to be had -from it, on one side the plains of the Argentine, flat as a motionless -sea, on the other this same plain, bursting suddenly into mountains, -which climb in more and more jagged formation to the snow-clad summits -of the Andes almost sheer overhead, mere words are but weak symbols to -describe. - -Meanwhile the excellent municipal band had been playing all the -afternoon in a kiosk nearer the park entrance. Soon after noonday we -low-caste promenaders on foot had begun to gather about it; then a few -poor public vehicles took to ambling around it; better and better -carriages appeared, with coachmen in high hats and livery; finally -private automobiles, large and gleamingly new, joined the now crowded -cortège. Pedestrians had become too many for free movement; the -carriages and automobiles circled in unbroken procession farther and -farther out on the horseshoe-shaped drive, until each heard only -occasional snatches of the music as they passed near it. A few silk-clad -ladies and their perfumed escorts deigned to descend and stroll a bit. -Policemen on magnificent horses, white plumes waving from their helmets, -directed the traffic with princely gestures. By dusk all Mendoza was -there, every class of society from the proud hidalgo descendent of the -conquistadores to the millionaire Spaniard who came out forty years ago -with his worldly possessions in a cardboard suitcase, and who now took -care to avoid the old Spanish match-seller who was his boon companion on -that memorable voyage. Vendors, hawkers and fakers, announcing their -wares as loudly as they dared without arousing the wrath of the haughty -army officer, master of ceremonies, who would presently vent his spleen -upon those who failed to snatch off their hats at the first note of the -national anthem, mingled with honest European workmen in _boínas_ and -_alpargatas_ and sun-faded shirts, enjoying a rare day of recreation in -the life-time of toil which they naïvely consider their natural lot. -Though wine flows as freely in Mendoza as in Italy, not a suggestion of -drunkenness did I see during the day. - -As evening advanced, the crowd became more and more silk-hatted in looks -and temperament, a better bred, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, yet -also more blasé throng than similar gatherings over the Andes. The bony, -ungraceful women numerous in northern countries were rare, the plump -type not only of Mendoza but of all the Argentine most in evidence being -physically attractive in spite of overdress and enameled faces. Soon -after full darkness had fallen some of the most regal equipages fell out -of the procession by failing to turn the outside corner of the drive, -and wended their way homeward. The better class of hired vehicles -gradually followed their example; the public hacks, whose occupants were -having perhaps their one spree of the year, at last got tardy, regretful -orders to turn townward, until the place was left again to the -foot-going classes, many of the hawkers, fakers and vendors still -wandering among them, emitting rather helpless yelps in a last effort to -be rid of what remained of their wares. There came a hurried last number -by the band, cut unseemly short as the players dropped out and fell to -stuffing their instruments into their covers, and behind the hurrying -musicians the last stragglers took up the march to town. Not a -firecracker had exploded all day; no fireworks enlivened the evening, -though the grounds of the chief plaza and several smaller parks were -gaudy with colored electric lights set out in the form of flower-plots, -and similar lights outlined the municipal theater into which all those -who had attended services in the morning, with the exception of the -ecclesiastics, crowded to hear “Rigoletto” sung by fresh young Italian -voices with more power than polish. - -The “Buenos Aires al Pacífico” has several lines in and about Mendoza -province, with frequent trains out through the vineyard districts. One -train travels an S-shaped route and comes back to the station from which -it starts without covering any of the ground twice, then makes the same -trip in the opposite direction. When I rose at dawn, the Andes stood out -against the sky as if they had been cut out of cardboard; by the time I -had reached the station long banks of steel-gray clouds were rising like -a steam curtain under the rays of the red sun, until the range was all -but hidden from view. My journey through the vineyards uncovered great -peaks capped with snow and glaciers that seemed to touch the sky, and -everywhere were grapevines, stretching away in endless rows, between -some of which oxen were plowing and men hoeing, vineyards limited only -by the horizon or the Cordilleras in the background. As there is little -natural campo on which to fatten herds in Mendoza province and -insufficient rainfall to make wheatfields productive, grapes were -introduced here half a century ago by Spaniards who brought them over -from Chile. The torrents pouring down from mighty Aconcagua were caught -and put to work, and wherever there is irrigation grapes grow abundantly -in what was a bushy Arizona when the first settlers came, until to-day -the province does indeed resemble California. For a long time Mendoza -furnished the Argentine all its wine. Then Europe began sending it over -at prices that competed, the vineyards spread into neighboring provinces -along the base of the Andes, and Mendoza lost its monopoly. When the -railroad came, it brought French, Spanish, and Italian peasants who knew -grapes as they knew their own families, and the Argentine became the -greatest wine-producing country in all the world outside western Europe. -Now there is a little corn, alfalfa, and grain, though all these are -insignificant compared to the principal product. Spaniards I met along -the way asserted that corn or wheat paid better now than grapes, so low -in price as to be scarcely worth picking, and that olives would do best -of all, if only the growers would bring in experienced workmen and give -the trees proper care. - -I left Mendoza on a crisp May morning, and the autumn leaves I had not -seen for years were falling so abundantly that a line from “Cyrano de -Bergerac” kept running through my head, “_Regardez les feuilles, comme -elles tombent_.” Here they lay drifted under the rows of slender -yellowed poplars which stretched away through the vineyards, endless -brown vineyards everywhere covered with the dead leaves of autumn -standing in straight rows as erect as the files of an army and backed -far off by the dawn-blue Andes, their white heads gradually peering -forth far above as the day grew. Between the rows glided Oriental -looking people, lightly touching them on either side, bent on unknown -errands, for the fruit was nowhere being gathered. Unpicked grapes, -shriveled to the appearance of raisins, covered even the roofs and -bowers and patios of the flat adobe houses. Here and there a weeping -willow or an _alfalfal_ showing the advantages of irrigation gave a -contrasting splotch of deep green to the velvety-brown immensity. Before -his majestic entrance the god of the Incas gilded to flaming gold a -fantastic white cloud high up above his eastern portal, then lighted up -the files of yellowing poplars, then brought out the golden-brown of the -vast vineyards, gave a delicate pink shade to the range of snow-clads -away to the west, and at last burst forth from the realms of night in a -fiery glory that quickly flooded all the landscape. - -I am not sure that I have ever seen nature so nearly outdo herself as in -this dawn and sunrise across the vineyards of Mendoza, while we crept -upward from the Argentine toward the Cordilleras. No other hour of the -day, certainly, could have equaled this, and it made up amply for the -discomfort of being routed out of our comfortable cabins on the -“International” before daybreak, to wash in icy water and stumble about -in the starlight until we were thoroughly chilled, before we had been -permitted to board the little narrow-gauge _transandino_ train, so tiny -in contrast to the roomy express that had carried us across the pampas -that one seemed crowded into unseemly intimacy with one’s -fellow-travelers. Across the aisle sat a priest with an open -church-book, mumbling his devotions and crossing himself at frequent -intervals, but never once raising his head to glance out the window. No -doubt when he gets to Heaven he will falsely report that the earth has -no landscapes to vie with those of the celestial realms. Over me swept a -desire to get off and walk, to stride up over the steep trails and feel -the exhilarating mountain air cut deep down into my lungs, sweeping -through every limb like a narcotic, and to take in all the magnificent -scene bit by bit, instead of being snatched along, however slowly, -without respect either for nature or my own inclinations. - -The day turned out brilliant and cloudless; in full sunshine the scene -lost some of its delicate beauty of coloring, though still retaining its -grandiose majesty. The vast pampa sank gradually below us as we turned -away toward the mountains, the irrigated green patches grew almost -imperceptible. Slowly the plain itself was succeeded by fields of loose -rocks on which vegetated a few gaunt, deformed trees, spiny bushes, -gnarled and crabbed clumps of brush scattered in unneighborly isolation. -The sun flooded the barren, fantastic, million-ridged and valleyed -foothills of many colors, rolling up to the base of abrupt mountains -that climbed, rugged and unkempt and independent of all law and order, -like some stupendous stairway to heaven, to the clouds in which their -tops disappeared. Cliffs washed into every imaginable shape by centuries -of hail, snow, and mountain winds—for there is no rain in this -region—cast dense black shadows, which in the narrow valleys and tiny -scoops and hollows contrasted with the thousand sun-flaming salient -knobs and points and spires and hillocks—a lifeless stony barrenness -only enhanced by the scattered tufts of a hardy yellow-brown bush barely -a foot high. - -Hour after hour we wound back and forth across the river Mendoza, fed by -the glaciers above, taking advantage of its two flat banks to rise ever -higher, while the river itself grew from a phlegmatic stream of the -plain to a nervous mountain brook racing excitedly past through deep, -narrow, rock gorges. The rare stations were “beautified” with masses of -colored flowers that would have been pretty enough in their place, but -which here looked tawdry and seemed to mock man’s feeble efforts to vie -with nature in her most splendid moods. Above Cachueta, noted for its -hot baths exploited by the city of Mendoza, in so dismal a landscape -that visitors come only from dire necessity, all vegetation had -disappeared and all the visible world had grown dry and rocky and barren -as only the Andes can be in their most repellant regions. Not even the -cactus remained to give a reminder of life; not even a condor broke the -deadness of the peaks which seemed cut out with a knife from the hard -heavens. After several bridges and tunnels there came an agreeable -surprise,—the valley of Uspallata, with a little pasture for cattle. But -this oasis did not last long, and soon the dull, reddish-brown cliffs -shut us in again. Broken and irregular peaks eroded into thousands of -valleys of all shapes and sizes gave lurking-places in which shadows -still hid from the searching sun, like smugglers on a frontier. Though a -certain grandiose beauty grew out of these crude, planless forms of -nature, they ended by giving the beholder a disquieting sadness. One -seemed imprisoned for life within these enormous walls; the utter -absence of life, the uniformity of the dry desolation, especially the -oppressive, monotonous solitude, enhanced by a dead silence broken only -by the panting of the sturdy little locomotive crawling upward on its -narrow cogwheel track and the creaking of the inadequate little cars -behind it, seemed to hypnotize the travelers and plunge them into a sort -of stupor from which nothing short of imminent disaster would arouse -them. - -Between ever higher stations the only signs of man were rare _casuchas_, -huts of refuge built of the same dreary material as the hills, tucked -away here and there against the mountainsides. Before the building of -the railroad these served travelers as shelters for the night or against -the dreaded _temporales_, hurricanes of the winter-bound Cordillera. At -the Puente del Inca, a natural rock bridge under which the Mendoza River -has worn its way in a chasm, we caught the first clear glimpse of -Aconcagua, its summit covered with eternal snow and ice. Yet it seemed -small compared with the tropical giants of Chimborazo and Huascarán, -with their immense slopes of perpetual blue glaciers, perhaps because -there was no contrast of equatorial flora below, and it was hard to -believe the scientists who rank it the highest in the western -hemisphere. By this time snow lay in patches about us and stretched in -streaks up every crevice and sheltered slope, yet the mammoth glacier -peaks and striking Alpine beauty one expected was little in evidence. - -As we drew near Las Cuevas, the increasing desire for a mountain tramp, -coupled with that of seeing the famous “Christ of the Andes” which the -traveler by train comes nowhere near, caused me to sound several of my -cosmopolitan fellow-travelers on the suggestion of leaving the train and -walking over the summit. But the few of them who did not rate me -hopelessly mad felt they could not spare the three days between this and -the next train, even if they were not seriously infected with the tales -of Chilean bandits. Yet I could not sit supinely in a railway coach and -be dragged through a dingy, three-mile tunnel, to come out on the other -side without having seen a suggestion of the real summit. Besides, there -was another excellent reason to drop off the train at Las Cuevas. There, -at the mouth of the international tunnel, my Argentine pass ended, and -the fare through and over the summit, a mere fifty miles by rail, was -almost twenty dollars. Even second-class, with the privilege of sitting -on a wooden bench in a sort of disguised box-car, was but little less -than that, and it was noticeable that all but the well-dressed had -disappeared from this also, the most expensive bit of railroading in the -world being too much of a luxury for the rank and file. These high rates -make the Andes a doubly strong barrier against immigration from the more -crowded and less capacious Pacific slope, which is to the _argentino’s_ -liking, for on the eastern side the Chilean is hated and feared, all the -talk of international affection notwithstanding, as something between a -cruel and piratical Indian and a Prussianized tradesman. - -As we drew into Las Cuevas I gathered together the essentials of kodak -and note-book and turned the rest of my baggage over to a young -Norwegian on his way to Valparaiso, with a request to leave it at Los -Andes, where the _transandino_ joins the government railways of Chile. - -The train went on. The detachment of Argentine police that had given it -their protection up from Mendoza clambered upon the released engine and -went back down the mountain, and I found myself stranded and almost -alone in something far less than a hamlet at more than ten thousand feet -above sea-level. A quick movement instantly reminded one of the height, -an altitude doubly impressive at this latitude and at this season. Even -near midday it was not particularly warm in the sunshine and it was -decidedly cold in the shadows. Yet I must climb more than three thousand -feet higher to get over into Chile. The section-gangs of half-Indians, -in their heavy knit caps without visors and thick woolen socks reaching -to the knees, were a sullen, cruel looking crew, with marks of frequent -dissipation on their bronzed faces, men suggesting the Andean Indian -stripped of his humility and law-abiding nature and gifted with the -trickery that comes to primitive races from contact with the outside -world. - -With sunset it grew bitter cold, an icy wind howling and moaning -incessantly even through the chinks of the dismal, guestless frontier -hotel in which a coarse and soggy supper cost me three pesos. When it -was finished, the landlord led the way out into the frigid, blustery -mountain night and, wading through a snow-drift, let me into the first -room of what is in summer-time a crowded wooden hotel, telling me to -lock the outer door, as the whole building was mine. What he would have -done had a lone lady also stopped here for the night I do not know—wired -to Mendoza, perhaps, for a chaperon. I burrowed under a veritable -wagon-load of quilts. Two or three times during the night I awoke and -peered out the curtainless window upon the bleak, jagged snow-clads -piled into the starlight above, each time wondering whether day was -near, but there was no way of knowing, for not a sound was to be heard -above the howling of the wind and the shivering of the doors and windows -of the unsheltered wood structure. - -At last there seemed to be something faintly brighter about the white -crest of the range, and I coaxed myself out of bed. The darkness was -really fading. I drank the cup of cold tea I had prevailed upon the -landlord to leave with me the night before, strapped on my revolver for -the first time since leaving Bolivia, and set out as soon as I could see -the next step before me. The automobile road that zigzags up the face of -the range, accomplishing the journey to the “Cristo” in seven kilometers -of comparatively easy gradients in the bright summer days of December -and January, was heaped high with snow in this May-day winter season and -was plainly impassable. Beyond the last dreary stone refuge hut I took -what had been pointed out to me the day before as a short cut and, -picking up a faint trail, set out to scramble straight up the barren, -rocky slope toward the grim, jagged peaks above. - -For hours I clawed my way upward through loose shale and broken rock, -all but pulling the mountain down about my ears, slipping back with -every step, filling my low shoes of the city with sand, snow, and the -molten mixture of both, panting as only he can understand who has -struggled up an almost perpendicular slope in the rare atmosphere of -high altitudes, my head dizzy and my legs trembling from the exertion. -Every now and then I had to cross a patch of hard snow or ice so steep I -must clutch with toes, heels, knees, and fingernails to keep from doing -a toboggan to perdition hundreds of feet below. Sometimes there was -nothing for it but to spring like a chamois from one jagged rock to -another, at the imminent peril of losing my balance once for all. In -many places the mountain itself was made of such poor material that it -came apart at the slightest strain, so that many a time I laid hands -upon a rock only to have it come sliding down toward me, threatening to -carry my mangled remains with it to the bottom of the valley. I would -gladly have gone down again and, after kicking the “short cut” -informant, made a new start, but that was next to impossible. It was -difficult enough to climb these great toboggan fields of loose shale and -ice; it would have been a rare man who could have descended them whole -without at least the aid of an Alpine stock. There remained no choice -than to keep on picking my way back and forth across the face of the -cliff, gradually clawing upward, reviving my spirits now and then by -eating a handful of snow, always subconsciously expecting to receive a -well-aimed shower of stones or knives from a group of bandits ensconced -in one of the many splendid hiding-places about me. - -I had lost myself completely and, convinced that I was in for an all-day -struggle, could have met with resignation the lesser suffering meted out -by bandits, when I suddenly struck what proved to be a gravelly ridge -between two peaks and on it an iron caisson marking the international -boundary. Far from coming out at the “Christ of the Andes,” I found the -famous statue standing in utter solitude in a sandy pocket of the -mountains free from snow so far below me that it looked almost -miniature. By the time I had climbed down to it, however, the figure -itself, erected by the two nations to signalize what they fondly hope -will be perpetual peace between them, grew to several times life size -and took on an impressiveness much enhanced by its solitary setting. - -Not a sign of humanity had I seen or heard when I emptied my shoes and -set off down the opposite slope. On the Chilean side the highway was -drifted still deeper with snow, in places stone hard, in others so soft -that at every step I sank knee-deep into it. The brilliant sun that had -cheered me on all the breathless climb here grew so ardent that I was -forced to shed my outer clothing. I was present at the birth, nay, the -very conception, of the River Juncal, which later joins the Aconcagua -and flows into the Pacific, for I had stood even higher than the point -where the snow and glaciers begin to melt and trickle down the mountain. -It is this foaming blue river which carves out the route down into -Chile, leaving highway and railroad the precarious task of following it -down the swift and insecure slope. - -Near the mouth of the international tunnel the Lago del Inca, beautiful -in its setting of haggard mountain faces, reflected the blue of the -glaciers and the white of the snow peaks above. From there on all was -comparatively easy going, for though the sharp ballasting of the little -narrow cogwheel railroad mercilessly gashed and tore my shoes, I had -already saved enough in fare to buy several pairs. Now and then I met a -work-train straining upward out of the mouth of a sheet-iron snow-shed -or one of the many long dark tunnels through which I passed with hand on -revolver butt. By the time I had met several section-gangs, however, -dismal, piratical looking fellows, with a suggestion of Japanese -features, in ragged patched ponchos and wide felt hats, I decided that -they were more savage in appearance than in character, and when at last -a whole gang of these reputed cut-throats left off work to show me a -short cut, I laid away the stories I had heard of them along with the -fanciful tales of danger I had gathered in many other parts of the -world. They were _rotos_ indeed, “broken” not only in the sartorial -Spanish sense in which the word is used in Chile, but in the meaning it -has in American slang. Not a suggestion did they have in manner or -features of that hopefulness of the Argentine masses, but rather the air -of men perpetually ill or saddened by a recent death in the family, who -lost no opportunity to drown their sorrows in strong drink. - -There were grades as steep as ten per cent. in the rackrail line down -which I strode at forty cents a mile. In places the western face of the -range was so steep that the mountain fell almost sheer for hundreds of -feet to the railroad, the loose shale seeming ready to drop in mighty -avalanches and bury everything at the slightest disturbance, and -suggesting some of the problems faced by the American engineers who -built the more difficult Chilean half of the _transandino_. The station -of Juncal, perched on a rock, posed as a railway restaurant, but at -sight of its price-list I fled in speechless awe, and at the next stream -below fell upon the lunch I had been brilliant enough to pilfer from my -Argentine supper the evening before. The tiny brook that had trickled -from under the snow below the “Cristo” had swollen to a scarcely -fordable river when, toward evening, with twenty-eight miles, or more -than eleven dollars’ worth, of ups and downs behind me, the huts that -had begun to appear, carelessly tucked in among the broken rocks and -mammoth boulders of the Rio Juncal, collected at last into a little -village called Rio Blanco, in which I found an amateur lodging. I had -heard that Chile was different from the other west-coast countries, but -this first glimpse of it scarcely bore out the assertion. Here were the -same squalor, cur dogs, chicha—even though it was made from -grapes—Indian fatalism and indifference to progress with which I had -grown so familiar in the other lands of the Andes. - -Descending still farther into Chile next morning, I met a fellow tramp -limping toward the summit, a mere bundle of whiskers and rags, evidently -a German, though he was either too surly or too sad to speak, carrying -all his possessions in a grain-sack, his feet wrapped in many folds of -burlap. The twenty-two miles left were an easy day’s stroll, much of it -through the rocky canyon of the river that had roared all night in my -ears. In mid-morning I passed the famous “Salto del Soldado,” where the -railroad leaps across an abysmal chasm with the Rio Juncal brawling and -foaming at its bottom, from one tunnel directly into another, and over -which hovers the legend of some soldier jumping to fame and death in the -revolt against Spanish rule. I had dinner in an outdoor dining-room -under a red-flowered arbor beside the track, where a large steak—of -rhinoceros, I fancy—corn cakes fried in grease, excellent coffee, and -endless chatter from the pudding-like Chilean woman serving it, cost -only a peso—and the peso of Chile is but little money indeed. The woman -had never in her life been a mile farther up the valley, so that I was -an object of the deepest interest to her as a denizen of the unknown -world above and beyond the jagged snow-clad range that bounded her -horizon. - -By afternoon the weather had become like May at home. There was nothing -autumnal about it except the pencil-like Lombardy poplars touched with -yellow along the beautiful valley of the Juncal, back up which one -looked almost wonderingly at the glacier-capped range walling off the -rest of the world. The country was very dry, the hills inclosing it -rocky and half-sterile, yet enlivened by the green of the organ cactus -which grew plentifully, the more distant ranges showing a faint red -tinge through their general blackness. Some of the parched fields were -being plowed with oxen. Gradually the mountains flattened themselves -out, a genuinely Andean traffic of mules, straw-laden donkeys, and -half-Indian _arrieros_ on foot grew up along the broad highway following -the valley, now well inhabited, chiefly in huts thrown together of a few -reeds or willows, as if there was nothing to look forward to but -perpetual summer. The once narrow gorge had expanded to a broad, -well-settled valley that suggested California when, in the later -afternoon, footsore, but many dollars ahead, I wandered into the town of -Santa Rosa de los Andes, junction point of the most expensive and one of -the cheapest railroads in the world, and found my half-forgotten baggage -awaiting me. - -[Illustration: At last I came out high above the famous “Christ of the -Andes” in a bleak and arid setting] - -[Illustration: The “Lake of the Inca” just over the crest in Chile] - -[Illustration: On the way down I passed many little dwellings tucked in -among the boulders] - -[Illustration: The stream that had trickled from under the snows at the -summit had grown to a considerable river, watering a fertile valley] - -The bewhiskered conductor of the express which snatched me on into the -night looked like the Bowery at five in the morning. Indeed, one noticed -at once a wide difference between the prosperous spick-and-spanness of -the Argentine and squalid, uncheerful, _roto_ Chile, whether in the -crowds of poor people quarreling over the few crumbs of coal to be found -in the cinder heaps at the edge of town or in the general appearance of -the government railway and its rather unkempt employees. I fell asleep -soon after the train started at seven, woke once when we seemed to be -rushing through high hills and over deep valleys, and again at a station -where the one employee and the two policemen were wrapped to the eyes in -ponchos heavy enough for the Arctic circle. Then myriads of lights -flashed up out of the night ahead, the brakes ground us to a halt, and -we were set down at a station named “Mapocho,” which turned out to be -one of three serving Santiago, capital of Chile. - - - - - CHAPTER V - CHILEAN LANDSCAPES - - -Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café -open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour -preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My -second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at -the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be -no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and -the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest -type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar -with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less -oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more -shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the -Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like -that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side. - -This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all -Chile. The _roto_ who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of -the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train, -who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country. -With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel. -The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty -holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house -fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or -repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic -feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors -of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great -difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another -shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos -Aires. - -The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern -Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly -account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once -of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social -standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks -of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial -builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of -losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained -an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of _cités_ or -_conventillos_, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind -alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving -off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded, -unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished -from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country. - -The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more -important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza -de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material -being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many -half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there -where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far -outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals -of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and -modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of -“saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no -distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable -than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous, -doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either -architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public -structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral; -the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list -of imposing buildings. Long _galerías_, roofed passages that are -virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though -its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with -sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios -than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings, -and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none -whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social -standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River -Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of -all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a -laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of -that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare -house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom. - -Of late years many of these old families have found that they can -materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower -stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always -slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been -almost wholly obliterated. Under the _portales_ of a palatial, red-brick -building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories -once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty -little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands, -uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the -Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South -America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy -little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are -sold the favorite dishes of the _gente de medio pelo_, the ragged -masses,—_mote molido_ (boiled and mashed ripe corn); _mote con -huesillos_ (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the -thick, greasy soup known as _cazuela_. The half-trained tailors, to whom -no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense -well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing -throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women -commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively _mujeres de manto_, -dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about -their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of -color adding to the general gloom of the town. - -In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do -class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of -the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce, -drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking -ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often -gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza. -The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of -velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the -_alpargatas_, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called -_hojotas_ common to the _roto_ class. Some of these countrymen come -riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden -closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently -with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who -are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the -morning hideous with their deliveries. - -It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion -of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky -hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of -perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may -be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above -the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all, -have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag -rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to -behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every -direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old -churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if -that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity -to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two -thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of -Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in -the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand -as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the -main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging -horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal -scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never -uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly -rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few -kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has -broken the ice of _costumbre_, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier -classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps -indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great -ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their -single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early -and often to tuberculosis. - -Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any -noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory -chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy, -soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural -haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet -shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a -drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required -by the human system that I recall having run across in South -America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified -himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny -Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary -light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to -be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both -Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic -doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be -married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the -wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away -in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by -prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries -there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few -months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having -a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to -the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a -Protestant church _is_ a church, even in Chile. - -Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger -hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much -the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San -Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a -gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense -sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is -offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising -“Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and -as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they -wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by -threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is -protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile -is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism. - -Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually -open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be -taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of -the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of -two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the -monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two -immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a -pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward, -the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or -both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing -at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the -glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass, -readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of -course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for -a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a -lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and -Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the -_intellectuales_ of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat, -lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out -after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long -and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the -great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from -Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any -other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his -fellow-_intellectuales_, for it would have been attacking one of their -most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he -argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was -not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the -unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object -of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence -from the more humble origin. - -There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of _futres_, -_bomberos_, and _rotos_. The first are well-dressed street-corner -loafers; the _bomberos_ are volunteer firemen, and the _rotos_ form the -ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The -latter, said never to be without the _corvo_, an ugly curved knife, with -which they are quick to _tripear_, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an -adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous, -but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood. -Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of -the _Mercurio_ office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter -to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers -than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named -Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and -almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and -slouches are the rule among the female division of the _roto_ class, and -Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the -Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign -born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests -such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen, -and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually -welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in -evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast -characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them -decidedly from the people of eastern South America. - -Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still -noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful -owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which -the ostensibly free-voting _roto_ has little real hand. The “best -families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and -in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or -from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is -frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the -ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public -building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the -voter must be able to read and write, and any _roto_ whom the landlords -do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On -the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more -common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible -politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising -from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast -upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages -given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the -frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and -histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is -often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly -democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in -the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic -patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes -striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the _roto_ not only free of -speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his _corvo_, but ready to -fight for himself in more modern ways. - -“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will -be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution. -The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their -incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country. -You have something of that problem in the United States, but the -proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible -compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of -the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.” - -Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still -retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the -upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago -grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One -of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic -families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up -in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their -trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of -being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable. -One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to -the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside -Santiago in a decade. - -History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the -energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no -exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not -rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a -world monopoly of nitrate, or _salitre_, as the Chilean calls it, the -only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty -on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which -is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some -town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero -to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the -“saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the -treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the -request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen -deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic -pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the -greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to -take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton, -who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the -time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,” -insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and -Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.” - -The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for -agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the -Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under -ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious -enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading -impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket -statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no -such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to -the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an -exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he, -and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and -artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less -active and has less initiative than the more European _argentino_. - -Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The -latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and -the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live -in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at -the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books, -because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup -fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in -newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older -native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate -arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the -contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the -instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the -suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show -that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The -country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere _ranchos_ to modern -several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw -more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America, -and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater -prevalence of wooden structures. - -The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the -_bomberos_ to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire -departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is -appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are -open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males -of Santiago’s “best families” become _bomberos_ because it is considered -one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored -ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a -fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and -all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to -don their splendid _bombero_ uniforms, without which, naturally, it -would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always -include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the _bomberos_ -arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of -being both true and courteous. - -There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other -convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the _bomberos_. -The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if -it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on -conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as -the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the -ranks are filled almost entirely with _rotos_ or the poorer classes. The -Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray -Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the -commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the -World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great -contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian -population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian -temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its -more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only -the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are -frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world -seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first -time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life -recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the -Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling -for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best, -or at least the second best, navy in South America. - -Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among -their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the -Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had -communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between -mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of -illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted -with a _turno_, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard -barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the -_turno_ given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their -agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions. -Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are -housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day -taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely -the fault of the _roto_ class. None but the civil marriage is now legal -in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the -poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to -get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the -church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to -have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he -is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money. - -Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in -the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or -die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.” -German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted -to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only -makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but -frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the -church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though -this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like, -even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the -proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against -these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans, -is more noted for criticism than for effective action. - -Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until -two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the -political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate -“functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain -the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing. -Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most -beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this -distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean -women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety -black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they -were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at -least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce -and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly -deserted, except by the stolid _pacos_ wrapped in their heavy black -uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag -on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish, -usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven -around the eternal triangle; now and then a _zarzuela_ company succeeds -in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems -as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone), -or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to -avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic -efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these -mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or -wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that -they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the -winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian -than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a -Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better -suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus -of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out -toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude. - -Among the poorer classes the _zamacueca_, the native dance of Chile, -popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman, -each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if -alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and -a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of _chicha -de manzana_ or _de uva_, which roughly correspond to our cider and -grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed -class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not -often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the -side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in -competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred -meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which -she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune -without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the -winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is -better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many -“chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives -the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the -“s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of -its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where -Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first -president of the University of Chile. - -I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of -Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since -become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom -dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars -of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a -boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to -man’s estate. The boy is the _conductor_, which in Spanish means the -motorman, and the woman _cobrador_, or collector. Far from inspiring the -protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their -income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some -unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance -that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to -accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the -dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member -of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance -enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to -be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her -head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin -stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female -conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the -working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away -an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car -behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan -are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for -they certainly are not on the cars. - -Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that -the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten -centavos; up on the _impériale_ they pay five, which at the commonly -prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively. -Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or -the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The -white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the -closed car rather than go up on the _impériale_, which is not only -preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes -the upper story forbidden ground for the _gente decente_. As a -Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and -widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top: - -“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than -inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in -Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk, -nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up -there with the _rotos_. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to -ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he -goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon -me in droves.” - -The Chilean _peso_ is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New -York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South -American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as -doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or -silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day -before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs -the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a _peso -fuerte_,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a -“strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has -decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is -nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its -national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in -need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No -wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is -gambling enough to suit anyone. - -With the exception of a few private, narrow-gauge lines in the nitrate -and coal fields, the railroads of Chile are government owned. A state -line now runs the length of the country, connecting its southernmost -port on the mainland with its most northern province, and even with the -capital of Bolivia. In the fertile, well-inhabited southern half of the -country the railroads, like the more important ones of the Argentine, -have the broad Spanish gauge, and down to where the population begins to -thin out the trains are long and frequent. The “Longitudinal,” running -for hundreds of miles northward from the latitude of the _transandino_ -through dreary deserts a bare meter wide, carries neither through -passengers nor freight. The former would probably die of monotony or -thirst on the way; the latter would be valuable indeed after paying the -breath-taking freight rates. It is far quicker, more pleasant, and -cheaper to take, or to send by, the steamers along the coast, and the -real raison d’être of the “Longitudinal” is Chile’s determination to -keep the two provinces she took from Peru. - -On the whole, the railroads of Chile are a sad commentary on government -ownership. There are probably more employees to the mile on Chilean -railroads than on any other system in the world, not because the Chilean -is a particularly poor workman, but because politicians foist upon the -helpless public carriers so many needy but influential constituents. Yet -both roadbeds and rolling stock of this overmanned system are -astonishingly _descuidado_,—uncared for, dust-covered, unwashed, loose, -broken, out of order, inadequate, with whole train-loads of perishable -goods rotting in transit, and frequent wrecks. It is common rumor that -the government pays twice the market price for all railway supplies, -thanks to the carelessness and the grafting tendencies of the personnel, -while every year finds the railroads with a million or more deficit. How -carelessly the trains are operated is suggested, too, by the -extraordinary prevalence of missing legs in Chile. It seemed as if one -could scarcely look out a train window without seeing someone crutching -along beside the track, to say nothing of those entirely legless, as if -the railroad habitually ran amuck among the population. - -Started by Meiggs, the fleeing Californian who carried the locomotive to -the highlands of Peru, and continued by a deserter from an American -sailing ship, the Chilean railroads were built chiefly by American -capital, as well as by American engineers. They still bear many -reminders of that origin. The passenger-trains have comfortable American -day coaches, made in St. Louis; the sleeping-cars are real Pullmans; -even the freight-cars closely resemble our own. The engines, though -supplied with bells, are more often of British or German origin, or from -the government shops near Valparaiso. There are three classes, or, more -exactly, five, for the prices and service on the express trains are -different from the corresponding ones on the _mixtos_. Except that in -the former one is more certain of having an entire seat to oneself, -there is little difference between first and second class. Fares are -comparatively low even in these; on the lengthwise wooden benches of -third class they are cheaper than hoboing. Trunks, however, pay almost -as high as their weight in passenger, there being no free-baggage -allowance. The assertion is frequently heard in Chile that third class -is a disadvantage to the country, because the low price makes it too -easy for the _roto_ masses to move about. A rule that might not be amiss -in our own land is that the engineer who jerks a train either in coming -into or leaving a station is subject to a fine, if not to dismissal—but -of course the Brotherhood would never permit any such interference with -their long-established privileges. The trainboy nuisance, here known as -a _cantinero_, with the accent on the beer, is in full evidence. Though -the night trains carry Pullmans, there are no diners, because -concessions have been given at various stations to men of political -influence to run dining-rooms and the trains must stop there long enough -to contribute the customary rake-off. The monopolists are less given to -brigandage than they might be, however, and of late there has been -inaugurated a system of sealed lunches at three pesos, including a -half-bottle of wine. Moreover, it is a rare station that does not have a -crowd of female food-vendors, especially well-stocked with fruit in the -autumn season. - -[Illustration: The street cars of Chile are of two stories and have -women conductors] - -[Illustration: Talcahuano, the second harbor of Chile, is only a bit -less picturesque than Valparaiso] - -[Illustration: The central plaza of Concepción, third city of Chile] - -[Illustration: Valdivia, in far southern Chile, is one of the few South -American cities built of wood, even the streets being paved with planks] - -The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one -hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the -train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way -through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent -magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out -hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to -Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the -Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts -leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures -bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great -estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his -administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of -every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north, -the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and -turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief -source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but -once since entering South America two years before burst out in full -ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected -bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s -most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so -close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad, -and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis -and second city of the country. - -Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of -South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in -layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it -stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that -surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled -masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have -climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there -is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following -the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town, -under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy, -two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a -small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops -of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business -houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the -earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs -steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble -of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique -feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise -dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since -the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are -English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at -opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles, -though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten -centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious -persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several -stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs -to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city -spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular -bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and -small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash -unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales -sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous -project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead -with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so -far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no -visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures -of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and -more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though -nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña -del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of -Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up -the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited -country. - -The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood. -Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found -wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive -landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving -or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least -important among them. Along the docks the _roto_ stevedore works -barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town -rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets -its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow -at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in -this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact -with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in -watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a -street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights -of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns -inland and climbs back up into the Andes. - -From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped -southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a -feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley, -distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more -fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams -pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness, -stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where -the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season -vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling -country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky, -the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the -jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line -painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the -horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of -closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with -a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the -rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen -grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs, -shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a -hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the -Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow. - -Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks, -more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the -general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were -many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their -shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the -ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here, -especially among the _huasos_, as the _gaucho_ is known in Chile, and -this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the -individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed -numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with -cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which -prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped -north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing -their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there -was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is -like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here -following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea. - -At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale -fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well -stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only -land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red -_copihüe_, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom -growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women -were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of -more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over -many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with -earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called _guayruros_ with -which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are -supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the -ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple -and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them -bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab -farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously -un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages -decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in -arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might -easily have mistaken them for raisins. - -We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few -shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped -off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far -too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance. -The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of -the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here, -as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its -resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets -of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away -its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were -announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not -promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal -a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been -raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through -which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a -bed—and not much of a bed at that. - -In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it -had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the -traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as -good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as -a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of -“hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest, -and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average -of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be -mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected -makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate -purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always -charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells -for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being -prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost -several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not. -The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has -had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it; -or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that -the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite -side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the -first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the -man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels -even though he spends some half of his time on trains. - -It was wet and sloppy and all the world was drowned in a dense fog when -I set off again at dawn. Everyone who owned them wore heavy overcoats -and neck-scarfs, keeping even their noses covered. One would have -fancied a demand that trains be heated would be in order in such a -climate, but if the lack of artificial heat is at times unpleasant it is -healthful, and the traveler in South America is likely to return with a -prejudice against it. At San Rosendo I caught a branch line along the -shining Bio-Bio, the largest river of Chile, and followed it -northwestward to the coast, the sun at last breaking through and -suddenly flooding all the scene as the train took to rounding many -rolling hills covered with scrub growth. The _huaso_ was everywhere busy -with his fall plowing, his ox-drawn wooden implement as primitive as -those of Peru, except for its iron point. Here there was considerable -eucalyptus, the foster child of the Andean tree world, though the poplar -was more in evidence and the weeping willow frequent. - -I spent a day in Concepción, third city of Chile, a brisk and mildly -pretty town scattered over a hillside, center of a large grain district -with coal fields near, hence the site of many factories, flour-mills, -even sugar refineries, which import their crude product from Peru. -Though it is the scene of considerable modern industry, and has the -usual two-story, be-skirted tramcars, brilliant ponchos and gaunt oxen -dragging clumsy, creaking carts are to be seen in its main streets. A -splendid view of the town may be had from the Cerro Caracol, crowning -point of a long ridge of rolling hills of reddish soil, yet covered with -grass, so rare in South America, and much of it with a thick fir forest. -A “snail” roadway winds upward, and immediately at the climber’s feet -spreads out the entire city, flat and low for the most part, with the -plethora of bulking churches common to all Chilean towns. There are many -Germans in Concepción, south of which they grow ever more numerous. -Along the Avenue Pedro de Valdivia, squeezed between the river and the -hills in the outskirts, live scores of men of this nationality who came -out less than half a century ago as simple clerks and who now have -sumptuous mansions and large estates—_quintas_ they are called in -Chile—a single row of them eighteen blocks long on this one avenue -boasting such names as “Thuringia” and “Die Lorelei” and the top-heavy -architecture which goes with them. In Arauco province, a bit to the -south, with a private railroad running into Concepción, are some of the -few coal mines in South America, Chile being virtually the only country -on that continent not entirely dependent on Newcastle or Australia for -this sinew of industry. It seems to be a soft surface coal, mainly -productive of smoke, great clouds of which frequently wipe out the -beauties of the landscape in this vicinity. - -Talcahuano, six miles farther northwest, is on Concepción Bay, national -naval rendezvous and the best harbor in Chile, being seven miles across -and bottled up by the island Quiriquina. The town, thrown around the -inner bay like a wrap about a throat, with pretty residential hills -climbing up close behind the modest central plaza, the outskirts -scattered far and wide over a rolling, verdant country, has considerable -shipping, but the Pacific is seen from it only through the rifts of -islands and promontories. Forty years ago American whalers often entered -this harbor, and some of the wealthy families of the vicinity to-day are -descended from the deserting sailors they left behind. - -In Talcahuano I found an American consul who had been there for decades, -evidently long since forgotten by the authorities at home. Of the many -tales he had to tell the most picturesque were those of his early days -as a guano digger on the west coast, but he was more filled with the -alleged rascality of the Germans in Chile. There were in Concepción, he -asserted, forty German business houses as against four English and no -American—or perhaps I should say “North American,” for the Chilean grows -more enraged than any of his neighbors at our assumption of a term to -which he considers himself equally entitled. The consul was greatly -grieved to see the Germans steadily taking away the little trade -Americans once had, driving out even our stoves and agricultural -machinery from what had formerly been a United States stronghold. But -the Germans were more apt to make things to fit local tastes, or the -customer seldom had any fixed notion of what he wanted and fell easy -prey to the clever and unscrupulous German salesman. The consul had -recently discovered a German house secretly sending to the Fatherland a -binder and a reaper which it had imported from New York, evidently -because direct importation would have called official attention to the -plan of copying the machines for the South American trade. He had -recently bought what purported to be a reputable implement made in the -United States and known by the trademark “Eureka.” It worked badly, -however, and the parts broke so easily, that he finally examined it more -closely and found that it was really a “Hureka,” made in Germany. Though -Americans and English are hard to assimilate, clannish, little inclined -to take Chilean wives, the Germans marry freely with the natives and -gain much commercial and political advantage from such alliances. The -Chilean-born children of Germans are legally Chileans, but at heart, -according to the consul, they are still Germans. The Teutons have driven -the natives out of all important business, except in the case of wealthy -landowners, and these usually live in Paris and intrust their holdings -to a German or other foreign manager. Our forsaken representative was -also highly incensed at “the nonsense of American business men running -down to South America in droves, making themselves laughing-stocks among -the natives by their geographical ignorance, their manners and public -drinking, and only stirring up the Germans to greater underground -efforts.” - -Though all Chile below Santiago is noted for its agriculture, its -fertility increases with every degree southward. South Chile, which may -be reckoned as beginning at the Bio-Bio River, where the vineyards end, -is an almost virgin land, only a fraction of which is as yet under the -plow. The Bio-Bio marks the point below which the Spaniards were never -able to make a permanent conquest, for the region below it was the home -of the most valiant Indians of South America, a race much more like our -own untamable red-skins than the slinking tribes farther to the north. -The river was finally agreed upon as the southern limits of Spain’s -authority, and such it remained until that had wholly disappeared from -the American continent. After the independence of Chile the republican -government confirmed the valiant Mapuches, as the Araucanians call -themselves, in their claim to regard the Bio-Bio as a frontier. It was -not until forty years ago, when at last the white man’s fire-water had -done what the Spaniards were never able to do, that the Araucanians were -at last pushed back into limited reservations and Araucania formally -taken under the rule of Santiago. The land was divided up among white -settlers, and when the Indians objected the central government “sent out -soldiers to shoot down the rebels, following just the same policy as you -did in the United States,” as a Chilean told me in a naïve, -matter-of-fact way. - -The “first-class” coach in which I crossed the Bio-Bio, not so long -before a proud product of St. Louis, was a rattling old wreck, the floor -so sloppy and wet one needed rubbers, its window panes either broken or -missing entirely, some of them pasted over with paper, the seats more -worn and dirty than those on a backwoods branch line in the United -States. As the weather had grown steadily colder from Talca southward, -everyone on board was wrapped and overcoated beyond recognition. We -moved slowly through a woodless, brown, rolling country almost invisible -for the rain. In the early afternoon the train crept cautiously across a -bridge far up above a small but powerful stream, amid green hills of -plump, indistinct outline. The reason for the caution soon appeared. -Just north of the city of Victoria we were suddenly routed out into a -cold rain flung against us by a roaring wind like the spray from an -angry sea, and found ourselves at the edge of a mighty chasm. At the -bottom, in and about the stream which raged through it far below, lay -the wreckage of a freight train that had dropped with the bridge a month -before, killing the crew. Across this chasm swung a narrow, -wire-suspended foot-bridge a furlong in length, which swayed drunkenly -back and forth as the stream of wet and shivering passengers, a few -women and aged, infirm men among them, crept fearfully across it, -followed by all the boys and ragamuffins of the vicinity carrying the -hand baggage—no white-collar Chilean of course, would carry his own even -in case of wreck. We were bedraggled indeed when we climbed out of the -mud and rain into another train, and another good hour was lost in -transferring the mails and the heavier, fare-paying baggage before we -were off again. - -I found Temuco, up to the present generation the capital of the land -from which the sturdy Araucanians were at length dispossessed, the most -interesting town in Chile. It was more nearly like the cities of the -Andean highlands, with something Mexican about it also, thanks to its -mixture of dirt, poverty, and the “picturesqueness” of which the tourist -rants. The Mapuche Indians are thick-set, the women especially so, -broad-faced, with a reddish tinge showing through a light copper skin, -due perhaps to the colder climate of their temperate homeland. Some of -the women were comfortably fat; they wore their coarse hair in two -braids, a band of colored cloth or silver coins about their round heads, -this sometimes securing a gay head-kerchief flying in the wind. The -mantos about their shoulders were usually a dull red, their skirts a -true “hobble,” being a simple strip of cloth wrapped tightly around the -waist and tucked in, with the raw edge down one leg. Their feet were -bare, chubby, and by no means clean, though more nearly so than those of -the typical Andean Indian. The children ran about bare-legged for all -the wintry air. The older Indians of both sexes had rather dissipated -features, as if the white man’s fire-water were still doing its work -among them. The men wore a mildly gay short poncho, some still -home-woven, most of them made in Germany, flannel drawers, a black or -near-black skirt brought together between the legs, shapeless felt hats, -and black leather boots of light material. The more poverty-stricken -wore a rude moccasin and any head-gear available, even the cast off -stiff straw hats of the summer-time _futres_ of Temuco; and May is not -the month for straw hats in southern Chile. The nearest Indian -settlement is but half an hour’s ride from Temuco, and some of the -Indian women rode into town on horses decorated with as many trappings -and large silver ornaments as themselves; others carried baskets on -their backs, with the leather band supporting it drawn tightly across -chest or forehead. Babies were not carried on the mothers’ backs, that -custom having disappeared where I turned eastward from the Andes across -tropical Bolivia. - -The modern Araucanian’s land is secured to him, and an official of the -Chilean Government, known as “Protector of the Indians,” sees to it that -the acreage he owns to-day is not alienated. But the tribe is dying, -like all Indians in contact with European civilization, and the time is -not many generations distant when the rest of his land will go to the -white man. To all appearances the Araucanian has lost most of the -warlike courage for which his ancestors were famous, though he has by no -means degenerated to the cringing creature one finds in Quito or Cuzco. -As in those cities, shopkeepers are obliged to learn the tongue of their -most numerous customers, and Araucanian was heard on every hand, among -whites as well as Indians. Some of the latter could speak nothing else, -though now and then a familiar Spanish word broke out of the jumble of -sound. The Mapuches had some of the superstition of the Quichuas and -Aymarás toward the “little magic box with one eye,” and for the first -time in months I was forced to resort to simple trickery to catch my -chosen pictures. - -Rain was almost incessant in Temuco, and the mud so deep that the -better-to-do used _suecos_, wooden clogs on which were nailed imitation -patent-leather uppers in any of the little shops devoted to that -industry. The next most familiar sight was that of oxen pulling solid -wooden wheeled wagons, straining laboriously through the sloughs called -streets until one fancied the animals, with the yoke across their brows -all day, must end each night with a raging headache. - -Below Temuco the train crossed several considerable rivers. Long -stretches of stumps and scattered wooden shacks suggested the days of -Lincoln and Daniel Boone. Much rough lumber was piled at the flooded -stations, which served ugly frontier hamlets tucked away among rolling -hills once thick wooded and still so in places. Curiously enough this -more southern section of Chile is an older country, in the settler’s -sense, than that about Temuco. Seventy years ago, long before it was -able to force the stronghold of the central valley of Araucania, the -Chilean Government made an entry far to the south, catching the Indians -in the rear and settling with foreign immigrants wide areas of what are -now the provinces of Valdivia and Llanquihüe. The town of Valdivia and -several other strategic points, chiefly on the coast, where the -Spaniards had erected forts and established small precarious -settlements, were moribund when Santiago turned its attention to the -region in the middle of the last century. The coming of European -colonists has given the district new life and considerable prosperity. - -The methods of Chile in settling this wilderness of the south were -simple. An agent in Germany sought colonists; an agent in Chile was sent -to Valdivia to receive them when they landed. The first-comers were -placed on the Isla de la Teja, where they would be secure against -possible attack by the Indians on the mainland. There are still a number -of German factories on that island, the inevitable brewery among them. -When the colonial agent was forced to look farther to the unknown south -for more land, he found nothing but matted forest. A trusted renegade -Indian named Pichi-Juan was given thirty _pesos fuertes_ (in those days -nearly fifteen dollars) to burn this primeval woodland. Smoke clouds, -visible from Valdivia, rose for three months, and at the end of that -time a strip forty-five miles long and fifteen wide, from Chan-Chan to -the Andes, was ready for the colonists. - -All the way to Valdivia the product of the saw was in evidence,—rivers -of planks, seas of squared logs. New little towns, built entirely of -wood, and visibly growing, dotted the line of the railroad; in small -clearings, about shacks as rough as those of our Tennessee mountains, -the soil that had been turned up was rich black loam; the scattered -inhabitants had the hardy, self-sufficient, hopeful air of all -frontiersmen. Then great damp forests, strangely like those of the far -north, grew almost continuous on either hand. I stood for half the -afternoon on the back platform of our wreck of a first-class car, -watching the cold, wet world race away into the north, and the temperate -zone night, so different from that of the tropics, settle slowly down. - -In the darkness we came to a little station called Valdivia, but it was -merely the landing-place for the small steamer to the town of that name, -which lay twelve miles up the river. It is named for Pedro de Valdivia, -a companion of Pizarro in Peru and afterward conqueror of Chile—with -reservations; for he had no such luck against the Araucanians as against -the docile Quichuas farther north and finally lost his life in his -efforts to subdue them. But Valdivia is Spanish only in name; in nearly -all else it is extremely Germanic, so different from the typical South -American town that one seems suddenly transported to another continent. -Well built, two stories high, new and clean, without a suggestion of -luxury, yet comfortable as a town of the north temperate zone, it might -easily have been mistaken for one in the newer sections of Washington or -Oregon. Most remarkable of all, at least to a man who had been traveling -for years in lands of adobe, brick, or stone, it was made entirely of -wood. - -Saw-mill whistles awoke me at dawn. The sun, after a long struggle with -the dense clouds rising from the unseen sea not far to the west, won the -day, and every living thing was visibly grateful for its benign -countenance, for continual rain is the customary lot of this part of -Chile at this season. For once the weather was fine—except underfoot. -The streets and roads of Valdivia were literally impassable, with the -exception of those that were laid with plank floors, planks which would -have been worth almost their weight in silver in most of the continent. -Heavy rains bring thick forests, however, and here wood served every -possible purpose. Wooden fences were everywhere, wooden sidewalks -drummed under my heels with an almost forgotten sound; houses were -covered with a rough species of clapboarding; even the few buildings -that seemed at a distance to be of stone turned out to be made of wood -tinned over, the roofs covered with lumber rather than shingles, either -because Valdivia does not know how to make the latter or because boards -are cheaper than labor. The unfloored streets were incredible sloughs of -mud. One was named the Calle Intrépido, and the man would have been -intrepid indeed who ventured out into it. A few aged hacks, smeared with -mud to their wooden roofs, plied along the few principal streets between -the Germanized plaza and the rather wide river which the town faces. To -enter almost any shop was to be suddenly transported to the little towns -of the Harz or the Black Forest, though the shopkeeper was likely to -address a stranger in Spanish, usually with more or less foreign accent. - -Isolated for a considerable period after their first arrival in southern -Chile, the Germans began to move northward as the Chileans moved south, -and the hostile Indians were squeezed between them. With the advent of -the railroad, which reached Temuco a short generation ago and Valdivia -some time later, the Chileanizing of the immigrants and the territory -advanced rapidly, and even before the World War direct relations between -these settlers of Teutonic blood and the Fatherland seem to have been -rare. Yet the harsh German speech echoes everywhere through the trains -and hotels of South Chile to-day, though the German-Chilean speaks -Spanish as well as he does the tongue of his grandfather colonist, -exercises all the rights of Chilean citizenship, and frequently marries -into Chilean families. His ways are somewhat enigmatical, sometimes -ludicrous, to the Latin-sired native, however, and for all his industry, -he is to a certain degree the butt of the older society. What we know as -an “Irish bull” is called in Chile a _cuento alemán_—a “German yarn.” - -Below Valdivia lies a great potato-growing country, occupying the site -of the burned forest, now a rich, rolling agricultural section. -Blackberries were thick along the railroad. The centers of this uncouth, -wood-built, prosperous region are the large German towns of La Unión and -Osorno, towns in which German was the language of the schools and almost -all the local officials bore Teutonic names. From Temuco southward the -railroad had been running out like a dying stream, with ever decreasing -traffic. I left Osorno by the daily freight, which dragged behind it one -passenger car with two long upholstered seats along its sides serving -also as a caboose and densely packed with well-dressed men entirely -European in origin. Several young men were plainly of German parentage, -yet they spoke Castilian together, and one such pair was wondering how -they could escape the year of compulsory military service in Chile, -“since our fathers came out here largely to avoid such slavery.” Rail -fences, rude cabins in rough little clearings, rolling hills scratched -over with wooden plows, countrymen in ever thicker ponchos and with but -rare traces of Indian blood, burned woods covered with charred stumps -and grazing cattle, lined the way on this journey. The railroad, here -only a few months old, faded to a little grass-grown track. Then the -land opened out, flattening away to the edge of Lake Llanquihüe, and I -came to the end of railroading and mainland in Chile. - -Puerto Montt, more than a thousand kilometers south of Santiago, and -capital of the province of Llanquihüe, below which Chile breaks up into -islands terminating in Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, was founded by -Germans in the middle of the last century. It is a quiet hamlet of three -or four thousand inhabitants, built of planks or wooden bricks, in a -style reminiscent of Switzerland or Westphalia, on the edge of an -immense harbor which hopes some day to serve as a station of a partly -overland route between Australia and Europe. The commerce of the region -is almost wholly in German hands, there being but two Chilean merchants, -while the native population is miserable and poverty-stricken. -Barefooted women, ragged gamins, not a few beggars, are to be seen in -the streets, and there are far too many shopkeepers in proportion to -producers. Here, too, may be seen women on horseback, wearing heavy -ponchos and wide brimmed felt hats which give them a suggestion of -misplaced “cow girls.” A short steamer trip from the town lies the large -island of Chiloé, said to be the original home of the potato and still -producing it in great quantities. Many of the neat, well-managed farms -of Chiloé are owned by Boers who refused to endure British rule after -the South African War, though a majority of the Chilotes are of old -Spanish stock with a considerable strain of Indian blood. - -I had come more and more to regret that I had not reached this wet and -shivering corner of the world in the brilliant summer-time of Christmas -and New Year’s. The regret was all the keener because it was coupled -with the necessity of altering long-laid plans and retracing my steps, -always an abhorrence. From Puerto Montt I might in summer have crossed -the two Chilean lakes of Llanquihüe and Esmeraldas, Laguna Fría in the -Argentine, and finally famous Nahuel-Haupi, and, with ten days’ tramping -across the pampas, have come back to Buenos Aires by Neuquen and the -“Great Southern.” But at this season such a journey was impossible and, -having no taste for polar explorations, I let Puerto Montt, in a -latitude similar to that of Boston, stand as my “farthest south,” and -turned tail and fled back into the warmer north. - -At Temuco I wired ahead for a berth on the night train to Santiago. The -precaution was hardly necessary. At the end of the train waiting in San -Rosendo were two brand new cars stencilled “Pullman Company, Chicago,” -which had not yet had time to go to rack and ruin. There were but few -passengers in the first of them; in the second I found myself entirely -alone. The conductor bowed low over my pass with, “Will you have a berth -or a stateroom?” The porter was a ragged _roto_ such as might have been -picked up at any station, but he lost no time in making up my private -parlor. Just how much the huge yearly deficit of the government railways -of Chile is due to the hauling back and forth of empty first-class cars, -and the ease with which general passes are granted, is of course a -question for financiers rather than a random wanderer. Before I turned -in, I impressed upon the melancholy porter the necessity of calling me -in time to get off at Rancagua, station for a famous American copper -mine up the mountainside to the eastward. He was vociferous in his -advice to me to “lose care.” - -Unfortunately I did so. By and by I was disturbed by a thumping on my -door that finally brought me back to consciousness. I sprang up and—and -heard the irresponsible half-Indian masquerading as porter say in a -mellifluous voice: - -“You wished to get off at Rancagua, señor? Well, you must hurry, for I -overslept and we are just pulling out of there.” No doubt, being a -Chilean _roto_, it had never occurred to him that his “gringo” charge -had taken off his clothes to sleep. By the time I might have had them on -again we were miles beyond, and I had gone back to bed. From Santiago I -hurried back to the Argentine so fast that I paid in cash the -breath-taking fare between my two railroad passes. I was just in time; -for the very next train was forced to back down to Los Andes again, and -the transandean pass remained snowed in until the following September. - - - - - CHAPTER VI - HEALTHY LITTLE URUGUAY - - -One cold June evening, with more than a hundred days and eight hundred -miles of travel in Chile and the Argentine behind me, I took final leave -of Buenos Aires—not without regret, for all its ostentatious -artificialities. Or it may be that my sorrow was at parting from the -good friends with whom I had been wont to gather toward sunset in the -café across from the consulate for a “cocktail San Martin,” one of whom -now volunteered to see me as far as Montevideo just across the river—a -hundred and twenty miles away. Out the Paseo de Colón the Dársena Sud -was ablaze with the lights of the several competing steamers, equal to -the best on our Great Lakes, which nightly cross the mouth of the Plata. -For the two cities are closely related. In summer _Porteños_ flee to -Montevideo’s beaches; in winter the white lights of Buenos Aires attract -many Uruguayans; the year round business men hurry back and forth. -Aboard the _Viena_ of the Mihanovich Line I watched the South American -metropolis shrink to a thin row of lights strewn unbrokenly for many -miles along the edge of the horizon, like illuminated needle-points -where sea and sky had been sewed together. Wide and shallow, exposed -here to all the raging winds from the south, the Paraná Guazú (“River -like a Sea”) often shows itself worthy of its aboriginal name in this -winter season. I did not wake, however, until the red sun was rising -over Montevideo and her Cerro and we were gliding up to a capacious -wharf. - -It was fitting that my sight-seeing should begin with the little rocky -hill surmounted by an old Spanish fortress which is the first and last -landmark of the traveling Uruguayan. To the Cerro, barely five hundred -feet high, yet standing conspicuously above all the rest of the -surrounding world, Montevideo owes both its name and its situation. When -the Portuguese navigator Magalhães, whom we call Magellan, sailed up -what he hoped might prove a passageway from the Atlantic to the Pacific, -a sailor on lookout, catching sight of this little eminence, cried out, -“Monte vid’ eu! I see a hill!” On it was built the first fort against -the Charrúa Indians, and its value both as a place of refuge and as a -stone quarry made it natural that the chief town of the region should -have grown up about it. The part the Cerro has since played in Uruguayan -history is out of all keeping with its insignificant size; the poems -that have been written about it are as legion as the legends which hover -over it. It holds chief place in the national coat-of-arms and in the -hearts of homesick sons of Uruguay. Never in all the rebellions and -revolutions since its discovery has the Cerro been taken by force of -arms; never will the people of Montevideo tire of telling haughty -_Porteños_ that Buenos Aires has nothing like it. - -From its summit all Montevideo may be seen in picturesque detail and -far-spread entirety, the point where the Plata, deep brown to the last, -for all its sea-like width, meets the Atlantic and flows away with it -over the horizon, then, swinging round the circle, the faintly -undulating plains, broken here and there by low purplish hillocks, of -the “Purple Land.” It is a pity that the Cerro, certainly not -impregnable as a fortress, has not been made a place of residence, or, -better still, transformed into such a park as Santa Lucía of Santiago. -The fashionable section of Montevideo, however, has moved in the other -direction, leaving the famous hill, with its garrison-sheltering old -Spanish fort and its lighthouse, to squatters’ shanties, rubbish heaps, -and capering goats, not to mention the insistent odors of a neighboring -_saladero_ where cattle are reduced to salt beef. - -In many ways the Uruguayan capital is the most attractive city of South -America; as a place to live in, contrasted with a place in which to make -a living, it is superior to many American cities. There is a peculiar -quality of restfulness about it unknown to its large and excited rival -across the Plata, something distinctive which easily makes up for the -handicap of being so near a world metropolis as to be overshadowed by -it. For another thing, it is nearer the mouth of the river, making it a -true ocean port and the most nearly a seaside resort of any national -capital in Spanish-America. Built on a series of rocky knolls, roughly -suggesting the fingers of a rude hand, the charm of its location is -enhanced by undulations that recall by contrast the deadly flatness of -Buenos Aires. The old town, all that existed two generations ago, is -crowded compactly together in true Spanish fashion on what might be -called the forefinger, though it had unlimited space to spread landward. -On this rocky peninsula the cross streets are narrow and fall into the -sea at either end, for here it is but eight or ten short blocks from the -Plata to the Atlantic. On one side is an improved harbor with steamers -of many nationalities, on the other is a bay lined with splendid -beaches. Like that of its great neighbor, the harbor of Montevideo -requires frequent dredging, and its problem is quite the contrary of -that in Valparaiso and other bottomless west-coast ports. - -[Illustration: Countrymen of southern Chile in May to September garb] - -[Illustration: A woman of the Araucanians, the aborigines of southern -Chile] - -[Illustration: A monument in the cemetery of Montevideo] - -[Illustration: A gentleman of Montevideo depicts in stone his grief at -the loss of his life’s companion] - -Along with its seascape, this situation gives the city a very -exhilarating air, especially in the winter season. Then it is often -penetratingly cold, and frequently so windy that not only the most -securely fastened hat but the hair beneath it threatens to abandon the -wearer. On the day of my landing a windstorm caused several deaths and -much property damage. Among other things it took the sheet-iron roof off -a building in which four fishermen had taken refuge and as these ran -away the roof followed and fell upon them. In the third story of the -frame hotel that housed me I often woke from a dream of being rocked in -a ship at sea, and Punta Brava in a far corner of Montevideo’s suburbs -was rightly named indeed on windy days. Fierce thunderstorms also marked -my stay in the capital, some of them accompanied by the mightiest of -flashes and crashes, during which water fell in such torrents that one -could scarcely see across a narrow street—tropical storms they might -have been called, had it not kept right on raining long after it had -done raging. - -Uruguay claims 1,400,000 inhabitants, of whom all but the million are -said to live in the capital, though the lack of a definite census makes -guessing a popular pastime. But the city is much larger in extent than -this number would imply. One can ride for hours on the lines of its two -excellent tramway companies without once leaving town. Even in the older -sections Montevideo is substantially and handsomely built, with many -good modern monuments. Only a few old landmarks are left, such as the -purely Spanish cathedral on the Plaza de la Constitución, for Uruguay -seems to consider her first demand for independence in 1808 the -beginning of her history and makes no effort to preserve the memories of -her colonial or pre-colombian days. For all that, the capital has -retained a considerable atmosphere of old Spain, a distinctly -seventeenth-century echo, along with her South American style of -up-to-datedness. The best houses along the fine avenues are generally in -colonial style, an almost Moorish one-story building, with lofty -ceilings and space-devouring patios. Especially in the roomy suburbs do -the dwellings stop abruptly at one story, so abruptly sometimes as to -suggest that ruin, or at least a laborer’s strike, has suddenly befallen -the owner. The real reason is probably because it would be hard to marry -off one’s daughters if their “dragons” had to begin their wooing by -shouting up to the second or third floor windows. - -Iron-work grilles are universal, and many house-doors have brass-lined -peepholes through which the resident can see whether the man knocking is -worth admitting. Gardens with subtropical plants are numerous and -promenades under palm-trees by no means unusual. Especially along the -edge of the sea there are over-ornate _quintas_, alternating with -washerwoman shanties; but there is little oppressive poverty in -Montevideo, and at the same time little of the conspicuous plutocracy so -familiar across the river, a lack of contrast which adds, perhaps, to -the monotony of many a street vista. Poor _ranchos_ are by no means rare -in the farther outskirts, but these are open-air and almost clean slums -compared with the congested sections of our own large cities. Out beyond -the older town are park improvements on an extensive scale. The Prado, -with its great Rose Gardens, said to include hundreds of varieties, -though but few were in bloom among the dead leaves of June, is worth -coming far to see. Here real hills break the monotony of the landward -vista and make artificial, over-polished Palermo with its deadly -flatness seem disagreeable by contrast. The tale goes that a group of -wealthy _Porteños_ once set on foot a movement to buy one of Uruguay’s -hills, carry it across the river, and set it up in one of their own -plazas. No doubt they could have reimbursed themselves by charging -admission and rights of ascension, but like many ambitious -Latin-American plans this one died prematurely. - -In general Uruguayans are well-dressed, and comfortably well-to-do, if -one may judge from appearances; compared with _roto_ Chile the capital -is immaculate. “Beachcombers” are rare in this only important port of -the country and beggars are seldom seen, though there is a plague of -petty vendors. It had been like landing on a hostile shore to make our -way through the amazingly impudent mob of hoarse-voiced cabmen, -newsboys, hotel touts, lottery-ticket vendors, vagrants, pickpockets, -useless policemen, and idle citizens into the tranquil waters of a -Sunday morning in the Uruguayan capital; but this common waterfront -experience did not last long. There is something extremely pleasant -about most of the modest, unpretentious _Fluvenses_, as the people of -Montevideo call themselves, a term we might translate as “rivereens.” -They have, as a rule, a natural politeness, a frank and open simplicity -all but unknown across the river, a leisurely, contemplative philosophy -that will not be broken down even by the material prosperity of a -country that is making perhaps the most intelligent use of its situation -and resources of all the republics of Latin-America. It is said that the -Uruguayan came mainly from the Basque provinces and the Canary Islands, -while the _argentino_ is chiefly of southern Spanish origin; that the -former brought with him and still retains a sturdier, less facile, but -more dependable, more thoroughgoing character. Those of wide commercial -experience in the continent say that the Uruguayan is the most honest -man south of Panama; every foreign resident I questioned rated Uruguay -as the most lovable country in South America—and as a rule foreign -residents do not see the best side first. Personally, I found the -Uruguayan more sincere, less selfish, somewhat more solid and at the -same time more of an impulsive idealist than his materialistic neighbors -across the Plata. His country is far enough south to escape the -indolence of the tropics, far enough north to make life itself seem of -equal importance with making a living. With every natural advantage of -the Argentine, except the doubtful one of size, and a more frugal and -industrious population not greatly modified by recent immigration, -Uruguay is still peopled by a kind of colonial Spaniard, somewhat -improved by the breezy, generous quality of his New World domain. - -To those who approach it from the south, where they are almost unknown, -negroes are noticeable in Montevideo and become more so as one proceeds -northward through the country. No doubt they drift down from Brazil and, -finding the wide Plata an obstacle, seldom reach its southern shores. -Yet they are so few, and slavery is so slightly connected with them in -the Uruguayan mind, that there is scarcely a “color-line.” The daughter -of a former Uruguayan minister to Washington told me she had always -informed inquiring Americans that there were no negroes in Uruguay, and -had only discovered her error upon her return with a sharpened color -sense. In Uruguay people are often called by nicknames of color, ample -proof that there is no sensitiveness about the hue of the skin. These -popular terms, usually preceded by the affectionate “Ché” of -southeastern South America, run all the gamut of tints,—“Hola, Ché -morocha.” “Diga, Ché trigueña!” “Cómo va, Ché negrito?” It is a common -experience of visiting Anglo-Saxons to hear themselves addressed by -familiar persons as “Ché rubio,” literally “red-head,” as a -complimentary distinction from the universally black-haired natives. The -latter, particularly the women, are almost always of plump form and -comely face, whatever their color, with few of the cadaverous types so -numerous in the north temperate zone. Uruguayan women, by the way, are -perhaps a trifle more Moorish in their family life than those of Buenos -Aires, but they are not wholly unaware of the “advanced” atmosphere of -their environment. - -Buenos Aires has long had the reputation of being the most expensive -city on earth, probably because it is large enough to be famous, for -certainly its neighbor Montevideo is still less of a poor man’s -paradise. For one thing, the difference in basic coins favors the -Uruguayan profiteer. Many things which cost an Argentine peso in Buenos -Aires cost an Uruguayan peso, or two and a half times as much, in -Montevideo. It is highly to the credit of Uruguay, and a constant source -of pride to her citizens, that her dollar is the only one in the world -normally worth more than our own; but it is painful for the visitor to -be forced to purchase at so high a price pesos that will seldom buy what -a quarter should. In hotel charges, public conveyances, laundries, -lottery-tickets, and other necessities of life the Uruguayan dollar -seems to go little farther than that of the Argentine, and certainly it -has nothing like the purchasing power of our own. Not only are there -substantial coins in circulation, instead of more or less ragged scraps -of paper redeemable only in the imagination, or coins so debased that -only a careless speaker would refer to them as silver, but any gold coin -is legal tender in Uruguay. Throw down an English sovereign in the -smallest shop in the most isolated corner of the republic and it is -instantly accepted at a fixed value. An American $10 gold piece passed -without argument as $9.66 Uruguayan, though our dollar bill was rated at -only ninety _centésimos_ before the war. I chanced to be in a _pulpería_ -far out in the interior of Uruguay when the shopkeeper asked the large -estate owner of the vicinity to take a hundred pesos to the capital for -him. By and by the _pulpero_ returned from a back room with a small -handful of gold and a bit of paper on which he had figured out the sum -he wished to send. He handed the _estanciero_ several English -sovereigns, some German 20-mark pieces, a Brazilian gold coin, an -American half-eagle, two French napoleons, and the rest of the sum in -Uruguayan paper, silver, and nickel. There was no argument whatever as -to the “exchange” on the foreign coins; each had its fixed value -anywhere in Uruguay. It was something like what a universal coinage will -be when the world grows honest and intelligent enough to establish -one—though of course our bankers would not allow any such system to -become universal, even did the perversity of human nature make it -possible. This ready exchange, and the possibility of turning Uruguayan -paper into gold upon demand, are among the reasons which make the -Uruguayan dollar normally the most valuable in the world. - -Down on one of its beaches the city of Montevideo runs a sumptuous hotel -and an official Monte Carlo. Here it brings ambassadors and -“distinguished visitors” for afternoon tea or formal banquets, gives -balls, keeps an immense staff of liveried menials at public expense the -year round, and during the season takes money away from the wealthy -“sports” from across the river with an efficiency not exceeded anywhere -along the Riviera. More than one passing observer has found this an -excellent means of taxing the rich for the benefit of the poor, since -the profits of the Casino go into the municipal treasury. As much can -scarcely be said for the lottery run by the federal government, with its -incessant appeal to the gambling instincts of all classes of the -population. The tickets assert that “the lottery is run for the Hospital -de Caridad and its profits are destined for exclusively beneficent -ends,” but the statement rings as hollow as many similar attempts on the -part of Latin-America to coax itself to believe that there is something -good in an essentially vicious institution. - -Music and drama flourish during the winter in Montevideo; uncounted -cinemas perpetrate their piffle in and out of season. An excellent -Italian dramatic company, headed by the emotional actress Lyda Borelli, -sometimes, and probably not unjustly, called the successor of Duse, was -playing at the “Solis” during my visit—and bringing out in pitiless -contrast the insufferable barnstormers usually seen on the South -American stage. The opera season is in August, when that half of stars -and troupe who do not cross to Santiago de Chile are on their way back -from Buenos Aires to New York or Europe. Orchestra seats are then at -least $12 each and boxes from $80 up, but as one _must_ have a box for -the season or be rated a social nonentity, there are sad rumors of -_Fluvense_ families scrimping all the rest of the year in order to buy -their opera tickets. Naturally this makes them somewhat exacting and -capable of giving an unpleasant reception to singers tired out at the -end of a long season. Caruso himself has been roundly hissed in -Montevideo. Plays and the opera begin at twenty-one o’clock. As in Italy -and Brazil, and more recently in the Argentine, the law requires the use -of the excellent twenty-four-hour system in all public buildings, and -many a private timepiece has followed suit. The decree was new and -throughout the city were many pasted-over signs such as: - - Museum open from 12 to _16_ o’clock. - -Somewhere in South America I met a Dane who contended that a small -country, like a man of modest wealth, is better off than a great nation. -Uruguay bears out the statement. We have been accustomed to speak of the -“A.B.C.” countries of South America as having the only stable and -progressive governments in that continent. Only its slight size, as -compared with its gigantic neighbors, has caused Uruguay to be -overlooked in the formation of that list. As its near neighbor and -relative, Paraguay, is perhaps at the bottom of the scale -governmentally, so Uruguay, by its national spirit, its energetic -character, and its advanced legislation is probably at the top, more -nearly fulfilling the requirements of an independent state than any -other nation south of the United States. Certainly it is superior to -both Chile and Brazil in everything but size, and it is doubtful whether -even the Argentine is governed with more intelligence and general -honesty. Once as troublesome a state as any in Latin-America, Uruguay -has settled down and developed her natural resources until she is noted -for her financial stability, and revolutions are memories of earlier -generations. Were she a large country, instead of being merely a choice -morsel of land smaller than some counties of Texas, there is little -doubt that she would stand at least as high as any of her neighbors—or -would size, always an obstacle to good government in Latin-America, -bring her down from her high level? - -Uruguay has not always been a small country, nor for that matter a -country at all. In the olden days the _Banda Oriental_, or “Eastern -Bank,” of the River Uruguay was a province of the viceroyalty of Buenos -Aires. To this day the official name of the country is “La República -Oriental del Uruguay,” and the people still call themselves “Orientals.” -In 1800 the whole “Eastern Bank” had but 40,000 inhabitants, of whom -15,000 lived in Montevideo. When Napoleon overran Spain and the -viceroyalty of Buenos Aires revolted, the _Banda Oriental_ remained -loyal, thus opening the first breach between the two sections of the -colony. Not long afterward the “grito de libertad” sounded in the -interior of the province, and the man who was destined to become the -national hero of Uruguay, the “First Oriental,” the “Protector of the -Oriental Provinces,” soon took the head of the revolt. - -José Gervasio Artigas was a mere _estanciero_ of the “Eastern Bank” -until he took up soldiering, some time before the “cry of liberty.” In -1811 he left the Spanish army and fled to Buenos Aires, but soon became -an advocate of complete Uruguayan independence, a patriot or a traitor, -according to the side of the Plata on which the speaker lives. Having -won their freedom from Spain, the _argentinos_ were finally defeated by -the “Oriental” general, Rivera, and Artigas became ruler not only of the -present Uruguay but of the now Argentine provinces of Entre Rios, -Corrientes, Santa Fé, and Córdoba, these having formed the “Federal -League” in opposition to the Buenos Aires Directory. To read Uruguayan -school-books, “the Tucumán congress was secretly working to establish a -monarchy on the Plata, and our five provinces sent no delegates.” One by -one, however, the other provinces returned to the new mother country, -only the “Eastern Bank” persisting in its isolation and demand for -complete autonomy. Meanwhile Artigas was in exile—and at one time was -offered a pension by the United States—but finally, in 1825, a band of -“Orientals” besieged Montevideo and Uruguay declared her full -independence. - -The Uruguayan flag remains the same as that of the Argentine, with a -golden sun superimposed. The revolutions of 1863 and 1870, each two -years long, are the only serious disturbances that have occurred in the -“República Oriental” since its independence, and with those exceptions -the country has steadily advanced in health and prosperity. Its -government is more centralized than our own, more like that of the -Argentine, the congress being elected by popular vote in the -departments, but the executives of the latter being appointed by the -federal government. _Argentinos_ speak of Uruguay with a kind of forced -condescension, as of a member of the family temporarily estranged from -the rest, or as a land of no great importance yet one worthy of again -being a province of what they consider the greatest country on the -globe, and they pretend at least to think that the great development of -the Argentine will in time inevitably bring back to the fold this one -lost lamb. But the “Orientals” consider their government superior and -show no tendency to make the change. - -Uruguay’s reputation as perhaps the most progressive republic in South -America is largely based on her advanced legislation, most of it -fathered by a recent president. Under his guidance stern minimum wage -and maximum hour laws have been enacted, and many doctrines of the -milder radicals have been put into modified practice. The legislators -forbade bull-fights, cock-fights, and prize-fights in one breath. -Uruguay is the only country in South America with a divorce law, and the -church has been shorn of the militant power it still has in most of -Spanish-America. Montevideo bids fair to become the Reno of the -continent, as well as its only summer-resort capital. Dissatisfied -husbands or wives move over from Buenos Aires; Spanish and Italian -actors look forward to their Uruguayan engagement as an opportunity to -air their conjugal grievances—though they are not “aired” in the -American yellow-journal sense, for here divorce is strictly an affair -between the parties concerned and the judge and lawyers, rarely being so -much as mentioned even in the back pages of a provincial newspaper. -Priests are comparatively rare sights in the _Banda Oriental_; religious -festivals and public processions have been abolished, and the influence -of the church on the government reduced to a minimum. Montevideo is the -seat of an archbishop, but he exists only on paper, for the party in -power is not friendly to the clergy and the papal appointment must be -confirmed by congress. There are, to be sure, many crude superstitions -left, especially among the poorer classes and in the rural districts, -but they give Rome no such income as it derives from similar sources in -the rest of the continent. Several Protestant churches have been built -in Montevideo, and all faiths enjoy a freedom that would seem astounding -on the West Coast. Indeed, comparative indifference to sect lines makes -it an ordinary experience for Protestant ministers traveling in rural -districts to be asked by persons professing themselves devout Catholics -to baptize their children. “For one thing,” as one such rustic put it, -“it is cheaper than when the priest does it.” It may seem a matter of -slight importance to those who have never known the suffering inflicted -by the infernal din of hand-beaten clappers against disguised kettles in -the church towers of the Andes that on the evening of my first day in -Uruguay real church bells, of a musical tone I had almost forgotten, -were ringing in a way that must have been genuine music to the -ocean-battered old windjammer just creeping into the harbor. Far off in -the autumn twilight the sound was still carried softly to my ears by the -wind before which gray clouds were scurrying like a battalion in broken -ranks of defeat, toward the western sky, stained blood-red by the -already dead sun. - -Politically the Uruguayans are _blancos_ or _colorados_, “whites” or -“reds.” It is a splendid distinction. For one thing, the parties can -print their arguments and their lists of candidates in posters of their -own color and even the stranger has no difficulty in deciding which side -is speaking. Townsmen can announce their political affiliation by -wearing a red or a white cravat, or a bit of ribbon in their lapels; -countrymen, by the color of their neckerchiefs. There is contrast enough -between the two colors to obscure the lack of any other real difference -between the two parties. In theory the “reds” are “advanced” and the -“whites” more conservative. Evidently there are no neutrals in Uruguayan -politics; everyone is either “red” or “white” from the cradle, not -because Uruguayans take a greater interest in political matters than -average republican societies, but because it is bad form, and lonesome, -to be outside the ranks; and men who do not vote are fined. How an -Uruguayan becomes attached to this or that party is a mystery; almost -none of them can give any real reason for their affiliation. Evidently, -like “Topsy,” they are “jes’ born” in their natural colors. - -It is now fifteen years since the “reds” came to power on the heels of -Uruguay’s last revolution. Possession is nine points, even in so -progressive a corner of Latin-America, and the “whites” have been the -“outs” from that day to this. Yet one often hears _blancos_ speak of -“when we start our new revolution,” for it seems to be taken for granted -that the “whites” will come back some day with bullets, and virtually -every man in the country is prepared to fight on short notice for one -side or the other. Roughly speaking, “big business,” large estate -owners, and the church, in other words the predatory classes, are -“whites,” though neckcloths of that color are by no means rare on the -peons and _gauchos_ of the more backward country districts. The leader -of the “reds,” now a private citizen merely because the constitution -does not permit the same man to be president twice in succession, has -often been described as “a mixture of idealist and predatory -politician,” but he knows the secret of imposing his will upon the -government and is generally credited with most of Uruguay’s progressive -legislation. For all his efforts and many real results, however, there -is still much that is rotten in the Republic of Uruguay. The most -advanced laws are of doubtful use when they are administered by the -bandits in office who still flourish throughout the rural districts. In -contrast with the brave modern theories of government is the practice in -such things as permitting scores of the lowest forms of brothels to -flourish in the very heart of the capital. I cannot recall a more -disgusting public sight in the western hemisphere than the long rows of -female wrecks in scant attire who solicit at the doors of several -streets radiating from the Anglican church, while veritable mobs of men -and youths march back and forth to “look ’em over,” amid laughter, -ribald witticisms, and worse. - -Contrary to the usual custom in South America, there is no military -conscription in Uruguay; recruits are enticed by posters covered with -glowing promises. Yet for all the “advanced” principles of equality -reputed to reign in the little republic, its army is largely made up of -the poorer and more ignorant element of the population. It is not a -dangerous military force, but it is very useful to the party in power -not only in preserving law and order but for discouraging “white” -revolutions. Whether or not only “reds” are recruited, or whether those -placed on the government payroll automatically become “reds,” whether -indeed youths in the political-ridden interior do not have redness -thrust upon them, is a question not to be determined during a brief -visit. As to the “national navy” of Uruguay, it consists, if my -semi-official informant is trustworthy, of one gunboat, two cruisers, -four steamers, and a transport, all of which, when they are not absent -on one of the frequent “official missions” that make life in the -Uruguayan navy just one festival after another, may be seen anchored in -the harbor of Montevideo, their eyes turned rather toward the “whites” -on shore than toward foreign foes. - -I traveled fifteen hundred miles on the network of the _Ferrocarril -Central_ of Uruguay. This and the equally British “Midland” reach all -towns of importance in the republic, though they still by no means cover -it thoroughly. Railway travel in South America is seldom as luxurious as -in the United States, but in the dwarf republic both cars and service -are, on the whole, excellent; the trains are so much more comfortable -than many of the towns through which they run that it is not strange -that scores of the inhabitants come down to sit in them as long as they -remain. There are few accidents, the trains are seldom late, though not -particularly swift, and while fares are high there are frequent -low-priced excursions, announced on handbills as in our own land. The -English-made cars are on a modified American plan, some of the -first-class coaches having leather-upholstered divans as large as beds, -even second-class boasting little tables between the seats for those who -care to lunch or play cards. Between the two classes at opposite ends of -the train there is usually a compartment with kitchen stove and pantry -that serves as a combination café and dining-car, a generous dinner -costing a _peso_, wine, or “cork rights” from those who bring their -liquor with them, extra. Sleeping-cars, journeying on both lines in -order to find distance enough for an all-night trip, run from Montevideo -to Paysandú and Salto, on the shores of the River Uruguay bounding on -the west the republic of the “Eastern Bank.” Compared with Chile, -railroading in Uruguay is palatial and immaculate, though even here the -only heating arrangements for bitter June days are doormats between the -seats, and the only really serious criticism to be made is against the -bad habit, common throughout South America, of starting the trains at -some unearthly hour in the morning. - -I took the shortest line first and, rambling at moderate speed across a -somewhat rolling country more fertile in appearance than the Argentine, -brought up at Minas. A broad stone highway, here and there disintegrated -by the heavy rains, led the mile or more from the station to the town, -an overgrown village in a lap of low rocky hills monotonously like any -other Uruguayan or Argentine town of its size, with a two-towered church -and a few rows of one-story buildings toeing wide, bottomless streets. -As in the Argentine, there are no cities in Uruguay that compare with -the capital; the present department capitals were originally forts -against the Indians and the Portuguese around which people gathered for -protection, and few of them have cause to grow to importance. - -The second journey carried me into the northwestern corner of the -country. As far as Las Piedras, a suburban town twenty miles from the -capital, there are a score of daily trains in either direction. -Street-cars come here also, the place being noted for a granite monument -topped by a golden winged Victory commemorating a battle for -independence in 1811, from the terrace of which Montevideo’s -fortress-crowned Cerro still stands conspicuously above all the rest of -the visible world. Then this chief “Oriental” landmark disappears and to -the comparative cosmopolitanism of the federal district succeeds the -bucolic calm of the _campaña_, as the pampa is called in Uruguay. The -absence of trees alone gives this a mournful aspect. The “Oriental” has -tried half-heartedly to make up for the natural lack of woods by -planting imported eucalyptus and poplar, at least about his country -dwellings, but nowhere do these reach the dignity of a forest. Uruguay -has less excuse for poor roads than the Argentine, for if it has as much -rain and even heavier soil, it has an abundance of stone, rare in the -land across the Plata. Yet though several stone highways leave the -capital with the best of intentions, they soon degenerate into sloughs -seldom navigable in the wet winter season. Most Uruguayan roads are -merely strips of open _campaña_, the legal twenty-two meters wide, -flanked by wire fences, or occasionally by cactus hedges. Estates a few -miles off the railroads have no chance of getting produce to market -during a large portion of the year; yet the prosperity of the country -depends almost entirely on the exporting of foodstuffs. - -Fertile rolling _lomas_, with now and then a solitary _ombú_ spreading -its arms to the wind on the summit, made up most of the landscape, a -scene not greatly different from, yet infinitely more pleasing than, the -dead flatness of Argentine pampas. The _ombú_ is the national tree of -Uruguay, of majestic size and always standing in striking isolation on -the crest of a _loma_, because, according to the poet, it loves to -overlook and laugh at the silly world, though the botanist explains that -it is planted by birds dropping single seeds in their flight and reaches -maturity only on hillocks out of reach of stagnant water. Beyond Mal -Abrigo, rightly named “Bad Shelter,” granite rocks thrust themselves -here and there through the soil; for long stretches coarse brown -_espartillo_ grass covered the country like a blanket. This and the -abundant thistles often ruin the black loam underneath, but the average -“Oriental” _estanciero_ abhors agriculture, preferring to give his -rather indolent attention to cattle and sheep, for he considers planting -fit only for Indians, peons, and immigrant _chacreros_. Nor is the lot -of these Basque, Spanish, or Italian small farmers always happy, even -though they hold their plots of earth on fairly generous terms, for -locusts have been known to destroy a year’s labor in a few hours. There -were a few riding gang-plows, however, drawn by eight or ten oxen, and -many primitive wooden plows behind a pair or two of them. Sleek cattle, -and horses of better stock than the average in South America, grazed -along the hollows and hillsides; now and then an ostrich of the pampas, -occasionally a whole flock of them, legged it away across the rolling -_campaña_. Though most of the country people lived in thatched huts made -of the rich loam soil, sometimes laid together with a clapboard effect -and oozing streaks of mud at this season, both sexes were well and -cleanly dressed. - -The railroad wound around every _loma_, refusing to take more than the -slightest grades. Now and then we climbed ever so little up the flanks -of such a knoll and discovered to vast depths of haze-blue horizon a -plump, rolling country of purplish hue, dotted with dark little clumps -of eucalyptus, from each of which peered a low farmhouse and -occasionally a Cervantes windmill for the grinding of grain. There were -many such _estancia_ houses, yet they were all far apart in the -immensity of the little Republic of the Eastern Bank. Why most stations -were so far from the towns they served, in this level country, was a -mystery. The towns themselves varied but slightly in appearance,—a -scattered collection of one-story buildings, in most cases covered with -a stucco that had at some time been painted or whitewashed, a -_pulpería_, or general store, sacred chiefly to the dispensing of strong -drink, and, radiating from it, wide roads plowed into knee-deep sloughs -of black earth. A few sulkies and huge two-wheeled carts, an occasional -country wagon with four immense wheels, from which produce was leisurely -being loaded into freight-cars set aside by the local switch engine—to -wit, a yoke of oxen—some real estate and auction signs offering the -chance of a life-time, completed the background of the picture. In the -foreground the inevitable gang of shouting, mud-bespattered hackmen was -almost lost in the throng of wind-and-sun-browned men in bloomer-like -trousers. Peons smoked their eternal cigarettes; _gauchos_ shod in low -_alpargatas_ or high, soft, wrinkled leather boots, a white or a red -kerchief floating about their necks, the short, stocky riding whip known -as a _rebenque_ hanging from a wrist, lounged about the door of the -_pulpería_, to posts before which were tied trail-spattered horses -saddled with several layers of sheepskins. An incredibly motley -collection of dogs; a majestic policeman in full uniform and helmet -above his voluminous _bombachas_, looking essentially peaceful for all -the sword dangling at his side; a few men and youths, bare-legged to the -knee, wading about with cheerful faces, as if the rainy season were at -worst a temporary inconvenience more than offset by the long months of -fine weather, added their picturesque bit to the gathering. Every -movement and gesture showed these people to be of quicker intelligence -than the dwellers in the high Andes. Few women were seen either on -trains or at stations, except at the smaller towns, where there were -sometimes groups of them, wholly white with few exceptions, but wearing -earrings worthy the daughters of African chieftains. At each halt the -station-master in his best clothes, looking busier and more important -than a prime minister on coronation day, stood watch in hand, the -bell-rope in the other, waiting for the time-table to catch up with us; -the town notables looked on, half-anxiously, half-benignly, as if they -considered themselves very indulgent in allowing the train to run -through their bailiwick and felt deeply the responsibility involved; -boys of assorted sizes, barefoot and shod, wormed their way in and out -of the throng staring at everything with wondering eyes; a few comely -girls sauntered about to see and be seen, and friends and relatives took -the hundredth last embrace amid much chatter and mutual thumping of -backs. Then all at once the station-master gives the bell three sharp -taps, as much as to say, “I mean it, and I am not a man to be trifled -with,” and as the train gets slowly under way some town hero grasps the -opportunity to show his fearlessness by catching it on the fly, and -dropping off again half a car-length beyond with a triumphant, sheepish -grin on his sun-browned countenance. - -Two days later the sun, rising huge and red over my left shoulder, -painted a brilliant pink the rounded _lomas_ flanking the Y-shaped line -to Treinta y Tres (also written “33”) and to Melo, far to the northeast -of Montevideo, then spread a pale crimson tint over all the gently -rolling world. Fluffy lambs turned tail and fled as we approached, the -watchdog, true to his calling even unto death, charging the train -against all odds and putting it to ignominious flight. Here and there -lay a whitening skeleton, the animal’s skull sometimes stuck up -conspicuously on the top of a fence-post. There is no unsettled -_despoblado_ in Uruguay, no deserts or haunts of wild Indians, but there -is still much land put to little or no use and not a few remains of the -destruction wrought during the civil war that ended in 1852. Rare, -indeed, is the standing structure in the rural districts that was not -built since that time. - -At a small station we were joined by a youth of twenty, pure Caucasian -of race, of the class corresponding to our “hired man.” His long, wavy, -jet-black, carefully oiled hair contrasted strangely with his -complexion, very white under the tan; his eyes were light-brown, as was -also the labial eyebrow he now and then affectionately stroked. He wore -a raven black suit, the coat short and tight-fitting, the trousers, or -_bombachas_, huge as grainsacks, disappearing in great folds into -calfskin half-boots. A black felt hat of the squared shape once popular -at our colleges was held in place by a narrow black ribbon tied -coquettishly under his chin. The bit of his speckless shirt that could -be seen was light green; above it was a rubber collar and a -cream-colored cravat adorned with a “gold” scarfpin; on the third finger -of his left hand he wore a plain gold band; about his neck floated a -huge, snow-white, near-silk kerchief, and a foreign gold coin hung from -the long gilded watch-chain looped ostentatiously all the way across his -chest. About his waist he wore a leather belt six inches wide, with -several buttoned pockets or compartments in which he kept money, -tickets, tobacco, and other small possessions, and from the back of -which, barely out of sight, hung his revolver. A poncho of faint -pink-white, as specklessly clean as all the rest of his garments, and -thrown with studied _abandon_ over one shoulder, completed his outfit. - -He rode first-class, and having produced his ticket with a millionaire -gesture meant to overawe the modest _guarda_ whose duty it was to gather -it, he strode into the dining-car with great ostentation and called for -a drink. With the same air of unbounded wealth he paid his reckoning, -flung a generous tip to the waiter, who probably got more in a week than -this at best low-salaried farm-hand in a month, and strutted back to his -seat. It was evident that he was not traveling far, or he would have -sneaked into the second-class coach in his old clothes. At each station -he got off to parade haughtily up and down the platform, casting peacock -glances at the dark-tinted _criolla_ girls who embroidered it. I -approached him at one such stop and asked permission to take his -picture. He refused in very decided and startled terms. I felt that his -“no” was not final, however, and scarcely a mile more lay behind us -before he came wandering up with a companion and sat down beside me. Why -did I want his picture? Would it cost anything? How many copies of it -would I give him? Well, if it was true, as I claimed, that they could -not be finished on the spot—and why not?—I could of course send them to -him? Gradually he reached the opposite extreme of begging me to take his -picture. His companion having suggested that it might be published -“_allá en Europa_,” he kept his delight down to becoming _gaucho_ -dignity with difficulty, and before we descended to take the picture at -the station where he left the train, after a short and evidently his -only railway journey in months, he was assuring me that I might publish -it “over there in Europe, in ‘Fray Mocho’ of Buenos Aires” (which the -raucous-voiced trainboy incessantly offered for sale) “or anywhere -else.” Only when the train had gone on without him did I discover that -he was a _blanco_ fleeing from arrest in his own department for the -killing of a rural official in some political squabble, a fact that -seemed to be common knowledge among my fellow-passengers and which must -have made a bit startling my sudden request to photograph him. - -The Cerro lighthouse was still flashing through the dense black night -when, late in June, on the shortest day of the year, I took the -tri-weekly train for Brazil. By the time the edge of darkness was tinted -pink by a cloudless day which gradually spread upward from the horizon, -we were already halting at country stations where thickly wrapped -rustics who had driven miles in their bulky two-wheeled carts, a lantern -set on either side of them in a sort of wooden niche raised aloft on a -stick, were unloading battered cans of milk. Durazno, a good-sized -department capital strewn over a low knoll and terminating in a church, -was so flooded by the River Yi at its feet that its parks, alameda, and -“futbol” field were completely under water and many poor _ranchos_ stood -immersed to their ears. The names of the stations were often -suggestive,—Carda, Sarandí, Molles, all named for indigenous trees, so -striking is one of them in this almost treeless landscape. From Rio -Negro, another of the department capitals which pass in close succession -on this line, the “Midland” railway paralleled our own for a dozen miles -before striking off over the brown lomas toward Paysandú. Well on in the -afternoon the smoothly rolling country broke up into the little rocky -gorge of a small stream lined with bushy trees. It was probably not five -hundred feet anywhere from the bottom of the brook to the top of the -rock-faced hill, but this was such unusual scenery to “Orientals” that I -had been hearing since hours before of the extraordinary beauty of this -natural phenomenon, and all prepared to drink their fill of it from the -windows of the train. It was named Valle Eden, but times seem to have -changed in that ideal spot, for a policeman in mammoth _bombachas_ stood -on the station platform, and of Eve there was not so much as a fig-leaf -to be seen. - -I had ridden the sun clear around his short winter half-circle when I -descended at Tacuarembó. The town had a hint of tropical ways,—women -going languidly down to the little sandy river with bundles of clothing -on their heads, the streets running out into grassy lanes scattered with -carelessly built ranchos. Features, which had grown more and more Indian -all day along the way and in the second-class coaches, here sometimes -suggested more aboriginal than Caucasian blood. Here, too, there had -been much rain, and the very bricks had sprouted green on the humid, -unsunned south ends of the houses. The shortness of the days was -emphasized by the discovery that I was back in candle-land again, where -there was nothing to do in the evening but stroll the streets or go to -bed. - -[Illustration: A rural railway station in Uruguay] - -[Illustration: The fertile Uruguayan plains in the Cerro Chato (Flat -Hills) district] - -[Illustration: “Pirirín” and his cowboys at an _estancia_ round-up in -northern Uruguay] - -[Illustration: Freighting across the gently rolling plains of the -“Purple Land”] - -I had been reading the Uruguayan epic “Tabaré” for hours next morning, -and possessing my soul in such patience as one acquires in -Latin-America, when I learned by chance that a _mucamo_, as they call a -_mozo_ in Uruguay, had been waiting in the hotel patio below and asking -for me every few minutes since the night before, the servants having -been too indolent to bring me word. With the better part of a day lost I -rode away on a stout, gray-white horse of rocking-chair canter. The -muddy or flooded road curved and turned and rose and fell, always -seeking the moderate height of the succeeding ridges and here and there -crossing gently rounded _cuchillas_. The _mucamo_ on his piebald was -outwardly a most unprepossessing creature, but he was a helpful, cheery -fellow, in great contrast to the usual surly workman of southern South -America, and though only sixteen and scarcely able to read, he was by no -means dull-witted. Apparently there was not a bird, a flower, or an -animal which he did not know intimately, and he was supernaturally quick -in catching sight or sound of them. The _hornero_, a little brown bird -that makes its ovenlike nest on fence-posts, the branches of trees, and -the crosspieces of telegraph-poles, was there in force; the _cotorra_, a -species of noisy paroqueet, was almost as numerous. The _chingolo_, -resembling a sparrow, sits on the backs of grazing cattle and lives on -the _garrapatas_, or ticks, that burrow into the animal’s hide. The -_bien-te-veo_ (“I spy you”), a yellow bird with a whistling call -suggesting that of a happy child playing hide-and-seek, frequently -glided past; the startled cry of the _teru-teru_ rose as we advanced, -disturbing it. The latter is called the “sentinel bird” and is so -certain to give warning of anything approaching that even soldiers have -found it a useful ally. Dark-gray with white wings and a slight crest, -it resembles a lapwing with a cry not unlike that of our “killdeer.” The -_bien-te-veo_ and the _teru-teru_ live in perfect immunity because of a -local superstition similar to the one sailors have for the albatross. -The woodpecker of Uruguay is called _carpintero_, because he works in -wood; the _viuda_ (widow), a little white bird with a black head, is so -called, my companion explained to me in all innocence, because she -produces her brood regularly each year without ever being seen with a -male. A little dark-brown bird called the _barranquero_ builds nests -like the homes of our ancient cliff-dwellers, in the sides of -_barrancas_, or sand-banks. Among the many small birds, songsters, -screamers, and disciples of silence, which eddied about us, one of the -most conspicuous was the _cardenal_, gray with white under the wings, -its whole head covered with a bright-red liberty cap. A large bird -resembling the stork my companion called “Juan Grande”; others call it -the _chajá_, because of the jeering half-laugh it is always uttering. It -lives on the edges of swamps, though it cannot swim. A big brown -_carancho_, a hawk-like bird living on carrion, circled above us with -the ordinary South American scavenger buzzard, here called simply -_cuervo_, or crow. There is good shooting of a local partridge in -Uruguay, the open season being from April to September. At plowing time -the gulls come in great numbers to feast on the fat grubs. The dainty -crested Uruguayan sparrow has all but been driven out by the English -variety, introduced, if the local legend can be believed, by an -immigrant who let a cageful of them fly rather than pay duty on them. - -Thus we rode hour after hour over the rolling _lomas_ and _cuchillas_. -The ground was here and there speckled with _macachines_, daisy-like -little flowers of a wild plant that produces a species of tiny sweet -potato. The _mucamo_ had never heard of the Castilian tongue; what he -spoke was the “lingua oriental.” It was, to be sure, by no means pure -Spanish, but a Spaniard would have had no difficulty in understanding -him. - -At the door of an estancia house with all the comforts reasonably to be -expected in so isolated a location I was met by “Pirirín,” son of a -former minister to London and Washington, and brother of a well-known -Uruguayan writer. His English was as fluent as my own, with just a trace -of something to show that it was not his native tongue. An old woman at -once brought us _mate_, and we sucked alternately at the protruding tube -each time she refilled the gourd with hot water. The sun soon set across -the rich loam country, which was here and there being turned up by -plodding oxen, and threw into relief the three _cerros chatos_, -flat-topped hills that give the region its nickname and which suggest -that the level of the country was once much higher before it was washed -away into the sea by heavy rains that even now gave earth and sky such -striking colors. - -The wealth and prosperity of the native _estanciero_ of Uruguay is -rarely indicated by the size or dignity of his _estancia_ house. As in -the Argentine and Chile, many estates are owned by men living in the -capital, if not in Europe, each in charge of a _gerente_, or -overseer-manager. Small as Uruguay is—by South American standards it -seems tiny, even though it is almost as large as New England—many of its -estancias are immense, especially in these northern departments. There -has been much chatter by politicians about limiting the size of estates -and setting up immigrants in the place of absentee owners, but so far it -has chiefly ended in political chatter. The average Uruguayan estancia -house is not particularly well adapted to the climate, at least during -the winter months. A little clump of poplars or eucalyptus, occasionally -a solitary _ombú_, invariably marks the site of the main dwelling. Not a -few men of comparative wealth pig it out on their own immense estates, -scorning modern improvements, cut off by impassable roads from markets -and all the outside world several months a year, refusing to subscribe -to the rural telephone, depending for their news on private postmen -hired by groups of their fellows. A few estate owners, especially those -who have lived abroad, demand moderate comfort, whether for themselves -or their managers, though even “Pirirín” was content with more primitive -conditions than many a small American farmer would endure. - -It is quickly evident and freely admitted that the average estancia in -Uruguay is loose of morals. _Estancieros_ frankly state that it is -better if the cook is old and unattractive. It seems to be the rule -rather than the exception, for _estancia_ washerwomen and others of -their class to present the estate with a score of children by members of -the owning family and perhaps by several of the peons as well. Among -this class marriage is unpopular and generally considered superfluous. -There is much noise about Uruguay’s “advanced” theories of social -improvement, yet the law forces, and _costumbre_ expects, no help from -the father in the support of his illegitimate children. If he chooses to -acknowledge them and aid in their up-bringing, he is credited with an -unusually charitable disposition. The woman, on her side, takes her -condition as a matter of course. She will admit with perfect equanimity -that she is not certain just who is father of this child or that and -pointing out one of a half dozen playing about the _estancia_ backyard -she will say laughingly, yet with a hint of seriousness and pride, “Ah, -sí, _el_ tiene papá;” that is, he is one of her children whose father -has recognized him. Yet these women are as punctilious in general -courtesy and the outward forms of behavior as their proud _patrón_ or -the hidalgo-mannered peons. - -Next day “Pirirín” and I rode away in the Sunday morning sunshine across -the immense estate, the _teru-terus_ screaming a warning ahead of us -wherever we went. In and about a _bañado_, a swamp full of razor-edged -wild grass that cut the fingers at the slightest touch, we saw specimens -of the three principal indigenous animals of Uruguay,—the _carpincho_, -_nutria_, and _mulita_. The first, large as an Irish terrier, is -grayish-brown in color, with an unattractive face sloping back from nose -to ears, squirrel-like teeth, and legs suggestive of the kangaroo. -Amphibious and sometimes called the river hog, he looks like a cross -between a pig and a rabbit, or as if he had wished to be a deer but had -found the undertaking so difficult that he had given it up and taken to -the water and to rooting instead. On the edges of Uruguayan streams -there are many happy little families of the beaver-like nutria, an -aquatic animal large as a cat, with long thick fur and a rat-like tail. -Playful as a young rabbit, the nutria is quick of hearing and swift of -action, taking to the water at once when disturbed and leaving only its -nostrils above the surface; yet when cornered it is savage, as many a -dog has learned to his sorrow. When the _pulperos_, or country -shopkeepers, of Uruguay found that nutria skins brought a high price -from the furriers of Europe and the United States they set the -countrymen to killing them off regardless of age, sex, or season, -ruining many of the skins by their clumsy handling and all but -exterminating the species. The _mulita_, also called _tatu_, is a timid, -helpless little animal of the iguana family, half-lizard, half-turtle, -with a scaly, shield-like covering that suggests medieval armor, and -which, dug out of its hole and roasted over a fagot-fire, furnishes a -repast fit for kings. - -The flora was also striking, for all the absence of forests and large -growths. The _sina-sina_ is a small tree with dozens of trunks growing -from the same root, willow-like leaves, and large thorns that clutch and -tear at anything that ventures within reach of it. A waterside bush -called the _curupí_ contains a poison that the Charrúa Indians formerly -used for tipping their arrows. The _sarandí_, a bush growing on the -banks of streams with its feet always in the water; the _madreselva_, or -honeysuckle; the _chilca_, a thinly scattered bush scarcely two feet -high, and the _guayacán_, a bushy plant with beautiful white flowers in -season, were the most common landscape decorations. Thousands of -_macachines_ covered the ground, white flowers with now and then a touch -of yellow or velvety dark-red. - -The gauchos of the estate had been ordered to _rodear_, to round up a -large herd of cattle, and soon we came upon them riding round and round -several hundred on the crest of a hillock. On the backs of some of the -animals _chingolos_ still sat serenely picking away at the _garrapatas_ -or the flesh left bare by them. The latter are the chief pest of an -otherwise almost perfect ranching country, for thousands of these -aggressive ticks burrow into the hide of the animals and suck their -blood so incessantly that great numbers of cattle die of anemia or -fever. All but the more backward estates now have a big trough-like bath -through which the cattle are driven several times a year as a protection -against _garrapatas_, but even so it is one peon’s sole duty to ride -over the estate each day to _curear_, or skin the animals that have -died, carry the skin home, and stake it out in the sun to dry. - -[Illustration: A _gaucho_ of Uruguay] - -[Illustration: A rural Uruguayan in full Sunday regalia] - -[Illustration: An ox-driver of southern Brazil, smeared with the -blood-red mud of his native heath] - -More than two hours of riding brought us to the _almacén_ or _pulpería_, -the general store that is to be found on or near every large _estancia_ -in Uruguay. As the day was Sunday scores of gauchos with that -half-bashful, laconic, yet self-reliant air common to their class, -ranging all the way from half-Indian to pure white in race, with here -and there the African features bequeathed by some Brazilian who had -wandered over the nearby border, silently rode up on their shaggy ponies -one after another out of the treeless immensity and, throwing the reins -of the animal over a fence-post beside many others drowsing in the sun, -stalked noiselessly into the dense shade of the acacia and eucalyptus -trees about the _pulpería_, then into the store itself. Most of them -were in full regalia of _recado_, _pellones_, shapeless felt hat, shaggy -whiskers and poncho. With few exceptions the “Oriental” gaucho still -clings to _bombachas_ or _chiripá_, the ballooning folds of which -disappear in moccasin-like alpargatas, or into the wrinkled calfskin -boots still called _botas de potro_, though the custom that gave them -their name has long since become too expensive to be continued. These -“colt boots” were formerly obtained by killing a colt, unless one could -be found already dead, removing the skin from two legs without cutting -it open, thrusting the gaucho foot into it, and letting it shape itself -to its new wearer. A short leather whip hanging from his leather-brown -wrist, a poncho with a long fringe, immense spurs so cruel that the -ready wit of the pampa has dubbed them “_nazarinas_,” a gay waistcoat, -and last of all a flowing neckcloth, the last word of dandyism in “camp” -life, complete his personal wardrobe. It is against the law to carry -arms in Uruguay, yet every gaucho or peon has his _cuchillo_ in his -belt, or carries a revolver if he considers himself above the knife -stage. Every horseman, too, must have his _recado_, that complication of -gear so astonishing to the foreigner, so efficient in use, with which -the rural South American loads down his mount. An ox-hide covers the -horse from withers to crupper, to keep his sweat from the rider’s gear; -a saddle similar to that used on pack animals, high-peaked fore and aft, -is set astride this, and both hide and saddle are cinched to the horse -by a strong girth fastened by thongs passed through a ringbolt. On the -bridle, saddle, and whip is brightly shining silver, over the -saddle-quilts and blankets are piled one above the other, the top cover -being a saddlecloth of decorated black sheepskin or a hairy _pellón_ of -soft, cool, tough leather, and outside all this is passed a very broad -girth of fine tough webbing to hold it in place. With his _recado_ and -poncho the experienced gaucho has bedding, coverings, sun-awning, -shelter from the heaviest rain, and all the protection needed to keep -him safe and sound on his pampa wanderings. - -As they entered the _pulpería_ the newcomers greeted every -fellow-gaucho, though some two score were already gathered, with that -limp handshake peculiar to the rural districts of South America, rarely -speaking more than two or three words, and these so low as to be barely -audible, apparently because of the presence of “Pirirín” and myself. The -rules of caste were amazing in a country supposed to be far advanced in -democracy. Though the gaucho, in common with most of the human family, -considers himself the equal, if not the superior, of any man on earth, -he retains many of the manners of colonial days. “Pirirín” and I, as -lords of the visible universe and representatives of the wealth and -knowledge of the great outside world, had entered the _pulpería_ by the -family door and were given the choicest seats—on the best American -oil-boxes available—behind the counter. The sophisticated-rustic -_pulpero_ greeted us each with a handshake, somewhat weak, to be sure, -because that is the only way his class ever shakes hands, but raising -his hat each time, while we did not so much as touch ours. To have done -so would have been to lower both the _pulpero’s_ and the by-standing -gauchos’ opinion of us. Then he turned and greeted his gaucho customers -with an air nicely balanced between the friendly and the superior, -offering each of them a finger end, they raising their hats and he not -so much as touching his. - -Yet these slender, wiry countrymen, carrying themselves like -self-reliant freemen, with a natural ease of bearing and a courtesy in -which simplicity and punctilio are nicely blended, take the stranger -entirely on his merits and give and expect the same courtesy as the -wealthy _estanciero_. If the newcomer shows a friendly spirit, his title -soon advances from “Señor”—or “Mister,” in honor of his foreign origin, -be he French, Spanish, Italian, English, or American—to the use of his -first name, and he will be known as “Don Carlos,” “Don Enrique,” or -whatever it may be, to the end of his stay. Later, if he is well liked, -he may even be addressed as “Ché,” that curious term of familiarity and -affection universally used among friends in Uruguay. It is not a Spanish -word, but seems to have been borrowed from the Guaraní tongue, in which -it means “mine,” and probably by extension “my friend.” To be called -“Ché” by the Uruguayan gaucho is proof of being accepted as a full and -friendly equal. - -In theory the _pulpero_ establishes himself out on the campaña only to -sell tobacco, _mate_, strong drink, and tinned goods from abroad; in -practice these country storekeepers have other and far more important -sources of income. They are usurers, speculators in land and stock, -above all exploiters of the gaucho’s gambling instinct. Thanks perhaps -to the greater or less amount of Spanish blood in his veins he will -accept a wager on anything, be it only on the weather, on a child’s -toys, on which way a cow will run, on how far away a bird will alight, -or on whether _sol ó número_ (“sun or number,” corresponding to our -“heads or tails”) will fall uppermost at the flipping of a coin. This -makes him easy prey to the _pulpero_, who is usually a Spaniard, Basque, -Italian, or “Turk,” and an unconscionable rogue without any other ideal -than the amassing of a fortune, yet who somehow grows rich at the -expense of the peons and gauchos, instead of meeting the violent death -from the quick-tempered _hijo del país_ who despises yet fears him. - -The gauchos were originally called “gauderios,” that is, lazy, -good-for-nothing rascals. To-day that word is an exaggeration, for they -have a certain merit of industry and simple honesty. There is -considerable vendetta among them, gambling rows and love affairs -especially, much of which goes unpunished, particularly if the -perpetrator is a “red” and his victim a “white.” Punishment for -fence-cutting or sheep-stealing is surer: as in our own West in earlier -days the loss of a man is largely his own affair, while the loss of a -flock of sheep or a drove of cattle is serious. To make matters worse, -the country _comisarios_, or policemen, are often subsidized by certain -_estancieros_ to the disadvantage of others, and the _juez de paz_ is -quite likely to be a rogue, in either of which cases the friends of -“justice” usually get off and their enemies get punished. - -According to “Pirirín,” the average gaucho is an incorrigible wanderer. -Paid but ten or fifteen pesos a month “and found,” and satisfied with -quarters which most workmen in civilized lands would refuse with scorn, -he is given to capricious changes of abode and is likely to throw a leg -over his faithful horse at the least provocation. Among these incurable -pampa wanderers there are not a few “poor whites,” often with -considerable Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, its origin lost in their -Spanicized names. Hospitality is the first of the virtues of the -_estanciero_, and any genial horseback tramp who turns up may remain on -the _estancia_ unmolested for a day, a week, or a month, as the spirit -moves him. There was a suggestion of our own cowboys among the group -that finally overflowed the _pulpería_, though the gauchos were less -given to noisy horseplay and had far more dignity and courtesy. Some of -them could read without having to spell out the words, and while -“Orientals” in the mass are not a nation of readers and there is -considerable illiteracy, these countrymen were much more in touch with -the world’s affairs than the same class in the countries of the West -Coast. - -The gaucho may still occasionally be heard thrumming a guitar and -wailing his sad, Moorish, genuinely Oriental songs, invariably -sentimental and deeply melancholy, with never a comic touch, like a -lineal descendant of the wandering troubadour of the Middle Ages or the -street-singers of the Mohammedan East. When he is not making music or -love, he is sucking _mate_ and talking horses. He has more than a score -of words for his equine companion, running through every gamut of color, -behavior, and pace. His obsession for this topic of conversation is -natural, for he has an instinctive horror of going on foot and the horse -is to the resident of the pampas what the ship is to the sailor; without -it he is hopelessly stranded. Yet his interest is entirely of a -utilitarian nature. He is racially incapable of any such affection for -his mount as causes other races to spare it unnecessary suffering; if he -coddles it at all it is merely for the selfish motive of his own safety -or convenience. Among the picturesque types of the campaña and the pampa -is the _domador_, the professional horse-breaker. His customary fee is -five pesos a head, “with living,” and his methods are true to his -Spanish blood. Instead of being broken early, the colts are allowed to -run wild until they are four or five years old; then a drove of them is -rounded up in a corral and the victims suddenly lassooed one by one and -thrown to the ground. With half a dozen peons pulling on the rope about -his neck until he is all but strangled, his legs are tied and a halter -is put on and attached to a tree, where the animal is left to strain -until he is exhausted, often hurting himself more or less permanently. -Then his tongue and lower jaw are fastened in a painful noose that -forces him to follow the peon, who rides away, jerking at the rope. -Finally, when the weary and frightened animal is trembling in every -limb, the brave domador mounts him and, with a horseman on either side -to protect him, and pulling savagely at the colt’s sore mouth, the -_potro_ is galloped until he is completely worn out. It used to be -beneath gaucho dignity to ride a mare, and to this day no -self-respecting _domador_ of the old school will consent to tame one. -Sometimes the female of the species draws carts, with her colt running -alongside, but on the larger _estancias_ she is allowed to roam at large -all her days. - -In the evening, with the gauchos departed and the _pulpería_ officially -closed to the public, we added our bonfire to the sixteen others in -honor of St. Peter and St. Paul, which we could count around the -horizon, and gathered about the table with the _pulpero’s_ family to -play “lottery,” a two-cent gambling card game. It was long after -midnight when “Pirirín” shook off the combined fascination of this and -the _pulpero’s_ amenable daughter. From my cot behind the _pulpería_ -counter I saw the day dawn rosy red, but clouds and a south wind -promised rain before my companion roused himself. We got into an _araña_ -(spider), a two-wheeled cart which did somewhat resemble that -web-weaving insect, and rocked and bumped away across the untracked -campaña behind two half-wild young horses. Never was there a let-up from -howling at and lashing the reeking animals all the rest of the morning, -an English education not having cured “Pirirín” of the thoughtless -cruelty bequeathed by his Spanish blood. Through gullies in which we -were showered with mud, up and down hill at top speed we raced, until -the trembling horses were so weary that we were forced to hitch on in -front of them the one the _mucamo_ was riding. In Tacuarembó this owner, -or at least prospective owner, of thousands of acres and cattle went to -the cheapest hotel and slept on an ancient and broken cot in the same -room with two rough and dirty plowmen, while I caught the evening train -for the Brazilian border. - - - - - CHAPTER VII - BUMPING UP TO RIO - - -Upon the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and -sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance, -situated in both the smallest and the largest countries of South -America. When the traveler descends from the “Uruguay Central” he finds -it is named for Colonel Rivera, the Custer of Uruguay, who made the last -stand against the Charrúa Indians and was killed by them in 1832. But as -he goes strolling along the main street, gazing idly into the shop -windows, he notes all at once that the signs in them have changed in -words and prices, that even the street has an entirely different name, -for instead of the Calle Principal it has become the Rua Sete de -Setembro, and suddenly he awakens to the fact that instead of taking a -stroll in the town of Rivera, in the República Oriental del Uruguay, as -he fancied, he has wandered into Santa Anna do Livramento in the state -of Rio Grande do Sul in the United States of Brazil. - -There is no getting away from the saints even when the tongue and -nationality and even the color of the population changes, for the -Portuguese adventurers who settled the mighty paunch of South America -were quite as eager for celestial blessings on their more or less -nefarious enterprises as were their fellow scamps and contemporaries, -the Spanish conquistadores. But the stray traveler in question is sure -to find that another atmosphere has suddenly grown up about him. -Barracks swarming with muscular black soldiers, wearing long cloaks, in -spite of the semi-tropical weather, as nearly wrong side out as -possible, in order to display the brilliant red with which they are -lined, give a belligerent aspect to this warmer and mightier land. -Negroes and piccaninnies and the unpainted makeshift shacks that -commonly go with them are scattered over all the landscape; oxen with -the yokes on their necks rather than in front of their horns testify to -the change from Spanish custom; instead of the pretty little plaza with -its well-kept promenades, its comfortable benches, and its well-tended -flower plots that forms the center of Rivera or any other -Spanish-American town that has the slightest personal pride, there is a -_praça_, muddy, untended, seatless, and unadorned. The sun, too, has -begun to bite again in a way unfamiliar in the countries in southern and -temperate South America. - -Rivera and Santa Anna do Livramento are physically a single town. The -international boundary runs through the center of a football field in -which boys in Brazil pursue a ball set in motion in Uruguay, and climbs -up over a knoll on the top of which sits a stone boundary post, the two -countries rolling away together over plump hills densely green in color, -except where the enamel of nature has been chipped off to disclose a -reddish sandy soil. Surely Brazil, stretching for thirty-seven degrees -of latitude from Uruguay to the Guianas, a distance as far as from Key -West to the top of Labrador, with a width of nearly as many degrees of -longitude from Pernambuco to the Andes and covering more space than the -continental United States, is large enough so that its inhabitants need -not have crowded their huts to the very edge of the boundary line in -this fashion, as if they were fleeing from oppressive rulers, or were -determined that little Uruguay shall not thrust her authority an inch -farther north. - -I went over into Brazil early in the day, it being barely three blocks -from my “Gran Hotel Nuevo,” which was neither grand, new, nor, strictly -speaking, a hotel. But when the sockless manager-owner of the main -hostelry of Sant’ Anna asked me two thousand something or other for the -privilege of lying on a hilly cot not unlike a dog’s nest in a musty -hole already occupied by several other guests, I concluded to remain in -Uruguay as long as possible. In Montevideo a cablegram had advised me to -make myself known to the Brazilian railway officials at the frontier and -learn something to my advantage. I could not shake off a vague -uneasiness at entering with slight funds a country of which I had heard -many a disagreeable tale and where I expected to undergo the unpleasant -experience of not understanding the language. Yet when at length I found -the station-master of the “Compagnie Auxiliaire,” in a red cap but, I -was relieved to note, a white skin, we talked for some time of the -general pass with sleeping-car accommodations which the discerning -general manager of the railways of southern Brazil seemed bent on -thrusting upon me, before I realized that he was speaking Portuguese and -I Spanish, and understanding each other perfectly. - -It is 2058 miles by rail from Montevideo to Rio de Janeiro, and the cost -of this overland trip to the average traveler with a trunk or two and a -moderate appetite would be about $150. One may leave the Uruguayan -capital on Monday, for instance, by one of the three weekly trains, and -arrive in the Brazilian capital on the following Saturday, spending only -one night motionless on the way—if one is contented to be a mere tourist -rather than a traveler and is not overburdened with baggage. For this -must be carried the mile or more over the frontier, at which it is -examined by a band of stupid and discourteous negroes, who seem to -delight in putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of the -well-to-do traveler. Not being included in that category, my own day’s -halt in Rivera was entirely by choice; but for those more in haste than -curious for a glimpse of Brazilian life it is cheaper, faster, and more -comfortable to make the journey by sea. - -The daily train northward leaves Santa Anna at 7:35, which is seven by -Uruguayan time, and I was dragged out of bed at an unearthly hour for -midwinter June to find the world weighed down under a dense, -bone-soaking blanket of fog. The street lamps of both countries, judging -daylight by the calendar rather than by the facts, kept going out just -half a block ahead of me as I stumbled through the impenetrable gloom, -the streets by no means improving at the frontier. I might have crossed -this without formality had I not chosen to wake the negro guard from a -sound sleep in his kiosk and insist upon his doing his duty. One would -fancy that an official stationed five feet from a Spanish-speaking -country would pick up a few words of that language, yet these -customhouse negroes professed not to understand a word of Spanish, no -matter how much it sounded like their native Portuguese. At length, with -a growl for having been disturbed, the swarthy guardian waved a hand at -me in a bored, tropical way, drew his resplendent cloak about him again, -and stretched out once more on his wooden bench. - -It was a long mile of slippery mud and warm humidity to the station, -where black night still reigned and where yet another African official -came to _revisar_ my baggage, for much contraband passes this frontier -in both directions. Finally something resembling daybreak forced its -reluctant way through the gray mass that hung over and crept into -everything, and our narrow-gauge half-freight took to bumping -uncertainly northward. What a change from the clean, comfortable, -equal-to-anywhere trains of Uruguay! Even our “primeiro,” with its two -seats on one side of the aisle and one on the other, was as untidy, -unmended, slovenly as the government railways of Chile, and every mile -forward seemed to bring one that much nearer the heart of happy-go-lucky -Latin-America. - -[Illustration: The parasol pine trees of southern Brazil] - -[Illustration: Dinner time at a railway construction camp in Rio Grande -do Sul] - -[Illustration: A horse ran for seven miles along the track in front of -us and made our train half an hour late] - -[Illustration: A cowboy of southern Brazil] - -I wrapped myself in all the garments I possessed, regretting that I -owned no overcoat, as we shivered jerkily onward across a wild, shaggy, -mist-heavy country inhabited only by cattle and with no stopping-place -all the morning, except Rosario, entitled to consider itself a town. I -fell to reading a Porto Alegre newspaper of a day or two before, for as -I could usually guess the meaning of the spoken tongue, so I could read -Portuguese, like a man skating over thin ice—as long as I kept swiftly -going all was well, but if I stopped to examine a word closely, I was -lost. Brazilians would have you believe that Portuguese is a purer form -of the tongue from which Spanish is descended; Spanish-speaking South -Americans assert that Portuguese is a degenerate dialect of their own -noble language and even go so far as to refer to it privately as “lingua -de macacos,” of which phrase the last word is the Portuguese term for -monkey. Thanks to my long familiarity with their tongue I found myself -siding with the Castilian branch of the family. - -On the printed page it was hard to treat this new tongue with due -seriousness. I found myself unable to shake off the impression that the -writer had never learned to spell, or at least had not been able to -force his learning upon the printer. The stuff looked as if the latter -had “pied” the form, and then had not had time to find all the letters -again or have the proof corrected. Thus cattle, instead of being -_ganado_, as it should be, was merely _gado_; _general_ had shrunk to -_geral_, and to make matters worse still more letters were dropped in -forming the plural, so that such monstrosities as _geraes_ and -_automobeis_ shrieked at the reader in every line. Fancy calling tea -_chá_; think of writing _esmola_ when you mean _limosna_! It suggested -dialect invented by a small Spanish boy so angry he “wouldn’t play any -more,” and who had taken to horribly mispronouncing and absurdly -misspelling the tongue of himself and his playmates, yet who had not -originality enough to form a really new language. And what a treacherous -language! The short, simple, everyday words were the very ones most apt -to be entirely different; thus _dos_ was no longer “two” but “of the”; -“two” was now _dois_ in the masculine and _duas_ in the feminine, and -there was still a _dous_—the plural form, I suppose. A _trapiche_ was no -longer a primitive sugarmill, but a warehouse; a cigar had become a mere -_charuto_. The Portuguese seemed to avoid the letter “l” as zealously as -do the Japanese, replacing it by “r”—_la plaza_ had been deformed into -_a praça_, _el plato_ had become _o prato_. Where they were not doubling -the “n,” contrary to all rules of Castilian spelling, they were leaving -it out entirely, and one was asked to admire the silvery rays of _a -lua_! A man had been brought before a judge because he had seen fit to -_espancar_ his wife, yet the context showed that it was no case of the -application of the corrective slipper. I was reading along as smoothly -and calmly as in English when all at once the headline “Esposição -International de Borrachas em Londres” struck my eye. Válgame Diós! An -International Exposition of Drunken Women! Seven thousand miles away, -too! And why in London, rather than in Glasgow? That particular headline -would have cost me much mental anguish had I not had the foresight in -Montevideo to buy a “Portuguez-Hespanhol” pocket vocabulary. And what, -of all things, should _borracha_ be, in this absurd, mispronounced -dialect, but _rubber_, and no drunken woman at all, thus depriving the -article at once of all interest! - -The chief trouble with written Portuguese is that it has never been -operated on for appendicitis. Parts that have long since ceased to -function have not been cut off, as in the close-cropped Spanish, and -such words as _simples_, _fructa_, and the like retain their useless -unpronounced letters until the written word is almost as absurdly unlike -the spoken one as in English. Yet the tongue of Brazil has at least the -advantage that it is in some ways easier to pronounce than Spanish. The -guttural Castilian j, for example, over which the foreign tongue almost -invariably stumbles, is missing, and while few Americans can say _jefe_ -in the Spanish fashion they can all give it the Portuguese sound -“shefe”; and if _mejor_ taxes the Anglo-Saxon palate, _melhor_ is -perfectly easy. Moreover, life is a constant holiday in Portuguese. -_Domingo_ and _sabbado_ are days of rest under any name; but it seems -unwise to mislead a naturally indolent people into thinking that every -day is a “feast day” by calling Monday “second festival,” Tuesday “third -festival” and so on, forcing the stranger to do some finger and toe -counting to find that _quarta-feira_, or “fourth festival,” was none -other than this very Wednesday so foggily hanging about us. To hear the -kinky-haired trainman tell me in a long series of mispronunciations that -if I chose to let this one go on without me I could get another train at -“twenty:thirty-two on fifth feast-day” required some nimble mental -exertion to figure out that the lunatic was trying to say 8:32 P. M. on -Thursday. - -The line out of Santa Anna is really a branch of the long and important -one from Uruguayana on the Uruguay River, dividing Brazil from the -Argentine, to the large “lagoon towns” of Pelotas and Rio Grande on the -Atlantic. About noon we tumbled out of our rattling conveyance at -Cacequy and took another train, on the line to Porto Alegre, capital of -the enormous “estado gaucho,” or “cowboy state,” southernmost of Brazil -and larger than all Uruguay. It rambled in and about low hills, with an -excellent grazing country spread out to the horizon on every hand, and -at four—beg pardon, sixteen o’clock—set us down at the considerable town -of Santa Maria on a knoll among wooded hills, the junction where those -bound for the capital of the state must take leave of those on their way -to the capital of the republic. I was privileged to occupy room No. 1 in -the chief hotel of the town, which was no doubt a high honor. But as it -chanced to be between the front door of the building and the cobbled -entrance corridor, with either window or door opening directly on crowds -of impudent newsboys, lottery vendors, and servants, it was not unlike -being between the devil—or at least a swarm of his progeny—and the deep -sea. Indeed, it quickly became evident that Brazilian hotels of the -interior would prove no better than those in the three southern -countries of South America, where the traveler is expected to pay a -fortune for the privilege of tossing out the night on a hilly cot and -where the meals never vary an iota,—beginning unfailingly with -_fiambre_, or thin slices of cold meat, and hurrying through several -dishes of hot meat, down to the inevitable _dulce de membrillo_, a hard -quince jelly which is the sad ending of all meals at the lower end of -South America. Nowhere does the Latin-American’s lack of initiative show -more clearly than in the kitchen. To increase my gloom, the French -proprietress, whose every glance caused my thin pocketbook to writhe -with fear, manipulated the items so cleverly that, though placards on -the walls announced the rate as seven _milreis_ a day, and I was there -only from sunset until a little after sunrise, she handed me a bill for -13,500 _reis_! - -Luckily I had already weathered the first shock of the traveler who -comes rudely in contact with the Brazilian money system, but I paid -miser-faced old madame in a daze, and retired to a quiet corner to -figure up the exact extent of the disaster that had befallen me. On due -reflection it proved to be not quite so overwhelming as it had sounded. -Even when they are reduced to real money Brazilian prices are not mild, -but they are by no means so utterly insane as they sound. The monetary -unit is the _real_, in theory only, for no such coin exists, and in -practice only the plural _reis_ is used, the real unit being the -_milreis_, one thousand _reis_. For years the _milreis_ had remained at -the fixed value of fifteen to the English pound. In larger -transactions—and most transactions are large in Brazil—the unit is the -_conto_, one million _reis_, about $325. Gold is never seen in -circulation. Between the _milreis_ and the _conto_ there are paper -notes, usually printed in New York; silver coins from five hundred to -two thousand _reis_, and nickel pieces of four, two, and one hundred -complete the list in common circulation. Lastly, lest the unwarned -stranger be led astray by appearances, the Brazilian places his dollar -sign after the _milreis_ and before the _reis_, so that 3$250 means the -normal equivalent of an American dollar, and the man who pays $500 for a -newspaper or a small glass of iced cane-juice does not feel that he has -been unusually extravagant—at least if he has lived long enough in -Brazil to get the local point of view. - -A pair of German peasants sat in a corner of the second-class coach when -we pulled out of Santa Maria. Theirs were the same honest, wrinkled, -hard-working, unimaginative faces one sees in rural Germany. The woman, -with a kerchief over her head and her bare feet thrust into low -slippers, was as devoid of feminine coquettishness as of desire for -adornment, a picture of the plodding, toilsome helpmate of the -thoroughly Teuton farmer at her side. Yet I found that they had never -been outside the southernmost state of Brazil, though they spoke German -with far more ease than they did Portuguese, and their appearance would -not have attracted the slightest attention in the very heart of Germany. - -The three fertile southern states of Brazil are on an elevated plateau -that makes them excellent cereal and fruit regions well suited as a -permanent habitation of the white race. All that portion of Brazil below -Rio de Janeiro is of comparatively recent settlement. During the -colonial period Portuguese energy was directed almost exclusively to the -semi-tropical and tropical regions of the north, to Bahia and -Pernambuco, where rich tobacco and sugar plantations could be worked -with slave labor, or to the gold and diamond lands of the interior, with -their special attractions to impatient fortune hunters. The splendid -pasture lands of the temperate zone were scorned by these eager -adventurers; maps printed as late as 1865 bear across all these southern -provinces the words “unknown and inhabited by wild Indians.” - -The Germans, to be sure, had begun to appear before that. Barely had the -exiled emperor of Portugal settled down in 1808, to rule his immense -overseas domain when he set about filling in its waste spaces by an -immigration policy that is to this day continued by the states -themselves. Not only Dom João but his successors, the two Dom Pedros, -turned to Switzerland and Germany for the hardy settlers needed to tame -this south-temperate wilderness. The first official German colony in -Brazil was founded in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and for -twenty-five years Teutonic settlers were established at many different -points, chiefly in the three southernmost states, in some cases as far -north as Minas Geraes. But in 1859 the German government forbade -emigration to Brazil. The original settlers are therefore long since -dead and the present inhabitants are of the third or fourth generation, -born in Brazil, and with little more than a traditional feeling for the -Fatherland. Yet it is a peculiarity of South American civilization that -it does not impose itself upon European immigration to any such degree -as does that of the United States. Ask the man whose father, or even -grandfather, emigrated from Germany to Brazil what his nationality is -and he is almost certain to reply, without any consciousness of the -strangeness of his answer, “Ich bin Deutsch.” If the German has remained -a German in Brazil, it is perhaps as much the fault of the Brazilian -environment as by his own choice. There are cities in the southern -states of Brazil so German that men and women born in them speak not a -word of Portuguese. This is particularly frequent in the district about -Porto Alegre and in the “lagoon country” between there and the Uruguayan -boundary. Joinville, in Santa Catharina, named for a German prince who -married the daughter of an emperor of Brazil, is so German that the -Portuguese tongue attracts attention in the streets, as it does in -several other of the thirteen colonies founded before the ban was placed -on German emigration. Even the inhabitants who speak Portuguese do so -with difficulty and with a strong Teutonic accent. The school teachers -of these former colonies are subsidized German pastors; the German -element is so strong as often to elect a German state president—the -states of Brazil have presidents rather than governors. For several -years all office holders in Santa Catharina, with the exception of the -Federal Court, appointed in Rio, were Germans, and the anomaly of -Brazilian government reports written by men who scarcely knew the -language of the country in which they ruled was by no means unusual. - -It is estimated that there are now about a million descendants of -Germans in the three or four southern states of Brazil, a territory -approximately as large as our “solid south” east of the Mississippi. -Their adopted country was liberal to the early settlers, allotting 175 -acres of land to each immigrant, though this has been much reduced in -individual cases by speculative abuses. Not until 1896 was the German -edict against migration to Brazil removed, and by that time the southern -states had attracted new settlers, particularly from Italy. The state of -São Paulo, for instance, has built up her great coffee industry and -factory production chiefly on Italian immigration. The Germans are said -always to seek the lower lands and the river bottoms, raising especially -pigs and vegetables, while the Italians plant the high ridges farther -back from the sea with corn and grapes, with the result that such towns -as Garabaldi and Novo Hamburgo, Blumenau and Angelina, are but a -cannon-shot apart. - -Where the great Lagoa dos Patos opens to the sea at the town of Rio -Grande, on sandy, onion-growing flats that follow two hundred miles of -shifting sand dunes from Imbituba southward, is a hot, often sand-beaten -point once ruled by powerful British firms. It is nearly a hundred miles -up this “inland sea” to the capital of the state, with 200,000 -inhabitants, which with the large town of Pelotas is the great port of -embarkation of the _xarque_, as the _tasajo_, or thick dried beef, of -the Argentine is called in Brazil. One by one the German traders crowded -out their competitors in this region; with the docile population of the -“lagoon cities” racially friendly to them they established a virtual -German monopoly of German commercial and financial houses in coöperation -with German shipping. Where the German ruled there was no room for any -other European or American, not even for Brazilian industry, and in each -of these coastal cities of southern Brazil a great German firm was -supreme dictator before the World War, which was not the least of the -many causes of that war. What advantages these uncrowned rulers of their -million unsophisticated and often unconscious subjects might have taken -in establishing themselves and their Fatherland more firmly in Brazil if -the world conflict had ended differently is of course now a purely -academic question. - -The lines of southern Brazil could scarcely be made a real railroad in -the American sense without complete rebuilding, for they constantly -squirm and twist and wind their way over the lightly rolling country, -seeking always the higher levels and never by any chance running for a -yard straight forward. One of the trainmen asserted that if a cow got in -the way of the surveyors who laid out the line, they moved the transit -rather than exert themselves to go and drive her away. Less facetious -officials explained that the engines are so weak that anything steeper -than a one per cent. grade was avoided in the building, and that this -was done on contract by Brazilians and by the mile. From the car-windows -we had frequent views of the engineer and the fireman in their cab; we -darted from side to side so often that, it would have been easy to -imagine the little engine in terror of the many wide-horned cattle -scattered over the rolling landscape. The brakes were frequently called -upon to keep us from running over the time-table; stations or crossings -were so rare that the whistle was uncomfortably startling; at the rare -places where we did officially stop an extended argument usually arose -between the station master in his red cap and the trainmen in their blue -ones as to when it would be fitting and advisable to jolt onward. - -Beyond the large town of Passo Fundo appeared, first singly, then in -roomy clusters, the splendid _pinheiro araucarai_, the slender yet -sturdy Brazilian pine-tree, erect and entirely free from branches to the -very top, from which these suddenly spread thickly out at right angles -to the trunk. The parasol-pine makes excellent lumber, being lighter yet -stronger than our northern pine, but above all it beautifies the -landscape. The rare small clumps of it in the hollows became more and -more numerous until, at Erechim, we found ourselves in an entire forest -of parasol-pines, with an atmosphere strikingly like our northern lumber -woods. The weather had grown so warm that in the middle of the day it -was uncomfortable to sit in the unshaded car window, and creepers and -lianas were beginning to appear in the semi-tropical forests, silent but -for the song of the tree-toad. - -I descended at the station of Erebango to spend the “Fourth” with a -fellow-countryman in charge of the construction of a branch railway -through the Jewish “Colonia Quatro Irmãos.” At the station was gathered -a group of Semitic immigrants just arrived from Europe, still in the -same heavy garb and wool caps in which they had left their wintry home. -We boarded the constructor’s “motor gallego,” a hand-car pumped by four -lusty Galicians, and struck out in company with the Jewish manager of -the colony. Each Jew was given upon arrival a piece of land and some -stock, the latter to be paid for after he got his start. For an hour we -pumped our way through semi-tropical forest, here and there broken by -clearings scattered with light-colored wooden houses, to come out upon a -more open rolling country suggestive of Uruguay but with clumps of the -beautiful parasol-pine in the hollows. Then I was furnished a horse and -rode away over the ridges, visiting a score of Jewish families. It being -Saturday, they were dressed in their Sabbath best, some of them, who had -lived in the United States, as overdressed as Irish “hired girls” going -to mass. Men, women, and children were gathered in large groups drinking -_schnaps_, and several of the men, in low-crowned derbies, grew -confidential and told me they wished they were back in “Heshter -Schtreet.” I spoke German to their Yiddish, as I did Spanish to my -peon’s Portuguese, and not only carried on conversation easily but -several times acted as interpreter. The little unpainted houses were -tolerably clean, with cheap lace curtains; and schoolhouses were being -built. But though some of them had been here for months, there was -little evidence of any work being done by the colonists themselves. One -got the impression that they preferred to live on the charity of the -association and its wealthy European sponsors rather than indulge in -physical exertion under the semi-tropical sun, and one wondered if it -was possible to make a farmer out of the Jew, whether the colonists were -not merely waiting for a town to grow up, that they might go and sell -things to one another. The railway company of southern Brazil, which is -British-American, as well as the Brazilian Government, is favoring such -immigration, but a casual glimpse of the colony did not suggest that -this was the best means of bringing the fertile waste places of the -republic into productive activity. - -The tri-weekly train picked me up two days later, the privacy of my -narrow-gauge _dormitorio_ being again unbroken. Hour after hour we -rambled on in leisurely tropical fashion. The water tanks were not at -the stations but wherever streams gave a supply, thereby increasing the -number of stops. Once a horse got on the track and ran for seven miles -ahead of the tooting little engine, refusing to leave the rails even -when the fireman got off and threw imported coal at it while the train -crept on after him. To have run into the animal would probably have -spilled our toy locomotive down the embankment of red earth. Finally a -group of Polish men and women gathered on the track ahead and forced the -weary beast to take to the _matta_, the jungled wilderness that shut us -in. At another stop the station-master, a pale blond who spoke German -but who sold tickets like a Latin-American, would not give the engineer -the signal to start until he had sent a boy to drive his ducks out from -under the engine where they were lolling in the shade. The number of -curs prowling about the stations made it easy to believe a joker’s -assertion that the dogs know the train schedule and line up along the -track in proper time and place for their tri-weekly banquet from the -dining-car. Here was the most costly part of the line, built by American -engineers, many bridges and viaducts lifting it across deep wooded -gullies with wonderful vistas of tree-tops, the dark green of the -_pinheiro_ still predominating in the sky-line. - -At Marcellino Ramos a big bridge carried us across the River Uruguay, -which not only rises in Brazil but forms the boundary between its two -southernmost states. Through trains had been operated on this line for -less than a year. Before that the overland traveler from Montevideo to -Rio had to stop six times overnight on the way and had often to be poled -across dangerous rivers. Then one crossed the Uruguay at Marcellino -Ramos in the darkness on a crazy launch operated by a crazier Brazilian -who let go the steering-wheel to roll cigarettes and who generally -succeeded in drowning some of the baggage, if not the passengers. The -launch landed its cargo at the foot of a steep muddy slope more than a -hundred feet high, at the top of which travelers fought for the -privilege of paying a fortune for a plank to lie on and for such stuff -as the predatory keeper of what he miscalled a hotel saw fit to provide -for stifling their appetites. - -Here we left the enormous “_gaucho_ state” behind and struck off across -the narrow state of Santa Catharina, through which we followed the -placid Rio do Peixe, or Fish River, for a hundred and sixty-five miles, -passing several waterfalls. The wooded _serra_ of Santa Catharina rose -slightly into the sky, and on all sides the world was thickly clothed -with jungle, though there were occasional small clearings with clusters -of crude new shanties. In places the palm grew close beside the -parasol-pine. Groups of ponies under clumsy native saddles were tied to -posts or wooden rails before the _armazem_ inside which their owners -were drinking away their Sunday. Blonds predominated at the rare -stations, tow-heads covered by kerchiefs peered from every doorway of -the houses, with their concave shingled roofs. Most of them seemed to be -Poles, and as all the way from Santa Maria northward the soil had been a -rich dark-red, domestic animals, children, and the garments of the -peasants themselves were dyed in that hue. Some of the dwellings were -like the plans of old Nuremburg brought to the tropics and set down in -the midst of the wilderness. There is a great difference between living -conditions in this region, where land is rarely more than five dollars -an acre, and Illinois, for example, with its schools, roads, and -community interests, yet settlers found much the same pioneer conditions -as this in Illinois when land was five dollars an acre there, and in -addition winters of snow and ice. - -In my sleeper, which had not had another passenger since it began its -journey at the Uruguayan boundary, the porter seemed to be hurt that -anyone should intrude upon his privacy. But if there was room to spare -in my car, the second-class coaches were sufficiently packed to make up -for it. Brazilian railway rules require that persons without shoes or -coats shall not ride first-class, hence it may have been something more -than price that made the wooden-benched cars so popular. Even the -first-class passenger-list had grown more and more shady and there was -something absorbing in the sight of pure white waiters serving and -kow-towing to mulattoes and part-Indians in the swaying dining-car. To -strangers, or at least to “gringos,” the waiters always brought the -change in 200-reis nickel pieces and in silver milreis, which look -almost exactly alike, carefully laid face down on the plate in the hope -that a natural error would increase their tips. - -I was aware of our being frequently stalled on some slight grade during -the night, yet when I finally awoke, to a cold clear sunrise, we had -crossed the River Iguassú into the state of Paraná, with an -intertropical vegetation and many _serrarías_, or sawmills. Nearly all -the morning we passed what I at first took to be small wild orange -trees, some ten feet high and set in rows and trimmed, with very dark -green leaves not unlike those of the elm in shape. Toward noon I learned -that this was the _herva matte_, known to us as “Paraguayan tea,” and -the most important product of the states of Santa Catharina and Paraná, -as cattle are of Rio Grande do Sul and coffee of São Paulo. The -gathering season was now at hand, but had not begun because the woods -were full of revolutionists, an argument between the two _matte_-growing -states having given a good excuse to several hundred bandits whom the -pusillanimous central government showed no ability to cope with during -all my stay in Brazil. - -The _herva matte_ is an evergreen shrub of the holly family, averaging -twelve feet in height, which has its habitat exclusively in the -temperate regions of eastern South America at an elevation of from -fifteen hundred to three thousand feet. In Paraná alone it is -distributed over 150,000 square kilometers, and it is found in six other -states, as well as in Paraguay and northeastern Argentine. It grows -wild, and the only cultivation it needs is the cutting away of the -jungle about it. Each bush produces annually some two hundred pounds of -leaves and branch-ends, which are reduced to about half that amount in -the “factory.” Here the sacks of dried leaves and sticks that come in -from the _sertão_ go through a stamping-mill that beats them almost to a -powder, after which the product is wrapped in hundred-pound lots in wet, -hairy cowhides that shrink as they dry until the bundle is stone-hard. -Great numbers of these deceptive looking bales may be seen at the -warehouses and stations in the _matte_ states. - -The descendants of the conquistadores acquired the _matte_ habit from -the Guaraní Indians, and it has become not merely an antidote for an -excessive meat diet but a social custom all the way from the -coffee-fields of Brazil to Patagonia. In former years _herva matte_ was -called “Jesuits’ tea,” for the same reason that quinine was introduced -to Europe as “Jesuits’ bark,” because the disciples of Loyola first -taught the Indian to gather it for trade purposes. About it has grown up -a complete system of etiquette and throughout all rural southeastern -South America the _matte_ bowl is the cup of greeting and of farewell; -not to offer it to a visitor, even a total stranger, upon his arrival, -is as serious an offense as for the visitor to refuse it. The bowl is a -dry, hollow gourd about the size and shape of a large pear, into the -open top of which is thrust a reed or a metal _bombilla_. Through this -each person sucks the somewhat bitter brew as the gourd passes from hand -to hand around the circle, amid aimless gossip in keeping with the -mañana temperament of the drinkers, every third or fourth person handing -it back to the servant—who is not infrequently the taciturn woman of the -house herself—silently waiting with a patience possible only among -Latin-Americans or real Orientals to proceed to the kitchen and refill -the gourd with boiling water. _Matte_ is cheaper than tea, for though -more leaves are needed for an infusion, they can be several times -re-steeped without loss in flavor and strength. Narcotic in its -influence, it has none of the after-effects of tea or coffee, but has on -the contrary many medicinal properties, being a blood purifier, tonic, -laxative, febrifuge, and stimulant to the digestive organs. The per -capita consumption of _matte_ in the state of Paraná is ten pounds a -year, vast quantities being exported; but, strangely enough, it has -never made its way outside South America, though foreigners who have -lived there come to demand it as loudly as the natives. - -The stations were usually mere stops at the foot of knolls on which were -larger or smaller clearings and a few paintless new shanties among the -scanty trees and charred logs that marked the beginning of man’s -hand-to-hand struggle with the rampant wilderness. Line after line of -the dark green parasol-pine-trees lay one behind the other to where they -grew blue-black on the far horizon. The increasing density of the jungle -was but one of many signs that we were gradually approaching the real -tropics. Each night the sun sank blood-red into the boundless _sertão_, -the symmetrical pine-trees standing out against the still faintly -blushing sky after all else had turned black, the moon a silver blotch -through the rising mist, out of which the sunrise broke each morning and -spread swiftly across the still trackless wilderness. - -One afternoon there appeared along a densely green tree-topped ridge in -the midst of rolling half-prairie the reddish-white town of Ponta -Grossa. Here the railway broke its rule and carried the train up to the -place, instead of leaving the climbing to the passengers themselves. -Vast brown vistas opened up as we rose to the level of the town, -picturesque with those brick-and-mud buildings and tile roofs which -appear so quickly wherever forest and lumber die out. Somewhere I had -acquired a letter of introduction to a merchant in Ponta Grossa. I found -him a lady-like little old man with evidences of some Indian ancestry, -who had traveled in Europe and was in close touch with the affairs of -the outside world, courteous and cultured, yet who still clung to the -Moorish-Iberian custom of considering his home a harem. For though I -should much rather have had a glimpse of Brazilian family life, he -permitted me to dine at the hotel and then insisted on spending -thousands of _reis_ for a carriage in which to drive me about town. No -Turkish seraglio is more jealous of its privacy than the average -Brazilian household; the brief explanation that “there are women there” -is considered ample excuse for any apparent lack of hospitality to men. -When we had visited the sawmills, the _matte_ “factory,” and the -waterworks-to-be of Ponta Grossa, my outdoor host insisted on driving me -down to the train, asserting that the scant half-mile was too far to -walk, and saw me off even to the extent of buying a platform ticket and -dismissing me with an embrace and a basket of tangerines from his own -garden. - -This time I had taken the branch line that runs a hundred and twenty -miles eastward to Curityba, capital of the state of Paraná, with an -elevation of nearly three thousand feet. It had all the earmarks of an -up-to-date city,—electric-lights and clanging street-cars, automobiles -and uniformed policemen, a large brewery to emphasize the German -element, though other Europeans were more conspicuous. Shops and offices -opened late, the dusting being barely commenced by nine, while schools, -as everywhere in Brazil, began at ten-thirty, a splendid training in -indolence for after life. It is often asserted that the predominance of -the white race is some day assured in southern Brazil, that all the -country below São Paulo bids fair to become a land of blonds. It will -scarcely be a pure white race, however, though the mixture that is -constantly going on makes it difficult to guess what the final amalgam -will be. Curityba certainly had no color-line prejudices. Here a -coal-black negro girl and a rosy-cheeked young Swedish woman lolled in a -doorway gossiping and laughing together like bosom companions; a Pole -with a negro wife showed off his mulatto children as if he were proud of -their quaint mahogany complexions; tow-headed Polish brides on the arm -of jet-black grooms stared proudly out upon the passer-by from the -windows of photograph galleries. Attractive blond girls of twenty -strolled the streets in bare legs and slippers as nonchalantly as the -slovenly race among whom they had been thrown; women from eastern -Europe, their heads covered with kerchiefs and driving little wagonettes -filled with country produce, halted to pass the time of day with African -street loafers; once I passed a girls’ school in which a teacher who was -almost an albino had an arm thrown affectionately about another who -would have been invisible against a blackboard. - -Nearly half of Brazil consists of an immense plateau between two and -three thousand feet above sea-level, falling abruptly into the Atlantic -and gradually flattening away northwestward into the great Amazon basin. -Though it is somewhat larger than the United States without its -dependencies, Brazil has almost no mountains except an insignificant -range along the coast, and almost no lakes. Many of its rivers rise very -near the Atlantic, but instead of breaking through the low coast range -they flow inland, those in the southern part of the country finally -emptying into the Plata and those beyond the divide into the Amazon. - -The branch line to Curityba descends from this plateau to Paranaguá on -the coast, the first-class coach bringing up the rear of a daily -afternoon train as mixed as the passengers it carried. We creaked -laboriously through heavy forests toward a fantastic mountain sky-line -far to the east, some of the vistas as striking as if we had been -approaching the Andes. Headlong streams and panoramas of tangled hills -awakened the vagabond spirit within and tempted me to cast aside ease -and respectability and plunge into the wilderness out of sight and sound -of jangling civilization. For a time we followed a rivulet, our little -wood-burning Baldwin spitting showers of sparks and cinders back upon -us; then all at once there opened out down a great gorge the first vista -since I had crossed the Andes from Chile of what might unhesitatingly be -called scenery. Far below lay a vast, rolling, heavily wooded, almost -mountainous world, little white towns here and there contrasting with -the distance-blue of the greenness, while farther off faintly seen -lagoons were backed by other densely blue-black hills. - -Suddenly the stream we had been following dropped headlong down a great -face of rock at a speed we dared not follow, breaking itself into white -cascades that repeated themselves a score of times before it disappeared -in the chartless wilderness. The train crawled cautiously along the edge -of precipices, circling slowly in vast curves in and out of the wooded -mountain that grew ever higher above us. Through tunnels and -rock-cuttings, across viaducts and lofty iron bridges, around -constricted loops where the train seemed to be pursuing its own tail, -like a frolicsome puppy, along stone-faced bottomless precipices we -pursued our descent, with the infinite caution of extremely old people. -A softness crept into the breeze; the feminine breath of the tropics -caressed our cheeks; the intense respiration of the jungle took to -droning in our ears. The vast, blue, wooded world far below, with its -white towns, its mirroring lagoons, its mysterious hazy recesses, -gradually yet imperceptibly climbed to meet us, while the breakneck -cliffs grew up beside us into sheer walls that seemed utterly -unscalable. It surely needed a man of vision to stare up at that -precipitous mountainside and decide that he could climb it with a -railroad. - -The short but decided descent of three thousand feet ended at length in -the somber, velvety valleys of Paranaguá, and the train calmed down from -its nervous tension into a mood more in keeping with the indolent, -tropical-wooded, sea-level world. It had suddenly become stickily warm. -Clothing that had often felt too thin on the plateau above grew -incredibly heavy, and as final proof that we had entered the real -tropics there fell upon us a sudden languid indifference to progress, -and we loitered about each station doing nothing for an unconscionable -length of time. Old women and boys, dressed in a few odd scraps of -garments wandered about with baskets of oranges, tangerines, and -bananas, but acted as if it were not of the slightest importance to them -whether the stuff was sold or not, as the baby did not need a new pair -of shoes anyway and it would be much less of a bore if school did not -keep at all. What a different philosophy of life the tropics bring even -to the man from temperate climes, and how quickly! Up on the plateau I -had become almost gloomy over a hole that had begun to appear in the -sole of a shoe; down here it seemed of so slight importance that all -memory of it quickly drifted out of my mind. There came a sunset like a -dozen pots of assorted paints kicked over by a mule, and dense, humid, -tropical night settled swiftly down upon us like an impenetrable pall. - -Paranaguá, a typical tropical seaport, is not on the sea at all but on -the narrow neck of one of those many lagoons stretching along the coast -of southern Brazil. For some time I wandered about town, barely able to -see the next footstep before me in the clinging, crape-like darkness. I -had a letter to a once well-known New York newspaper correspondent who -had reformed and gone to raising bananas, but he was not in town, and -though I talked with him by telephone I did not deliver the missive. For -it would have required twenty-four hours of travel by launch, canoe, and -ox-cart to reach the plantation where he was holding open house for the -vice president of the state and other solemnities, my evening clothes -had long since been misplaced and ... and anyway what’s the use of doing -anything in the tropics? It is so much easier to let things drift along -until it is too late. Finally, in the back room of a café, I ran across -several American residents engaged in the universal tropical pastime of -mixing whiskey with soda water. One of them headed the electric light -and bathtub syndicate of Paranaguá, neither of which improvements on -primitive society seemed to require his exclusive attention, for he had -time to cultivate genuine hospitality. Much talk, whiskey, soda, and -local beer had been consumed, however, before I managed to get in a hint -containing the word food. The Americans led me to the thoroughly -tropical establishment of a “Turk” who had once graced the United States -with his presence and who had there learned to concoct real ham and -eggs—with the slight exception of not soaking the salt out of the ham -and of frying the eggs to a frazzle. Here the consumption of words -continued until it was discovered that all the hotels, which were -unspeakable places anyway, had closed, and that I would do much better -to put up with the hospitable bathtub man. We waded through the dense -humid night, not to mention many acres of loose sand and veritable -streams of dew, to the outskirts of the sand-and-woods scattered town, -where I was soon introduced to an enormous double bed in the plantation -house of slave days which my fellow-countryman was guarding for the -absentee owner. - -Seen by daylight, Paranaguá has a very ancient stone customhouse, now a -barracks and once a Jesuit monastery, with the customary tradition of an -underground passage from it to an island a few miles out in the shallow -lagoon. There was one statue in town, a bronze bust among magnificent -royal palm-trees of “our dear Professor Sulano, who taught us all we -know and died in 1904, erected by his grateful pupils.” My own memory is -treacherous, but will some bright pupil kindly name the American cities -which have busts of the high school principal in front of the municipal -group? Dugout canoes full of oranges were drawn up on the beach, and -fish of every imaginable size, shape, and variety were offered for sale. -The population was of that mongrel sort that I was due to find -throughout Brazil wherever European colonists have not appeared in any -great number. It was not until ten that the sun had drunk up the vast -banks of cheese-thick mists that hang often over this corner of the -world, and then the humidity remained to help the despotic red sun that -burst upon us emphasize the advantage of a bathing-suit over customary -garb. Yet even the American residents insisted on wearing full Broadway -dress of heavy black suits with vests, topped with derbies! To appear in -less, they explained, would be to disgrace their native land and to lose -all dignity in the eyes of the natives, though such garb was probably -one of the reasons why they seemed so lifeless and could under no -provocation be enticed into the crushing sunshine. - -By mid-afternoon the train began to wind itself back up to the Brazilian -plateau, the air taking on a refreshing coolness the moment we began to -climb. Next morning, when I was pulled out of bed in Curityba in time to -catch the 5:30 train back to the main line, on which a broken nap in an -uncomfortable seat was chiefly dreams about icebergs, I would have given -anything within reason for one of those scorned hours in Paranaguá. At -every station where we stopped for more than an instant all passengers -tumbled off to partake of coffee. For a woman or man of the vicinity was -sure to have a table in the shade of the station, with many little white -cups that were filled with thick black coffee as the travelers deluged -upon them. The Brazilian who is not permitted to drop off at least once -an hour and drink from one to four such cups at a _tostão_ (a hundred -reis) each, and rush back to the train again as the warning bell rings, -would feel that he was being cheated of his birthright. - -My next stop was at a houseless siding just south of the boundary line -of São Paulo state. Here is the “Fazenda Morongava,” where the railway -and its attendant corporation runs a model ranch in charge of a Texas -Scotchman, a central point of the ten million acres it owns in Brazil -and Bolivia. An official telegram had ordered the conductor to set me -down there, when I discovered that the private car hitched on behind us -was filled with guests of the company, and was due to be sidetracked at -the same spot. It was after midnight that I awoke to hear the porter -carrying out his instructions to tell the switchman to show me up to the -_fazenda_ buildings, more than a mile away over rocky hills—and to note -with dismay that my newly appointed guide had a wooden leg! But a huge -form loomed up out of the brightly moonlighted night and I was soon -rolling away over the hills with a Colorado cattleman in a two-wheeled -gig toward a huge farmhouse built half a century ago in slave times and -now surrounded by several other and more modern buildings. - -The private-car party was already scattered over the landscape from -breakfast-room to champion-pig sty when I awoke, to be at once invited -to wage battle with a genuine American breakfast ranging all the way -from honest-to-goodness bacon, made on the _fazenda_, but unknown in -Brazil at large, down to hot cakes. Unfortunately I had so long before -lost both the habit and the opportunity of battling with American -breakfasts that I was quickly floored, in spite of being cheered on by -the genuine American housewife in charge. But my lack of endurance was -fully made up for by the last of the private-car party to leave the -table, a man who had been sent down by a Chicago packing-house to start -a similar establishment in São Paulo. In all my travels I have never met -his equal at mixing the flesh of “hawgs” with eggs and hot biscuits and -butter and coffee and hot cakes, whether the feat be considered from the -point of view of quantity or speed. During his championship exhibition -he bemoaned the fact that, though he was barely forty, he had suffered -greatly in walking up the hill from the car that morning, and for the -life of him he could not understand how he had become so fat, since as a -farm boy twenty years before he had been “lean as a rail.” - -In addition to this exhibit our “house party” included a French chairman -of the board of directors of the railways of southern Brazil, who had -run over for nine days to learn all about them before going to Persia on -a similar mission. Besides his staff, several uncatalogued hangers-on, -and the family of the manager, there was the American ranch personnel, -ranging from the fat and jolly _fazenda_ doctor who drove constantly -about the estate in a sulky behind racing mules, to a score of boss -cowboys who shocked the Europeans and Brazilians by addressing everyone, -be he manager, packing-house expert, or chairman of the board of -directors, in exactly the same manner,—“What, ain’t you fellers been -down to the barn yet? Y’ ought ’a shake a leg an’ see them there new -heifers we jes’ got in.” Now and then we caught a fleeting glimpse of -the real servant body, the native laborers, cattle herders, and gauchos, -who “knew their place” in the European-Brazilian sense and whom the -manager had cured of the time-honored custom of alternating three -working days a week with four days of drunken festivity by “firing” on a -moment’s notice and establishing the fixed rule that “if there’s to be -any dhrinkin’ on this ranch, I’ll do it myself.” The peons and native -cowboys were paid from fifty to a hundred thousand reis a month, and -“found,” and with local prohibition in force and gambling scowled -upon—to their mind inexplicable “gringo” idiosyncrasies—they were often -hard put to it to get rid of their money. - -Not being overwhelmingly interested in “hawgs,” I accepted the -invitation of a boss cowboy and rode nearly all day among the hillside -pastures. The degenerate tropical animal under it was not exactly my -idea of the noun equus, but the Texas saddle was all a saddle should be, -and a great improvement on others I had bestridden in South America. The -cattle included crosses between native cows and zebu bulls, which had -turned out lanky and of poor butcher’s quality, though they withstood -the heat and ticks better than pedigree stock. We saw several fleet -deer, visited a great canyon with a waterfall, the striking of which on -a ledge of rock hundreds of feet below gave an intermittent sound like -that of a compound engine puffing up a stiff grade, and had a native -dinner, at an isolated American cowboy’s shack, of rice, black beans, -and _farinha_ (a coarse meal made of ground mandioca, used to stiffen -soups or eaten dry all over Brazil), topped off by coffee and hot -biscuits. Magnificent panoramas rolling away into blue distances opened -out as we jogged up and down over the great folds of earth. Though it -was midwinter, it was so only in name, and the climate could scarcely -have been improved upon. The hottest that had ever been recorded here -was 84 degrees, and 70 was the lowest of a winter day, while the fresh -cool nights required a blanket the year round. - -The Americans, from the manager down, were agreed that all the land of -southern Brazil was of excellent fertility. It was better where there -was timber, but the _campo_, which the natives will not try to cultivate -because it does not yield immediate results, will also produce in -abundance almost any temperate or semi-tropical crop, if it is worked a -year or two to let the air into it and is sufficiently manured to offset -the two per cent. of iron which makes the soil so red. Not the least of -the advantages over the floor-flat pampas, from the grazier’s point of -view, was the rolling character of the ground. With hollows and ravines -there were no floods, yet always water, so that the cattle did not wear -themselves out in the dry season by wandering in search of it. Thousands -of head of stock were born, raised, and driven to slaughter in the same -hollow, the country being often not even wire-fenced. All were -enthusiastic over southern Brazil as a land of promise for white -colonists with youth, health, a little patience, who were willing to -earn their living from the soil instead of “sponging” on others, after -the fashion of the natives; and all considered the Argentine -overestimated, just now in the limelight, but with no such great future -before it as southern Brazil. - -I continued my journey in the private-car of my fellow-guests, which was -picked up by the tri-weekly train some time during the second night. -When the sun again rose above the horizon, we found ourselves in the -richest and most famous state of Brazil, the coffee-growing land of São -Paulo. Our coach had been hooked on directly behind the engine, ahead of -the baggage-car, so that we had to get off to reach the -dining-car—whereby hangs a tale. The “hawg” man and I reached there -together, without his interpreter, whose place I had to take and explain -at great length why any man, least of all one whose façade quaked as he -walked, could not be satisfied with small cakes and coffee, like -reasonable human beings, instead of demanding eggs and _toucinho_—which -means bacon in a Portuguese dictionary but salt pork in a Brazilian -mind—and getting into a rage because there was none of the latter on -board and commanding a large steak in its place. Then, as if that were -not trouble enough, my famished ward proved himself a poor traveler in -Brazil by complaining vociferously just because one poor little fly got -cooked with his eggs. It may have been my fault, too; for I had not yet -grown accustomed to the Spanish letter “l” becoming an “r” in -Portuguese, and no doubt, speaking with a Castilian accent, I -inadvertently ordered flied eggs. - -Sorocaba was the largest town of the day’s journey, and with it the -cruder rural section, the rude wooden houses of new colonists, and the -parasol pine-trees largely disappeared, while palms increased. Nowhere -from Montevideo northward had I seen an acre of sterile land, though -certainly not one-tenth of what I had seen was under cultivation. On a -pole before each house now was a white banner with the likeness of a -saint, which had hung there since St. Peter’s Day a fortnight before. -The railroad made a complete circle around São Roque in its deep lap of -hills, and gradually, in mid-afternoon, there grew up a constant -succession of villages. We passed groups of unquestionably city people, -and presently São Paulo itself burst upon us, far away and strewn up -along, over, and about a dry and treeless ridge. Then it disappeared -again for quite a time, while the villages changed to urban scenes, -streets began to take on names, electric-cars to spin along beside us, -endless lines of light-colored houses of concrete with red-tile roofs -appeared, and at last we came to a halt in a great glass-vaulted modern -station in the second city of Brazil—second, that is, in population, for -it is first in energy and industry, capital of the most progressive -state of the union and the first real city on the main line north of -Montevideo. - -Swinging my trunk under one arm, I set out to find a lodging in keeping -with my sadly depleted pocketbook. The first part of that task was in no -way difficult. Of all the cities of the earth, as far as I know it, -perhaps only Paris has more hotels, _pensões_, and lodging-houses per -capita than São Paulo. There seemed to be at least one for every -half-dozen possible guests. In all but the best of them there were two -or more beds in each room, as if they some day expected to have a -veritable flood of clients; but this prospective congestion mattered -little, for they rarely had anyone to share the room, though they -doubled the bill if one asked to have a room alone. When it came to -considering these accommodations on the score of cost, however, the task -of a man with a flattened pocketbook was serious, for the prices in the -poorest “doss-house” were appalling. Democracy and popular education, -even their pale reflections, seem to bring with them the cult of the -white collar, which grows more fervent as one approaches the equator; -hence scores of muscular Spanish and Portuguese immigrants had opened -hotels in São Paulo who should have been out planting corn or hoeing -coffee. Competition is not always a benefit. The hotels of São Paulo -were atrocious in price and poor in quality precisely because there was -so much competition, scores of hotel-keepers, each with runners, touts, -and a host of hangers-on, trying to make a fortune in six months out of -the three or four guests a week which fate sent them, that they might -return to end their days at ease in the land of their birth. For it was -not the native _Paulistas_ who ran the countless hostelries of all -classes, but easy-fortune seekers from overseas. - -[Illustration: The admirable Municipal Theater of São Paulo] - -[Illustration: Santos, the Brazilian coffee port] - -[Illustration: A glimpse of the Rio sky-line from across the bay in -Nictheroy] - -[Illustration: The slums of Rio de Janeiro are on the tops of her rock -hills] - -The English writer Southey, who wrote a six-volume history of Brazil, -complained of the “tremendous ascents” and the thinness of the air on -the plateau of São Paulo—with its elevation of nearly 2,500 feet! -Certainly the man who has rambled about the Andes feels only gratitude -for that altitude, which lifts him above the sweltering heat of the -coastlands. Even to the casual observer, however, there seems no other -fitting reason for founding a city at this particular spot, and one is -quickly driven to printed authority to account for such taste. In 1554 -the Jesuit, José de Anchietta, had gone to the town of Piratinanga to -establish a school, but being dissatisfied with that village, he ordered -its inhabitants, in the dogmatic Jesuit manner of those good old days, -to remove to a site on the Tieté. Now the Tieté is scarcely a brook, -rising on the Brazilian plateau near the Atlantic and flowing away -across country to the Paraná, finally to join the Plata and pour its -scanty waters into the South Atlantic. There are a dozen real rivers to -the north and south of this insignificant stream and a hundred sites -that would have seemed better suited to the good padre’s purpose, but -the Jesuit insisted and at length the people of Piratinanga obeyed his -command; and because the town that was destined to grow to be the -industrial capital and the railway center of Brazil was founded on June -25, it was named St. Paul in honor of that day’s saint. - -One must get some little way out of São Paulo to appreciate its -situation clearly. Built on plump low hills in a rolling, treeless -country, rather dry and reddish of soil, the nature of the ground gives -splendid views of the town from many points of vantage, and in tramping -about its environs one finds every now and then the reddish, -light-colored city spread out in almost its entirety below or above him. -In a general sense the city and the region about it would be called -flat, yet in detail it is by no means so. The character of its site -gives São Paulo an intricate network of streets, with viaducts over -great gullies and street-cars passing above and under one another. The -great Viaducto do Chá stands so high above the great ravine through the -center of town that it is a favorite place of threatened suicide among -lovesick youths. - -Its unexpected position as capital and metropolis of the world’s -greatest coffee-producing state has given this once bucolic country town -so extraordinary a growth that the Cidade of the nineteenth century is -now merely the central tangle of streets in the heart of town. From this -nucleus run splendid avenues lined with a bushy species of shade-trees, -and residence sections with dwellings of coffee kings, ranging all the -way from sumptuous comfort to magnificent and palatial eyesores, spread -away across town in various directions. São Paulo has more than half a -million inhabitants, a municipal theater for opera, drama, and concerts -scarcely second to any in the western hemisphere, and an up-and-coming -manner which quickly establishes its claim to equality with modern -cities of the temperate zone. The “Light and Power Company” runs an -excellent service of open street-cars and gives the city a nightly -brilliancy that is not often reached in cities of its size. Its -immaculate policemen carry speckless white clubs, thrust into leather -scabbards except when directing traffic. No one has ever known them to -strike a man with a club, but they are at least awe-inspiring -representatives of law and order. - -The extraordinary activity of São Paulo is plainly due to its European -immigrants,—Portuguese, Spanish, especially Italian. Whether it is -because they come from the northern part of the peninsula, where sterner -characters grow, or that they feel peculiarly at home in the Brazilian -environment, the Italians of São Paulo stand noticeably high in the -community. Many of the important business houses, some of the -professions, and much of the wealth is in their hands; among the rather -insignificant-looking hybrid Brazilians they are conspicuous for their -better physique and greater energy. Modern and energetic though it is, -however, São Paulo swarms with non-producers. At the stations crowds of -able-bodied _carregadores_, paying a high municipal license and waiting -most of the day in vain for an errand, try to recoup themselves by -demanding a thousand reis or more for carrying the traveler’s bag across -the street. The city has so many shops and hawkers and peddlers that one -might easily fancy it in a densely populated country, rather than in one -where land is everywhere suffering for cultivation. Countless little -liquor shops are run by grasping individuals without initiative, anyone -with cash or credit enough to buy a dozen bottles of liquor seeming to -choose this high road to opulence. Vendors of tickets for both the -national and state lotteries make day and night hideous with their -uproar and crowd the principal streets with their booths; hordes of -silk-clad, bejeweled French and Jewish adventuresses roll luxuriantly to -and fro every afternoon in their automobiles. - -The principal place of meeting for the rank and file is the _Jardim da -Luz_, a “popular” park retreat of the German beer-garden style, well -crowded of an evening, especially when a municipal or military band -plays. Here, too, vendors of strong and weak drink are ubiquitous, their -tables in the open air, their prices posted on the trees, yet demanding -500 reis for a glass of sweetened water, with the waiter still to be -satisfied. Everyone moves with an almost tropical leisure, though there -are evenings in this July midwinter when autumn garments are not out of -place and not a few young fops affect overcoats. Yet São Paulo is, on -the whole, a less showy town than one expects. Foreigners are so usual -in any gathering that one attracts little notice. Though perhaps a -majority of such a “popular” crowd is of the physically insignificant, -negroid mixture common to much of Brazil, in the strolling throng may be -seen every nationality from tow-headed Norwegian girls—about whom there -are suggestions of the effects of a tropical climate and environment in -slackening social morals among any race—to a Japanese out on the edge of -the night, with a far-away-across-the-Pacific look in his -cynical-inscrutable eyes out of all keeping with his commonplace -“European” garb. - -Every stroll beyond the city limits well repaid the dusty exertion. -Evidently the year’s shipment of rain, like so many carelessly billed -supplies from the North, had been carried past its destination, for the -region about São Paulo was deadly dry at a season when it should have -been verdant, and the newspapers reported the churches of Buenos Aires -filled day and night with people praying that the celestial waterworks -might be shut off. The cloud effects on the Brazilian plateau are so -striking that São Paulo was perhaps more beautiful on a gray day than on -a bright one when the glare brought out something of squalor. Out at -Ypiranga on the bank of a tiny stream, where Emperor Pedro I gave the -“cry of independence” that eventually shook Brazil free from Portugal, -there is a remarkably good museum full of a wealth of historical -material,—mementoes of the aboriginal inhabitants, splendid collections -of the fauna of Brazil, hundreds of _borboletas_, or butterflies, of -which the country has an incredible variety in size and color, -innumerable species of _beija-flores_ (“kiss-flowers,” or -humming-birds), many _pica-paos_ (“pick-sticks,” which are none other -than woodpeckers); strange specimens of the vulture family known as João -Velho (“Old John”). - -Or the five-mile tramp out to Penha is no waste of time. The road passes -through many market gardens of black soil in the bottomlands. Along the -way are Italian husbandmen with wide heavy mattocks, Sicilian -stocking-caps like the chorus of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on their heads, -Egyptian water-dips on poles with American oil-cans as buckets, Gallego -ox-carts with solid wooden wheels and axles that shriek along the -highway, much cabbage and lettuce, a few potatoes, grapes, baskets of -strawberries almost the year round. Pack-mules and the raucous cry of -muleteers plodding soft-footed in the dust behind them, one person to -each milk-can of a gallon or two, carrying it on his head to town, there -to sell it by the cupful—no wonder milk costs its weight in silver—and -much more may be seen spread out across the reddish landscape bounded by -the low rolling hills, light-wooded in places and distance-blue in -color, of the coast range. The town of Penha is pitched on the summit of -a knoll with a striking view of São Paulo, five miles away, and a shrine -to which the pious flock in great numbers. Inside the otherwise -uninteresting church is an ornate Virgin who is credited with miraculous -cures, and her chamber overflows with evidences of gratitude from her -devotees,—hundreds of pictures by native “artists,” atrocious -photographs of accidents posed for after they had taken place, that the -miraculously rescued victim might carry out the promise made in the heat -of fear to the Virgin, the latter always represented somewhere in the -upper right-hand corner of the picture in the act of saving the devotee -from appalling sudden death in the very nick of time. Here a fat man is -being snatched from beneath the wheels of a heavy truck, there a baby is -shown safely deposited on the fender of a street-car, or a countryman -falling from his horse is landing upright with divine assistance. Far -more numerous than these pictorial atrocities, however, are the wax -imitations of all parts of the body. A sign on the wall announced that -“only things that are decent may be shown in the miracle room,” but -words have not the same meanings in different climes and races, and -little was left to the imagination, though no doubt the rule cuts down -appreciably the material evidences of cures. How widespread is -superstition and the fostering of it even in the progressive state of -São Paulo is shown by the fact that a month fills the room to -overflowing. During the few minutes I was there a man brought a wax -foot, a buxom young woman a breast, and a mulatto crone a hand which no -doubt was meant to represent one of her own, though it was snow-white -except where she had painted a red streak across the back to indicate -the portion she wished, or had already had, cured. But the Virgin of -Penha draws no color-line, for her own complexion is by no means -strictly Caucasian, and her quadroon swarthiness no doubt gives the -average of her devotees a comfortable feeling of racial propinquity. - -Most famous, perhaps, of all the sights in and about São Paulo is the -“Instituto Butantan,” known among the English-speaking residents as the -“snake farm.” A mile walk out beyond the Pinheiros car-line brings one -to this important and well-conducted establishment, first started by -private initiative but now receiving government aid. On the crest of a -knoll are several concrete buildings and about them scores of -snake-houses, half-spherical cement structures some four feet high -inclosed in sections by low walls and moats, where thousands of snakes -lie basking in the sun. By Brazilian law any public carrier must -transport free of charge from its place of capture to the “snake farm” -of São Paulo any new species of snake discovered. There are one hundred -and eighty known species of reptile in Brazil—the Portuguese word for -snake, by the way, is _cobra_—of which ten are known to be venomous; in -other words when a snake appears even in Brazil there is only one chance -in eighteen that his bite is harmful, and the odds are eighteen to one -that he is just a harmless fellow who wants to cuddle up in your lap for -company. But the venomous ones are venomous indeed. There is the deadly -_cascavel_, or rattlesnake, the _jararaca_, worst of all the _jararaca -de rabo branco_, the _jararaca_ with a white tail. Aside from its mere -museum or “zoo” function, the “Instituto Butantan” has two very -practical purposes. Three serums are made here for snakebites and sent -to all parts of the republic, remedies that have saved the life of many -a _sertanejo_ dwelling in wilderness isolation back in the _sertões_ of -Brazil, where an ignorant pill-peddler, who calls himself “_doutor_,” -but whose training as a physician is largely imaginary, sometimes -appears not more than once or twice a year. The venomous snakes are -required to furnish their own antidote. A uniformed negro attendant -springs over the low wall and moat into an inclosure of dangerous -snakes, pins one to the ground with a sort of iron cane, picks it up by -the throat with his bare hands, and forces it to spit its yellowish -venom into a piece of cheesecloth drawn tight over the opening of a -glass receptacle. Healthy young mules are inoculated with this, and the -serum produced in much the same way as smallpox vaccine. - -The second purpose of the institute is to breed and distribute the -_mussurama_. This is a native black snake sometimes reaching eight feet -in length, entirely harmless to man but which feeds exclusively on other -snakes, venomous ones by preference. Within the moats that inclose this -species are many others which only repeated assurance would convince the -novice are not dangerous. The non-venomous snakes are in general larger -than the others, and may also be distinguished by the lack of any -special tail, being, as it were, all of one piece. If the employees of -the institute, from the scientists in charge of serum-making to the -negro snake-herders, are to be believed, there are other differences: -the harmless snakes lay eggs, while the others produce their young -alive; the former must be fed, and the latter have never been caught -taking nourishment since the institute was started. Some of the harmless -_cobras_ attain considerable size, though by no means any such as they -do in popular jungle tales. The largest in captivity at São Paulo was a -species of constrictor about sixteen feet long and as large around as a -rain-pipe. They vary widely, too, in habits. The _sucurý_ is huge, -clumsy, and sluggish; a large brown snake in the same inclosure was -almost lightning-like in its movements, snapping at the flap of the -attendant’s trousers and returning to the attack with incredible -swiftness as often as the latter threw him away with his crooked iron -stick. Like so many really harmless creatures he is evidently given his -vicious temper to make up for the lack of any real defense. This reptile -is said to follow for miles any creature that angers it, and though its -bite is harmless, only a man with long experience or iron nerve could -resist taking to his heels when this personification of speed and anger -dashes upon him with its great jaws wide open. All such species, -however, are mere souvenirs of the _sertão_, of no other use than to -keep company for the _mussurama_, great numbers of which are sent to the -snake-infested areas of Brazil as rapidly as they attain mature size. - -On my second or third visit, after I had won his gratitude with my -kodak, the chief snake-herder arranged a special snake-eating contest. -Into a moated compound of _mussuramas_ he threw a _jararaca de rabo -branco_, the most deadly snake of Brazil. Far from pouncing upon the -newcomer, the black cannibals gave it no attention whatever. The -attendant stepped over the wall and introduced the visitor to his hosts -one by one. The first turned up his nose at it, which drew forth the -information that this one had eaten only a week before and was not yet -hungry. The second had not dined for at least a fortnight. No sooner had -the _jararaca_ been tossed near him than he sprang forward and wound -himself about the other so rapidly that the eye could not follow the -individual movements, kinking and knotting him in an intricate -entanglement in which only their difference in color distinguished one -slimy body from the other. The two snakes were almost of a size, about -three feet long. The _jararaca_ writhed in agony, opened his huge mouth -with its two ugly looking fangs on the upper jaw, and struck hard into -the black body of his opponent, the yellow venom running down over his -scales. The only response of the oppressor was to increase the -entanglement until the head of the _jararaca_ was confined in a coil, as -his own was protected within the folds of his own body. - -For more than twenty minutes after his first sudden movements the -_mussurama_ scarcely moved a scale. I began to think he had gone to -sleep again. Then gradually, imperceptibly, almost as slowly as the -minute-hand of a clock moves, he withdrew his own head from the coil -that had protected it, looked cautiously about to see whether danger -threatened, then moving one muscle at a time, with the patience of a -professional wrestler, he worked his frog-mouth sidewise slowly along -the body of the _jararaca_ until he reached the neck. Pulling the head -carefully out of its confining coil, he crushed it flat by slow pressure -of his powerful mouth. Only then did he appear satisfied and at ease. -Disentangling himself, he began to swallow the _jararaca_ head first, -working his way along it in successive bites at about the speed with -which a lady might put on the finger of a new glove, now and then -wriggling his body to increase its capacity. Once he stopped, rolled a -bit, and took a long breath, then went steadily on until the white tail -of the _jararaca_, looking for a moment like a long tongue of his own, -disappeared entirely, perhaps four minutes from the time the swallowing -had begun, and the snake that was left where two had been before crawled -lazily away to his cement house for a fortnight’s sleep. - -I remained for some time in São Paulo not only because it proved to be a -city worth exploring, but because I had come to the end of my railroad -passes, and unless I could discover a new source of supply I faced the -painful and unusual experience of having to pay my fare. To tell the -truth, so weary had I become of train riding and respectability that I -found myself planning to slip into my oldest clothes, pick up a -fellow-beachcomber, and take to the road for the three hundred and -twenty miles left to Rio. But short samples convinced me that such a -walk would not prove entirely a pleasure jaunt and railway passes -evidently do not grow on São Paulo bushes. I was forced, therefore, to -fall back on my own slender funds. There is frequent and comfortable -service from São Paulo to Rio four times a day in twelve hours by day or -night on the government railway, but a more pleasant as well as cheaper -route appeared to be that by way of Santos and an ocean steamer; -moreover, it seemed more fitting to enter the far-famed harbor of the -Brazilian capital by the harbor’s mouth than to sneak in at the back -door by the government railway. - -An excellent express of the British “São Paulo Railway Company” left the -industrial capital at eight in the morning and raced thirty of the fifty -miles to Santos across level country in less than an hour. Then we -halted at Alto da Serra for the inevitable coffee and a new engine. This -was small and inclosed within a sort of car with glass-protected -observation platform, for almost the only work required of it was to -hook us, two cars at a time, to a cable running on large upright wheels -between the rails, two small trains counterbalancing each other at -opposite ends of the cable making little motive power necessary. Just -beyond was the _abertura_, the “opening” or jumping-off place, where the -world suddenly spread out far below, some of it visible, some hidden by -vast banks of mist slowly melting under the torrid sun. The cable let us -down more than two thousand feet in a very few miles, the descending and -ascending trains passing each other automatically on a switch halfway -down. The road was so swift that the buildings along the way seemed -sharply tilted uphill, but though the valley was densely wooded with -scrub growth, it was only a narrow one, so that while the engineering -feat may be as remarkable, the scenery was by no means equal to the -descent to Paranaguá. It took as long to lower us to Piassagüera in its -banana-fields, only eight miles without stops, as it had to cover the -thirty miles with several halts from São Paulo to the opening of the -range. This road, over which virtually all the coffee grown in Brazil -starts to the outside world, is reputed to be one of the richest -concessions on earth, though its charter restricts its net profits to a -certain percentage of the invested capital, the rest going to the -government. The company has always had great difficulty in devising ways -and means to spend its surplus earnings and keep them from falling into -the public coffers. It is rumored that all the switch-lamps are -silver-plated. The latest plan of the harassed directors is to electrify -the road, but to the casual observer this would seem exceedingly unwise, -for heavy coffee trains coasting down the hill might store up -electricity enough to run the entire road, and with no more coal to buy -at the breath-taking price of that commodity in Brazil the problem of -spending their surplus would become hopeless. - -Santos is even older than São Paulo, having been founded by Thomé de -Souza two years earlier. Not so long ago it was a pesthole, noted -especially for its yellow fever. Those unpleasant days are forever gone, -though it is still not a health resort and many of its people prefer to -live in São Paulo and come down daily on business. If it was not always -raining in torrents during my stay there, at least it was overhung by a -soggy, humid heat that had nothing in common with the cool, clear -atmosphere of São Paulo. Such air as arises in Santos drags its way -sluggishly through the streets, and there was a heavy, blue-mood -temperament about the place quite unlike the larger city up the hill. - -This languid, gloomy mood pervaded even the club in which a group of -Americans sit all day long, day after day, “mopping up booze,” -exchanging the chips that pass in the night, and buying coffee. The last -is their appointed task, but it is a light one. Every now and then a -dealer or a native messenger comes in with a name, a price, and one or -two other hieroglyphics scratched on a slip of paper; one of the buyers -lays aside his cards long enough to “o.k.” it, and the deed is done. -Santos exports a million dollars’ worth of produce to the United States -each year, “about one hundred per cent. of which is coffee.” When one -compares the retail price of this commodity in the American market with -what the planters of São Paulo state get for it, the wonder arises as to -where the difference goes. Some of it, of course, goes to the -world-weary men who spend their days exchanging chips at the club in -Santos; transportation takes its full share; a high ad valorem export -tax goes to the federal government; a similar impost of five francs a -sack goes to the State of São Paulo; the municipalities through which it -passes do not allow themselves to be forgotten; the European builders of -the port improvements exact their generous pound of flesh; and “official -charges” thrust out a curved palm at every step, so that whoever drinks -coffee helps generously to support the plethora of mulatto politicians -of Brazil. Yet even then the State of São Paulo is not satisfied with -the price paid for its principal product and in order that this may fall -no lower prohibitive taxes now make it impossible to lay out new coffee -plantations within the state. - -In all the business section of Santos there are pungently scented -warehouses in which coffee is picked over by hand by women and children -whose knowledge of sanitary principles is embryonic; while down at the -wharves the coffee-porters give the town a picturesque touch. Long lines -of European laborers, dressed in undershirt, cotton trousers, a cloth -belt, and a tight skull-cap, all more or less ragged, discolored and -soaked with sweat, trot from train to warehouse or from warehouse to -ship, each with a sack of coffee set up on his neck, moving with a jerk -of the hips and keeping the rest of the body quite rigid. Their manners -are gayer than one might expect of men constantly bearing such burdens. -The law requires that each sack weigh exactly sixty kilograms, about 132 -pounds, that the state may levy its tax without difficulty; and the men -are paid sixty reis for every sack they carry. In the slave days of -thirty years and more ago this coffee-carrying was done by African -chattels, trotting in unison to the time of their melancholy-boisterous -native melodies. Now there is not a drop of African blood among the -carriers, though there were not a few haughty negroes in uniform sitting -in the shade superintending the job and down on a tiny cruiser nearby -all the sailors were of that race. The Portuguese have driven out the -negro carriers by their greater strength and diligence, but they in turn -are being superseded by modern improvements. - -“Brazil is no good any more,” grumbled a sweat-soaked son of Lisbon with -whom I spoke. “It is forbidden now to carry two sacks at a time, and -these great carrier-belts they are putting in, as well as the -auto-trucks, are robbing us of our livelihood.” - -Santos has now grown almost wholly around a steep, rocky hill that was -once on its outskirts, spreading in wide, right-angled streets lined by -pretentious light-colored dwellings to the seashore, with several large -bathing-season hotels and many fine beaches along the scalloped coast. -Up at the top of this hill in the center of the flat modern town is an -ancient place of pilgrimage known as the “Santuario de Nossa Senhora de -Monte Serrat,” overflowing, like that of Penha, with wax imitations of -cures. Prices were distressingly high in Santos. Bananas, which overload -the landscape about the town, cost 600 reis each in any restaurant; and -all else was in proportion. No doubt milk must be sold at 32 cents a -quart in a town where the milkmen drive about in luxurious go-carts, -dressed as if on their way to a wedding. But such things are painful to -the wanderer who has already begun to doubt his ability to pay his way -home from the next port, particularly when he finds that for once there -is no steamer bound thither for several days, and that the fare for the -overnight sea-trip is half as much as that to Europe. - -It was too late to change my plans and make the journey to Rio by rail, -however, and I made the best of the delay by joining a Sunday excursion -to Guarajá, a beach with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that was being “boomed” a -few miles out through the wilderness. A little steamer carried us from -the Santos docks to a station across the harbor, from which a tiny steam -railroad runs off through the jungle. The benches were hard, the toy -engine incessantly spat smoke, cinders, and fire back upon us, and a -woman of the laboring class was jammed into close, popular-excursion -contact with me throughout the journey. But the beach of Guarajá was -fine and hard, and the day brilliant and clear. Chalets, bandstands, and -all the Palm Beach paraphernalia recalled the season of six to eight -weeks during which coffee kings and their mistresses hold high revel and -yield the promoters a good year’s profit on their investment. Natives, -both men and women, had here and there rolled up their trousers or the -feminine counterpart and gone wading, but evidently it was not -considered the proper season to swim, for all the heat of midwinter -July, or else the community had the customary South American fear of -“wetting the body all over.” Gringos may always take their own risks, -however, and by dint of long inquiry I found I could get an ill-fitting -bathing-suit and the key to a bathhouse, all for a mere 2000 reis, and I -went in alone. - -It was the first time I had been in or upon the sea since entering South -America way up on the gulf of Panama more than two years before. I -plunged in and was soon diving under the combers and enjoying myself -hugely, when I suddenly found that I could not touch bottom, and that -the more I tried the less I touched. This would not have mattered had I -not realized by some indefinable sense that I was not only in an ebbing -tide but that I was caught in an undertow which was dragging me swiftly -seaward. The buildings and the excursionists on the shore were growing -slowly but steadily smaller. I waved an arm above the water and -attracted the attention of a group of men, but it was evident by their -indecisive actions that they were “Spigs” and that no help would come -from that quarter, though they might be of use in testifying before the -coroner’s jury. Among the Sunday crowd on the shore and the hotel -veranda arose more stir than I had yet caused anywhere in Brazil, and -the bathhouse attendant who had taken the 2000 reis away from me rushed -down to the spray’s edge frantically waving his arms. For the next -twenty minutes or so I had visions of navigating the high seas without a -ship, but as I did not confine myself during that time to smiling at the -vision, but took to performing superhuman feats of swimming, I was -suddenly surprised, not to say relieved, to feel my feet strike sand, -and what might have been a coroner’s inquest turned out to be nothing -but a lesson for the foolhardy. When I returned to dress, the attendant -said that he had forgotten to tell me that certain parts of this beach -had a very dangerous undertow. Posthumous information was to be expected -of a Brazilian; but when the American of Santos who had suggested my -spending the Sunday at Guarajá replied to my mention of the entirely -personal incident, while we were lunching at the Sportsman Café next -day—at his expense—with “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that is the most -dangerous beach in South America, hardly a Sunday passes without someone -drowning there,” I could not but thank him fervently for his kind -warning. - -The steamer of the Spanish line owned by the Jesuits spent most of -Tuesday in “leaving within five minutes,” during which the passengers -all but succumbed to uproar, congestion, and perspiration. I found -myself packed into a tiny two-berth cabin with two other travelers whom -I should not naturally have chosen as companions; nowhere was there a -spot clean and large enough on which to sit down. Once a _refresco_, a -glass of sickly sweetened water, was served to us as a special favor -just before we choked to death, and finally about five in the afternoon -we let go the wharf, made a nearly complete circle with the “river” on -which Santos is located, and dipping our flag to its last fort, were -soon out on the high seas, the roll of which I had almost forgotten. - - - - - CHAPTER VIII - AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO - - -I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. -On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned -fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the -sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a -moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along -the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly -over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a -long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of -great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the -scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest -spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of -the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the -disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes. - -The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was -walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer -rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had -not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze -of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest -vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue -background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many -striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched -in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was -strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid -form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the -form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the _morros_ which -everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them -crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the -green background. - -But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is -still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at -a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a -turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the -_Minas Geraes_ that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and -finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been -rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from -a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring -boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to -the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of -them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever -profit the ships pick up on the high seas. - -I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I -decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or -Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to -occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible -among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon -and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute -for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like -abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext. -This and the _feijão_, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with -now and then a bit of _xarque_, dried or salted beef, added to give it -distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such -rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink -furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical -Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring -advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily -colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as -our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening -upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had -not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the -snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over -everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing -bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite -from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which -are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets. -My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two -inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we -had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not -sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as -only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond -the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic -activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off -toward dawn it was only to dream madly. - -The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the -streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by -the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast -served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the -town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony -window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though -these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented -furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was -evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For -that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a -German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it -mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in -the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São -Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it. - -The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad -Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of -the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new -main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida -de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length, -it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the -types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval -congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and -in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so -inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery -could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through -the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it -still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans -were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in -place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary -buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a -passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long -running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe -Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly -at the end of the vista. - -There are many things of interest in downtown Rio, but of them all -perhaps the Avenida Rio Branco is the most enticing. Stroll where one -will on either side of it, to the Arsenal, the Ministries, the palace -where the last emperor of the western hemisphere had his official -residence up to little more than thirty years ago, to the heavy and not -particularly striking cathedral, one is sure to drift unconsciously back -and take again to wandering aimlessly along in the human stream that -surges as incessantly through the Avenida as if the populace were still -enjoying the novelty of moving freely where their ancestors could not -pass. The only other street in old Rio that has anything like the same -fascination is the narrow Rua Ouvidor, as it is still known in popular -speech, though the city fathers long since decreed that it shall be -called the Rua Moreira Cesar. This is to Rio what the Calle Florida is -to Buenos Aires, not merely a populous street but a popular institution. -Along it are the most brilliant shops, in it may be seen the most -exclusive residents of Rio greeting one another with the elaborate and -leisurely formality of their class. Level paved from wall to wall, it is -in reality a broad sidewalk, for here wheeled vehicles may not enter at -any hour whatever. Yet even the enticing windows and the now and then -attractive shoppers of the Rua Ouvidor do not often keep the stroller -long from wandering once more out into the Avenida. - -For all its width it is not easy to walk along the Avenida. What might -be called “sidewalk manners” are atrocious throughout South America; in -Rio they are at their worst. This is not because the _Fluminenses_—for -these, too, call themselves “rivereens,” though they are far from any -real river—are especially inconsiderate, but because they are tropical -idlers with no fixed habit of mind, and instead of picking a -straightforward course down the broad avenue they wander back and forth -across one’s path in all sorts of erratic diagonals. The pace of life -slows down noticeably in twelve degrees of latitude, and street crowds -are not only slower but much more stagnant in Rio than in Buenos Aires. -In time the direct and hurrying northerner comes to realize that the -Avenida is not designed to be merely a passageway from somewhere to -somewhere else. It _is_ somewhere itself, a lounging-place, a locality -in which to show off at one’s best, a splendid site for café chairs and -tables. By late afternoon it is often so blocked that passage along it -is a constant struggle; in the evening clumps of seated coffee sippers -and groups of gossiping men fill the broad sidewalks almost to -impassability. - -[Illustration: An employee of the “Snake Farm” of São Paulo] - -[Illustration: Residents of Rio’s hilltop slums, in a chosen pose] - -[Illustration: The heart of Rio, with its Municipal Theater, the -National Library, the old Portuguese aqueduct, and, on the left, a -shack-built hilltop] - -These sidewalks of the Avenida were evidently laid with the connivance -of shoemakers. Most of them are mosaics of black and white broken stone -in striking designs and fantastic patterns, here geometrical, there in -the form of flowers, with horsey figures before the Jockey Club, -nautical things before the Naval Club, all of striking effect when seen, -for instance, from the upper windows of the _Jornal do Commercio_ -building, but particularly deadly on shoe leather. An architect might -have much to say of the score of splendid structures that flank the -avenue. Some are merely business houses; farther seaward, beyond two -great hotels, are clustered the sumptuous Municipal Theater, the School -of Fine Arts, and the National Library; set a little back from the -street are the Supreme Tribunal and the Municipal Council until the -Avenida breaks out at length into the Beira Mar beside the Palacio -Monröe in its little park. This last marble and granite edifice was -carried back from our St. Louis Exposition and set up chiefly as a -show-place and an ultra-formal gathering-hall, but the Chamber of -Deputies has been meeting there since their old firetrap on the Praça da -República took to falling about their ears. Beyond it lie the blue -waters of the oval bay, across which, always in full view from anywhere -on the avenue, stands the _Pão d’Assucar_, like a rearing monolith, the -thread-like cable that now and then carries a car to or from its summit -plainly visible in the clear tropical sunshine. - -However, it is not these more formal things but rather the continual -interweaving of curious and motley types, the air of unworried tropical -indolence that pervades the throng, the brilliance of the night lights -that draw the idler again and again to the chief artery of downtown Rio. -Particularly after the hour of siesta does the capital exchange the -extreme négligée of the household for its most resplendent garb and -sally forth to stroll the Avenida, the women with curiously -expressionless faces, as if they would prove themselves deaf to the -audibly flattering male groups that grow larger and larger until by -sunset the sidewalks become a great salon rather than places of -locomotion. Foreigners and those who have lost the spirit of Rio and -must hurry may take a taxi. These pour so continually past, day and -night, that to cross the Avenida is a perilous undertaking at any hour, -for the personal politeness of the _Fluminense_ does not extend to his -automobiles, and the chances of being run down, particularly by empty -machines cruising for fares, are excellent. Nor is it worth while for -the lone pedestrian to protest, for the odds are against him. Both -private automobiles and those for hire carry two chauffeurs, usually in -white uniforms, less often unquestionably of that complexion, their -faces studies in haughtiness as they gaze down upon the plebeian -foot-going multitude. The extra man is known colloquially as the -“secretary,” and the custom is said to have arisen from the fact that -before the law required meters taxis charged all the traffic would bear -and it often took two men to collect from recalcitrant customers. But -its persistence suggests that there are other reasons, among them the -Brazilian love of sinecures, the terror which solitary labor causes to -the tropical temperament, the pleasure of having a congenial friend -always hanging about, the excess of population over jobs, the real -chauffeur’s need of someone to crank his car, light his cigarette, and -keep an eye on the police, most of all, perhaps, the Brazilian love of -_fazendo fita_. Literally _fazendo fita_ means “making a film,” but by -extension it has come to signify posing for the moving-picture camera, -hence, in the slang of Rio, “showing off.” It is a rare Brazilian who is -not given to acting for the movies in this sense. Watch a traffic -policeman, in his resplendent uniform and white gloves, and you will -find that he is much more seriously bent on displaying his manly form -and graceful deportment to a supposedly admiring audience than on -keeping his street corner clear. Go up to any man with a gold cable -swung across his chest and ask gently, “O s’nhor tem a hora?” and he is -almost as apt as not to reply with a mumbled, “Ah-er-I cannot tell you -the time,” meanwhile grasping first one end of the chain, then the -other, as if he were striving to convince even himself that he has a -watch somewhere attached to it. - -It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the -surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the -shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of -the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable -that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours. -From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the -place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one -suspects that the _Fluminense_ is more energetic at play than in -productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into -short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the -Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block -without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables -on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street, -silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before -one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of -one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the -cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a _tostão_, a -nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty _tasa_, wanders on down the -street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks. - -But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter, -the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day -warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern -_dolce far niente_ that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the -wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the -night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more -brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city -fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even -Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent -streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the -Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the -opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues, -punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound -of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their -papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar -to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital. - -Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded -_morros_—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and -which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid -granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high -into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is -commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if -the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces -between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those -valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere -into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped -back into them, or, if the _morros_ set sheer rock faces against the -intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses -lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond. -Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was -backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head, -like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the -“Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving; -hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon -puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the -admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the -bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the -“Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon. -“Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of -Rio. - -It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital -succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks. -Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one -to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local -editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars, -“as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing -about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had -never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that -sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off -the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid -than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode -along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in -withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a -chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of -Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every -view. - -I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western -hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along -the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days -when it is _brava_. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe -Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the -foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to -pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the -city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent, -to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its -quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the -Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine -Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on -the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by -passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another -arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic -“Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean -front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue -for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential -section of the Brazilian capital. - -The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as -if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace -along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor -with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there -are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as -sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among -the _morros_ and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into -almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration -flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is -not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly -extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with -a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they -operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is -also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to -another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system” -imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are -lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and -_morros_, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore -all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege -of swimming home. - -What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the -“Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of -Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had -long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman, -and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me -any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some -time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a _fiscal segreto_ of the -system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn -in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my -room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was -decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay -for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until -I sailed my chief problems were solved. - -The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida -Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its -journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was -furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any -of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as -inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor -showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other -of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the -oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North -American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone -traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop -to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and -less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had -been given free transportation. - -I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the -Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The -company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the -abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars -introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale -to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for -them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were -dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the -Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a -consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables. - -The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on -the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden -Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride -across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are -all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is -allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those -not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being -second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of -the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are -also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in -Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians. -Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street -lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by -crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the -swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they -consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those -exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and -the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person -to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not -always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South -America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay -in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car. - -I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are -superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to -business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of -its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my -duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault -with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for -there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the -annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned -motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this -result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in -wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements -to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to -protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in -which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of -Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in -their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have -we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian -capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a -chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare, -dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid -personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor. - -Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that -three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to, -make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that -carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray -my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the -capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for -which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa -Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical -flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all -Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has -been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date -palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more -beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the -sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it -the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first -European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to -which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of -trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds -that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they -fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus -turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who -cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of -nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the -picture. It grows in the courtyards of _cortiços_, those one-story -tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying -mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows -up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and -the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of -impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from -between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried -a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and -climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in -regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable -jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny -man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of -the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful -embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it, -sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he -came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every -street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the -interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright -colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns, -and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling -imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of -Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels -of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs, -bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle -sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills, -like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength -and energy. - -My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings -dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside -little _praças_, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds, -that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets -which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable -wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every -conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up -gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some -seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably -into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the -imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are -many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is -sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded -together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an -hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of -jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin _matta_ almost in -the heart of the city limits. - -Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite -hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make -up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its -mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short -square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through -suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was -Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not -with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while -from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing -scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz -e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens -scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was -particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip -in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of -acquiring a bathing-suit. - -Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital -has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or -climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair -of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida -Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation -of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the -Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar -and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as -suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that -he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even -the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines -within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he -must frequently strike out afoot and climb. - -For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her _morros_, those rock -hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise -everywhere above the general level. The _Carioca_—the inhabitant -of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more -formal term _Fluminense_—hates physical exertion such as the -climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high -demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous -villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but -the upper flanks and summits of the _morros_ are left to the -discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build -their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry -goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal -palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels, -inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock -laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual -loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal -Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift -dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably -along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent -walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns -within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in -quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose -inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with -even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from -the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through -the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of -other lands may well envy. - -These scores of _morros_ rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many -shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar -Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which -the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older -part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries -turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of -the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of -negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what -were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the -city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the -_morros_,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white -trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop -inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the -equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these -slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the -top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in -Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his -physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her -hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her _gente de tamanco_, wearers -of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual -footwear of the poorer sockless _Cariocas_. The falsetto scrape of -_tamancos_ on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of -the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and -its sky-piercing _palmeiras imperiaes_. - -It was dusty on the _morros_ at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was -suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the -worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants -were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on -their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down -on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds -in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild -animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of -choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the -hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity, -about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the -Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the -_morro_ dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from -the same spot the supply for all the city. - -The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the -ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil -and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the -mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb, -its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive -tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like -so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of -the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the -city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running -through an old file of the _Jornal do Commercio_ at the National Library -I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among -many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we -all take refuge,” the following item: - - This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American - names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar, - arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so - frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a - concession for a line of bonds to that locality. - -The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a -clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of -the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car -bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with -complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living -up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it -in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a -heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to -peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would -find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly -what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top -of the “Sugar Loaf.” - -Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the -harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon -the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of -Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the -ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the -tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive -rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more -gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky -like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this -point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them. -There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the -coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the -most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the -company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station -visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly -pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the -station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is -similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end -ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead -of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two -cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at -nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock -hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out -to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our -nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across -the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged -considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of -the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea. - -At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far -out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy, -the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time -of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem -solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling -across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of -the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the -trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the -Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to -rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João -faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite, -midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage, -and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the -entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of -Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here -and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as -directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an -airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants -of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the -two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of -clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish -dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast -spreading city, strewn in and out among its _morros_ until it resembles -some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable -softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all -known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches -and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed -celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and -another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes, -until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very -warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and -all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some -fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else -is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence -blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would -attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of -Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in -person. - -Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more -striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar -Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted -by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A -little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old -Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing -high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle, -winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas -Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old -mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical -exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit. -But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he -who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself -the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the -mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems -tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense, -jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down -to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population -into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut -through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of -vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from -a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time. - -From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the -summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all -the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about -him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all -spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a -flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in -sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems -close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks -bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the -beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company -is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other -things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down -again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful -corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles -through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary -to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches. - -Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage -points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his -superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within -the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300 -above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be -reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four -hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be -taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and -its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too -easy accessibility. - -A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the -hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an -automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the -cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as -unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny -thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana, -pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy -endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care -for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now -and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a -mere _tapera_ now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely -into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the -fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but -the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest -piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the -Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever -bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam -far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often -abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its -edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as -an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to -be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as -the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their -plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like -trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped -valley. - -But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car -out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town -in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to -a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name -as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at -least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred -feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical -verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the -average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward -through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to -immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail -grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it -breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs, -between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the -summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the -otherwise unbroken vegetation. - -Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado, -for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range -beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive -federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over -chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and -“Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the -“Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in -the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree, -all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in -plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen -from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the -earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading -away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together. - - - - - CHAPTER IX - BRAZIL, PAST AND PRESENT - - -The Spaniard Pinzón had already sighted what is to-day Brazil when, in -1500, Pedro Alves Cabral, whom Portugal had sent out to get her share of -this new world, accidentally discovered land at some point on the -present Brazilian coast. He named it “Vera Cruz,” which not long -afterward was changed to “Santa Cruz.” But neither name endured, for the -only importance of the country during the first century and more after -its discovery was its exportation of the fire-colored wood of a bright -red tree which found favor in the old world for decorative purposes. -This the Arabs called “bakkam,” or “burning wood,” a term which became -in Latin _bresilium_, in French _braise_, and in Spanish and Portuguese -_brazil_, and gradually the “land of the _brazil_ tree” came to be known -simply as Brazil. - -The first white settler in Brazil of whom there is any authentic record -was Diogo Alvarez Correa, a Portuguese sailor whose ship was wrecked -near the present site of Bahia. His companions are said to have been -killed by the aborigines, but Diogo won their interest or fear by means -of a long implement he carried which belched fire at a magic word from -its owner and brought death upon anyone at whom he pointed it. The -Indians named this extraordinary being “Caramurú,” which in their -language meant something like “producer of lightning” or “sudden death,” -and welcomed him into their tribe. Diogo made the most of his -opportunities and had already established a considerable colony of -half-breed children when he passed on to new explorations in another -world. His good work was continued by fitting successors, since, to put -it in the simple words of a Brazilian historian, “the first arrivals -found no difficulty in procuring companions among the Indian women, as -the latter had a peculiar ambition to possess children by a race of men -whom they _at first_ deemed demigods.” Thus the landing-place of -“Caramurú” came in time to be the capital of all Brazil. - -Meanwhile João Ramalho had established the village of Piratinanga, -destined afterward to move its site and become São Paulo, and de Souza -began the present Santos by building the fort of São Vicente, while in -the north Olinda and Recife were showing the rivalry which has -culminated in the city now called Pernambuco. In 1516 Solis drifted into -a harbor which he named “River of January,” evidently so incensed at its -lack of length or at the heat of Brazil’s most torrid month as to refuse -to give it one of the customary saints’ names. His mistake was not -discovered until de Souza explored the bay sixteen years later and found -it no river at all. The French soon began to make settlements along the -coast and Durand de Villegaignon of the French navy, sent out by -Coligny, took possession of the island in Rio harbor which still bears -his name; but the Portuguese Mem da Sá at length drove him out and -clinched the expulsion by founding a fortress and thatched village on -the mainland, which he named, in honor of the day’s saint, “São -Sebastião.” Soon this became a worthy rival of Bahia and Olinda and by -the end of the sixteenth century it was recognized as the capital of the -southern part of Portugal’s possessions in the new world. - -For a time these promised to remain less extensive than they finally -became. The French founded a settlement called St. Louis on the island -of Maranhão off the north coast of Brazil and gave evidence of a desire -to conquer more territory. In 1624 the Dutch formed a “West India -Company” and took the capital, Bahia, which was recovered by the -Spaniards two years later, both Portugal and Brazil being under Spanish -dominion for sixty years at that period. In 1630 the Dutch took -Pernambuco and all Brazil north of the River São Francisco, and had high -hopes of annexing the entire country. By 1661 luck had turned, however, -and a treaty gave the enormous tract now known as Brazil to Portugal for -the payment of eight million florins to the Dutch and allowing them free -commerce in everything except the principal export, the fiery _brazil_ -wood. At the end of the seventeenth century this valuable product was -cast in the shade by the discovery of gold in the interior of the -country. - -When the Conde da Cunha was sent out by Pombal as viceroy in 1763 he was -instructed to move his capital from Bahia to São Sebastião on the “River -of January,” the latter having become more important because of its -proximity to the mines of Minas Geraes and to the River Plata, where -fighting with the Spaniards was frequent. About the same time the coffee -berry was introduced into the hitherto unimportant state of São Paulo, -noted until then chiefly for the energy and ferocity of the -cattle-raising _Paulistas_ in the stealing and enslaving of Indians from -the adjacent Spanish colonies. Great numbers of negro slaves had been -introduced into the country, particularly in that paunch-like portion of -it jutting farthest out into the Atlantic toward Africa and where the -planting of sugar-cane made a large supply of labor necessary. Soon -after the coming of da Cunha the further introduction of negroes into -Portuguese territory was forbidden, but the decree was never seriously -enforced, and the natural increase of the bondsmen, abetted by such -customs as freeing any female slave who produced six children, caused in -time the preponderance of African blood. - -When Rio de Janeiro was made the national capital of Brazil in 1763 it -had some thirty thousand inhabitants. Nor did it increase greatly during -the half century that followed. Its chief growth and development dates -from the arrival of the court in 1808. João VI of Portugal, driven out -of his own land by Napoleon, fled on a British ship “with all the -valuables he could lay hands on,” after the way of kings, and landed in -Bahia, soon afterward moving on to Rio and setting up his court under -the title of “King of Portugal, Brazil, and Algarve.” He opened the -country to foreign commerce, imported the royal palm, and carried out -certain reforms in the formerly colonial government. The way having been -cleared for him, he returned to Portugal in 1821, leaving his son behind -as regent. On September 7th of the following year this son declared -Brazil independent and proclaimed himself emperor under the title of -Pedro I. He was soon succeeded, however, by his infant son, Pedro II, -whose reign of half a century was punctuated by a three years’ war -against Rosas, the tyrant of the Argentine, and by the war of 1864 in -which Brazil joined the Argentine and Uruguay against the despot Lopez -of Paraguay. This second conflict cost the country thousands of men and -£63,000,000 in money—which, by the way, has not yet been paid—but it -established the free navigation of the Paraguay River and put Rio de -Janeiro into communication with the great wilderness province of Matto -Grosso. - -During the reign of Pedro II there had been much criticism of the -country’s anachronistic custom of negro slavery. This culminated in 1888 -in a decree of emancipation signed by the Princess Isabel, who was -acting as regent during her father’s illness. By this time the Frenchman -Comte had won many Brazilian disciples for his “positivist” philosophy, -and certain other factions were showing a growing enmity to the -monarchy. These elements and the leading planters, disgruntled at the -loss of their slaves even though they were reimbursed for them from the -public funds, formed a republican party. Finally the church, according -to a native writer, “seeing which side was going to win, withdrew her -weight from the crown and threw it into the other side of the balance,” -and on November 15th, 1889, Brazil was declared a republic. - -Like the abolition of slavery the year before, the change was entirely -without bloodshed. The ostensible leader of the revolt was “Deodoro the -tarimbeiro” (_tarimba_ being the cot of a private soldier), a bluff old -military commander who had the army behind him; but the real head of the -movement was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, who owed his given -name to his father’s admiration for a certain French writer. Constant -was a Positivist, as were several others of the leading republicans, and -many hints of Comte’s religion, if it may be so called, crept into the -new government. To a Positivist was given the task of designing a new -national flag, so that the banner of republican Brazil is not merely -green, Comte’s chosen color, but bears the words, from the Positivist -motto, “Ordem e Progresso”—to which the northern visitor feels -frequently impelled to add, “e Paciencia.” Unnecessary violence, -however, is contrary to the Positivist creed, and the former opponents -of the new régime did not suffer the fate so frequent in South American -revolutions. Harmless old Dom Pedro II was put aboard a ship in the -harbor with his family, his retainers, and his personal possessions, and -“the bird of the sea opened its white wings and flew away to the -continent whence kings and emperors came.” - -The Brazilian constitution of 1891 is an almost exact copy of that of -the United States, and under it and the half dozen presidents who have -succeeded Deodoro, Brazil has prospered as well as could perhaps be -expected of a tropical and temperamental, young and gigantic country. -Barely a year after the adoption of the constitution a revolution broke -out in the southernmost state and the Republic of Brazil came near dying -in its infancy. But with the ending of civil war and the beginning of -reconstruction under Moraes, this setback was regained, and the frequent -threats of secession of both the north and the south have thus far come -to naught. During this same term a boundary dispute between the -Argentine and Brazil was arbitrated by the United States, and in 1898 -the present frontier between French Guiana and the state of Pará was -established, leaving Brazil as nearly at peace with her neighbors as is -reasonable in South America. Her credit abroad was helped by the burning -of her old paper money; under an energetic _Paulista_ president railroad -construction was greatly increased at the beginning of the present -century; Rio was largely torn down and rebuilt, and the vast country was -knitted more closely together. To-day an “unofficial compilation” -credits Brazil with 30,553,509 inhabitants, and though the skeptical may -be inclined to question that final 9, there is no doubt that it is -second only to the United States in population in the western -hemisphere, with Mexico a lagging third and the Argentine a badly -outdistanced fourth. The population of the Federal District, which -includes little more than the capital, is estimated at 1,130,080, “based -on a count of houses and crediting each residence with ten inhabitants”; -which is perhaps a fair enough guess, for Brazilian families are seldom -small—and it would of course be hot and uncomfortable work, as well as -an intrusion upon “personal liberty,” really to take a census in Brazil -or its capital. - -As late as 1850, according to an old chronicle, “the habits of the rich -of Rio de Janeiro were distressing and those of the lower orders -abominably filthy. Monks swarmed in every street and were at once -sluggards and libertines. The ladies of that time usually lolled about -the house barefoot and bare-legged, listening to the gossip and scandal -gathered by their favorite body-women.” Even at the beginning of the -present century Rio was far from being what it is to-day. The narrow -cobbled streets were worse than unclean, dawdling mule-cars constituted -the only urban transportation, and yellow fever victims were often so -numerous that there were not coffins enough to go round. Those obliged -to come to Rio made their wills and got absolution for their sins before -undertaking the journey. In 1889, when the monarchy was overthrown, it -was seriously contemplated moving the capital away from Rio because of -the constant scourge of “Yellow Jack.” In fact, the constitution fixes -the capital of the republic in its geographical center at a selected -spot in the wilderness of the state of Goyaz, and a syndicate offered to -build everything from a new presidential palace to the necessary -railroads, if given a ninety-year concession and monopoly; but like so -many well-reasoned schemes this one ran foul of many unreasonable but -immovable facts and has never advanced beyond the theory stage. - -Once a hotbed of the most deadly tropical diseases, Rio was sanitated by -a native doctor at the cost of years of incessant labor that would have -disheartened any ordinary man, until to-day it is as free from yellow -fever and its kindred forms of sudden death as New York and has as low a -death rate as any large city in the tropics. The doctor began his -struggle in 1903, by act of congress, organizing a sanitary police -charged with clearing away all stagnant water within the city limits, -whether in streets, parks, gardens, rain-pipes, gutters, sewers, or—most -astonishing of all in a Latin-American country—even inside private -houses. This policy, together with the building of new docks and avenues -in the congested lower city, and the tearing down of many infected old -houses, virtually did away with the breeding-places of the deadly -stegomyia mosquito. Deaths from yellow fever dropped from thousands to -hundreds in one year, to tens in the next, and to none long before the -end of the decade. To this day the sanitary police strictly enforce -their regulations, though the man who framed them has gone to repeat his -work in the states bordering on the Amazon, and no dwelling can be -rented or reoccupied, be it a negro hovel or a palace, until the owner -has an official certificate of disinfection. - -Among the thirty million people imputed to the country, even in the -fraction thereof credited to Rio, there is every possible combination of -African and Caucasian blood, with but slight trace of the aboriginal -Indian and only a sprinkling of other races. Brazil is indeed a true -melting-pot, far more so than the United States, for it mixes not merely -all the European nationalities entrusted to it, but crosses with perfect -nonchalance the most diametrically opposite races. In theory at least, -in most outward manifestations, the Brazilians are one great family, -with virtual equality of opportunity, quite irrespective of color or -previous condition of servitude. The haziness of the color-line in -Brazil is little short of astounding to an American; one cannot but -wonder at the lack of color prejudice. Negroes were held as slaves -throughout the republic up to little more than thirty years ago; -thousands if not millions of former slaves are still alive, and the -tendency of humanity to look down upon those forced to do manual labor -is certainly as strong in Brazil as anywhere on earth. In England, -France, or Germany there is little color prejudice because the stigma of -forced manual labor was never attached to any particular color of skin, -and because the population has not come frequently enough in contact -with the African race to feel the disrespect for it which is the basis -of our own color-line. But neither of these motives are lacking in -Brazil. Is color prejudice so slight there because the Spaniard and the -Portuguese, mixed with the Moors, often by force, during their conquest -of the Iberian peninsula, have lost the color _feeling_, at least for -centuries? One has only to see a young Portuguese immigrant to Brazil -openly fondling a black girl amid the ribald laughter of his companions -quite as our own young rowdies dally with girls of their own class at -summer picnics or ward-healers’ dances to understand the widespread -mixture of races in South America. Though the actual importation of -African slaves into Brazil ceased some eighty years ago, and immigration -since then has been almost entirely from Europe, it has been chiefly -from the more ignorant and backward countries of southern Europe, where -the color-line is at most embryonic. The Portuguese man and the negro -woman get along very well domestically in Brazil; even the Portuguese -woman joins forces with a black man without feeling that she has in any -way lowered herself or her race. The number of young half-breeds -sprawling about the poorer houses of the immigrant sections or standing -in the doorways of Portuguese shops in the serene nudity of bronze -figures shows how general is this point of view. - -There are other causes for this lack of racial friction in Brazil. -Slavery seems to have been less harsh and cruel than in the United -States. With but slight color prejudice or feeling even among the -Portuguese who formed the great majority of the owning class, the -relation of the Brazilian slave to his master was more in the nature of -a hired servant. The slaves belonged to the same church, they observed -the same feast days, there were cases where they even married into the -master’s family. There was a species of local autonomy in the matter of -slavery, slaves being held in any province where it was locally legal -and profitable; nor must we lose sight of the fact that there was no -statehood problem to agitate and increase the differences of opinion on -the subject, no fear that each new territory admitted to the union would -disturb the political balance of power in the federal capital. Thus when -the question of abolition arose it did not divide the country into two -sharply defined camps, with the resultant generations of enmity that it -bred in our own land. - -Not long after our Civil War the agitation for the freeing of the slaves -began in Brazil. There, strangely enough, it came from the north, the -more tropical section of the country, partly no doubt because the -Amazonian regions, settled long after the sugar-growing lands of -Pernambuco and Bahia where intensive labor was needed, found white -immigration and their part-Indian population sufficient for their -immediate needs. At length a bill was passed by congress and signed by -the Princess Isabel making free any child thenceforth born of a slave, -and paving the way to the law of 1888 abolishing slavery entirely. The -latter was “premature” according to some Brazilians even of to-day, who -point to the many ruined plantations within fifty miles of Rio as proof -of their contention; it was undoubtedly one of the motives of the -revolution which drove monarchy from the western hemisphere in the -following year. But the fact that what cost us four years of savage -warfare was accomplished in Brazil almost by common consent, without the -shedding of a drop of blood, left the “color question” far less acute -than in the United States. There is a saying in Brazil that slavery was -buried under flowers, and as a result there is no hatred either between -sections of the country or between the races that inhabit it; with no -deep national or sectional wounds to heal a fraternal relationship -quickly grew up, so that to-day blacks and whites celebrate Emancipation -Day together in much the same spirit which we do our Fourth of July. - -In popular intercourse the color of a man’s skin is of little more -importance in Brazil than the color of his hair. Indeed, it is -commonplace to hear people referring to their varying tints in much the -same amused and friendly spirit in which our débutantes might speak of a -sunburn, and there is no offense whatever in nicknames of color. The -Brazilian, in fact, does not recognize a negro when he sees one. Ask him -how many of the thirty millions are of that race and he will probably -reply, “Oh, eight hundred thousand to a million.” From his point of view -that is true. There is no all-inclusive word “negro” or “nigger” in the -Brazilian language. To use the term _negro_ or _preto_ is merely to say -“black,” and it may be that there are not more than a million full -blacks in Brazil. But there are many millions with more or less African -blood in their veins, for whom the native language has a score of -designations all nicely graded according to the tint of the complexion. -There is a difference between the full negro and the mulatto in Brazil -which does not exist in the United States; like the Eurasian of India -the latter considers himself more closely allied to the whites, and acts -accordingly. Thus it is impossible to put the question to a Brazilian as -it can be put to an American. After traveling in every state of Brazil, -however, I have no hesitancy in asserting that two-thirds of the -population would have to ride in “Jim Crow” cars in our southern states. - -The question of the mixture of races is unusually interesting in Brazil, -especially as many Brazilians seriously believe that their freedom of -interbreeding is producing a new type of humanity, under the combined -influences of climate, immigration, and the fusion of many stocks by no -means all Caucasian, that can endure the heat of the tropics and at the -same time retain some of the energy and initiative of the temperate -zones. All sentiment or repugnance aside, it is possible that the -catholic cross-breeding sanctioned by the Iberian creed may prove -economically more profitable to tropical America than the Anglo-Saxon’s -instinctive aversion to fusion with the colored races. Yet humanly, it -seems to the outsider, the results are not so promising; it looks less -as if Brazil were solving the color question than as if color were -dissolving Brazil. The citizen produced by the intermixture of -Portuguese with negroes is not visibly an improvement on the parent -stocks. The mulattoes or quadroons are often brighter, quicker of -intelligence, than either the ox-like Portuguese or the full-blooded -Africans; but it is widely agreed, even in Brazil, that they have -neither the moral nor physical stamina, that they take on most of the -faults, and retain few of the virtues of their ancestors. - -In Rio de Janeiro evidence of this general interbreeding confronts the -visitor at every step, in all classes of society, far more so than in -São Paulo and the other southern states, where the flowing tide of -Italian and other European immigration has given Caucasian blood the -ascendency. Even at his best the average Brazilian is not prepossessing -in appearance; in Rio’s most élite gatherings a fine face is a rarity; -in her street crowds even a passable one is sufficient motive for an -exclamation. Every shade of color, of negroid type and features are -indiscriminately mixed together, while poor and insignificant physique, -bad teeth, and kindred signs of degeneracy are almost universal. There -is something disagreeable about mingling with the throng in Brazil; -surrounded on all sides by miscegenation, the visitor develops a -subconscious fear that his own blood will inadvertently get a negro -strain in it. But by the time he has been a month or two in the country, -especially if this has been preceded by a year or more in the rest of -South America, he scarcely notices the under-sizedness, the lack of -robustness, the patent weakness of character in a Brazilian crowd. He -needs an occasional shock of contrast to bring his sense of comparison -back to normal. The insignificance of the prevailing type is quickly -thrown into clear relief when a pair of burly clear-skinned Scandinavian -seamen from one of the ships down at the docks come shouldering their -way through a native crowd averaging a head shorter than they. - -Yet the equality of mankind irrespective of color is probably in a way -as good for the white man in Brazil as it is advantageous to the negro. -It saves him from presuming on his own importance simply because he -happens to be white, as not infrequently occurs in our own land. Perhaps -it is because the Brazilian negro does not himself consciously draw the -color-line, because he is instinctively courteous, gives one half the -sidewalk like a _cavalheiro_, yet does not obsequiously shrink before a -white man, that he arouses less dislike—or whatever it is—than the -American negro; or it may simply be that one’s feelings change with -one’s environment. - -Yet at bottom there is a real color-line in Brazil, though the casual -visitor may never discover it. Evidence of it must be pieced together -out of hints that turn up from time to time. Azevedo’s novel “O Mulato,” -the reader finds, hinges on the secret color prejudices of north Brazil. -One runs across a paragraph tucked away in a back corner of a newspaper: - - DISAGREEABLE INCIDENT - - It is reported that the intelligent - and cultured son of a state senator - of Bahia was refused admission to - our national military academy for - the mere motive that he is black. - -I have more than once had a Brazilian of that pale darkness of -complexion common to those who have lived for generations in the tropics -draw back a sleeve to convince me that the color of his hands and face -is climatic rather than racial, at the same time asserting almost in a -whisper that the “aristocratic old families” of Brazil are just as proud -of their Caucasian blood, and fully as determined that it shall not be -sullied with African, as are “os Americanos do Norte.” But positive -proof that there is no illegitimate strain in their veins is so rare, -and pure-blooded families are so greatly in the majority, that they -usually keep their color prejudices to themselves. It does not pay to -express such sentiments openly in a land largely in the hands of -negroes, or at least of those of negro blood, where the government -averages the mulatto tint, where the army which accomplished the change -from monarchy to republic is still powerful and overwhelmingly African -in its enlisted personnel. - -The constitution and the law-making and executive bodies of Brazil are -similar to those of the United States, more so, in fact, than in any -other country of South America. Here, too, there are states rather than -provinces; those states are largely autonomous, even less closely -federated than our own and vastly less so than the provinces of -Spanish-America, which are governed mainly from the national capitals. -In so far as any real one exists, the division between the two main -political parties in Brazil is the line separating those who wish a more -centralized government from those who wish the present semi-freedom of -the states to continue, if not to be increased. It is the contention of -the latter that state autonomy permits a fuller development of -independent activity, which in the end is of advantage to the entire -federation. The other side points to the frequent threats of -secession—now of Rio Grande do Sul because it feels it is neglected and -exploited by the central government, now of industrial São Paulo, -prosperous Pernambuco, or self-sufficient Amazonia as a protest against -supporting and being hampered by the throng of official loafers in the -federal capital, now of the north from the south for mere -incompatability of temperament—as proof that the existing loose bonds -are perilous to the future of the republic. As in all Latin-America, -however, political parties are much more a matter of personalities, of -rallying about some particular leader rather than about a given set of -principles, and except in minor details there is no visible difference -between the two principal divisions. To put it more concisely, in the -words of a frank politician: “Party lines? Well, you see Brazil is like -a great banquet table, heaped with all manner of food and delicacies. -There is not room for everyone at it, so those of us who are seated are -on one side, and those who are constantly trying to crowd into our -places form the other party.” - -An American long resident in Brazil asserted that the future of the -country is in the hands of the _fazendeiros_ of the interior, -industrious, tenacious, totally different from the city dwellers, a law -unto themselves, original because they have no precedents. However true -this may be, one soon realizes that Rio is mainly a port and a point of -distribution, living on the “rake-off” from the business passing through -its hands, and that such productive activity as exists is chiefly due to -foreign residents. The “upper class” Brazilian at least has inherited -his Portuguese forefather’s distaste for work and his preference for a -government sinecure; thanks perhaps to the climate, he is even more -strongly of that inclination than his ancestors. Almost every native of -social pretensions one meets in Rio is on the government payroll, and -the city swarms with clerks and bureaucrats. The centuries during which -the mineral wealth of Brazil poured into the public coffers of Portugal, -and from them into the pockets of politicians and court favorites, bred -the notion, still widely prevalent in all Latin-America, that “the -government” is a great reservoir of supply for those who know how to tap -it, rather than a servant of the general population. To the latter, on -the contrary, it is something in the nature of a powerful foreign enemy, -with which the average citizen has nothing to do if he can possibly -avoid it, except to trick or rob it when he gets a chance, yet which he -expects to do miracles unaided, as if it were some kind of god—mixed -with devil. - -It has often been said that the Argentine, Uruguay, and to a certain -extent Chile are more progressive than the rest of South America because -they are ruled by whites. In her highest offices Brazil, too, usually -has men of Caucasian race; but the great mass of citizens being more or -less African—though two years’ residence suffices for voting rights—the -country is really under a mulatto government. Even immigration is at -present unable to better this matter, because white newcomers are -numerically and linguistically so weak that they have little say in the -government and their efforts merely make the country richer and give the -worthless native more chance to engage in politics. Swarms of part-negro -parasites, what might be called the sterile class, are incessantly on -the trail of the producer, constantly preying on productive industry, -and supernaturally clever in devising schemes to appropriate the lion’s -share of their earnings. It seems to be a fixed policy of Brazilian -government to lie low until a head raises itself industriously above the -horizon—then “swat” it! Its motto evidently is, “The moment you find a -golden egg, hunt up the goose and choke it to death.” Brazilian taxes -make those of other lands seem mere financial pin-pricks. To begin with, -there is a “protective” tariff so intricate that it requires an expert -_despachante_ to deal with it, and so high that those are rare imports -that do not at least double their prices at the customhouse. Then there -is the omnipresent “consumption impost.” Scarcely a thing can be offered -for sale until it has a federal revenue stamp affixed to it. If you buy -a hat you find a document pasted inside showing that the government has -already levied 2$000 upon the sale; a 4$000 umbrella has a $500 stamp -wound round the top of the rod; every pair of shoes has a stamp stuck on -the inside of one of the heels—for some reason they have not yet thought -of selling each shoe separately. Almost nothing is without its revenue -stamp; and, be it noted, the stamp must be affixed _before_ the goods -are offered for sale, so that a merchant may have hundreds of dollars -tied up in revenue stamps on his shelves for years, even if he does not -lose their value entirely by the articles proving unsalable. There is a -“consumption” tax on every box of matches, over the cork of every -bottled beverage, be it imported wine or local mineral or soda-water. -Tooth-paste is considered a luxury, as by most legislators, and pays a -high impost accordingly; there is a stamp on every receipt or bank -check, on every lottery, railway, steamer, or theater ticket, on every -birth, marriage, or burial certificate; there are taxes until your head -aches and your pocketbook writhes with agony, _impostos_ until only the -foolish would think of trying to save money, since it is sure to be -taken away as soon as the government hears of it. A cynical editor -complained that there is no tax on revolutions and that “French women” -are allowed to go unstamped. - -But this is only the beginning—and these things, by the way, are no -aftermath of the World War, but were in force long before the -war-impoverished world at large had thought of them. State and municipal -taxes are as ubiquitous, and iniquitous, as those of the federal -government. Among the few ways in which the Brazilians who overthrew the -monarchy did not copy the American constitution was in not decreeing -free trade between the states, with the result that politicians who -cannot fatten on federal imposts may feed on state import and export -duties. Many a state taxes everything taken in or out of it; at least -one even taxes the citizens who go outside the state to work. The beans -of Rio Grande do Sul, where they are sometimes a drug on the market, -cannot be sent to hungry states because the growers cannot pay the high -export and import taxes between them and their market. Many a Brazilian -city imports its potatoes from Portugal, at luxury prices, while pigs -are feeding on those grown just beyond a nearby state boundary. If you -buy a bottle of beer or mineral water, you will probably find a federal, -a state, and a municipal tax-stamp on it. Every merchant down to the -last street-hawker, every newsboy or lottery-vendor, wears or otherwise -displays a license to do business. - -The politicians are constantly on the lookout for some new form of -taxation, but as they have the same scarcity of original ideas in this -matter as in others, the ancestry of most of their schemes can be traced -back to Europe or North America. Thus they copied the “protective” -tariff of the United States, though there are few native industries to -“protect,” not only because it was an easy way to raise revenue but -because it gave many openings for political henchmen. They were just -beginning to hear of the income tax at the time of my visit and to plan -legislation accordingly. The more sources of easy money of this kind the -government discovers, the worse it seems to be for the country, not only -in cramping existing industry but by drawing more of the population away -from production into the sterile ranks of the seekers after government -sinecures. Thanks partly to Iberian custom, partly to the power of the -second greatest class of non-producers—absentee owners of big -estates—there is little or no land or real estate tax, except in the -cities, and in consequence many squatters and few clear titles. But this -is about the only form of financial oppression the swarthy rulers have -overlooked, and now and then they show outcroppings of originality that -resemble genius. When the outbreak of war in Europe sharpened their wits -they had the happy thought, among others of like nature, of charging -duty on foreign newspapers arriving by mail and of recharging full -foreign postage on prepaid letters from abroad that were forwarded from -one town to another within the republic, or even within the same state. -Postal Union rules to the contrary notwithstanding. Brazil once ran a -post office savings bank, but after taking in millions from the poorer -class of the community this suspended payment, and to-day a government -bank-book with 5,000$000 credited in it cannot be sold for two-fifths -that amount. During the war one could buy a postal order in any city of -Brazil, but if the addressee attempted to cash it he was informed that -there was no money on hand for such purposes. More than that, if your -correspondent returned the unpayable order to you, your own post office -would laugh at the idea of giving you back the money. Furthermore, if -you received a postal order payable, say, in São Paulo, and presented it -at the same time that you bought another order on the issuing office, -the tar-brushed clerk would calmly rake in your money with one hand and -thrust your order back with the other with the information that the post -office had no funds on hand to pay it. - -If all or even a large proportion of the income from this hydra-headed -revenue system reached the public coffers and passed out from them in -proper channels of public improvement, there would be less cause for -complaint on the part of the taxpayers. But not only is a great amount -of it diverted to the pockets of politicians and their sycophants, even -before it becomes a part of the public funds, by such simple expedients -as bribery of those whose duty it is to collect them, but the outlets -from the public coffers are many and devious, not a few ending in -unexplored swamps and morasses. Nor does this well-known and widely -commented-upon state of affairs arouse to action the despoiled majority. -Bursts of popular indignation take other forms in Brazil. Everyone seems -to endure robbery unprotestingly and await his chance to recoup in -similar manner. Were all Brazilians honest, it would work out to about -the same division of property in the end—and save them much mental -exertion. We have no lack of political corruption in the United States, -but here at least it is sometimes unearthed and punished. In Brazil the -political grafter is immune, both because Portuguese training has made -his machinations seem a matter of course and because the “outs” do not -propose to establish a troublesome precedent by auditing the actions of -those temporarily in power. - -The Brazilians are inclined to be spendthrifts individually and -nationally. Both the public and the private attitude is suggestive of -the prodigal son of an indulgent father of unlimited wealth. Fortunes -made quickly and easily in slave times have in most instances long since -been squandered; the families who more recently grew rich from cattle, -sugar, or coffee have in many cases already gambled and rioted their -wealth away. Neither the individual nor the nation is content to live -within its income. The politicians periodically coax a loan from foreign -capitalists, spend it in riotous living, and when the interest comes due -seek to place a “refunding loan,” to borrow money to pay the interest on -the money they have borrowed. Financially Brazil had reached a critical -stage before the beginning of the World War, not only the federal -government owing a colossal foreign debt, but nearly every state and -municipality staggering into bankruptcy. The government had issued -enormous quantities of paper money bearing the statement “The National -Treasury promises to pay the bearer 10$”—or some other sum; yet take a -ragged, illegible bill to the treasury and you would probably be told, -“Well, you have the 10$ there, haven’t you?” and thus the paper -continued in circulation until it wore out and disappeared and the -government issued more at the total cost of the cheap material and the -printing. Soon after the outbreak of the war all foreign banks in Brazil -refused to lend the government any more money, whereupon the politicians -authorized the issue of 150,000,000$000 in gold; that is, as it was -explained later on in tiny type on them, notes _payable_ in gold, though -everyone in Brazil knew that even those already outstanding could not be -redeemed. A saving clause at the end of the decree read, “If when these -notes come due the government has not the gold on hand to pay them, then -it may redeem them in paper.” Such was the mulatto government’s idea of -“meeting the present world’s crisis.” - -Of a piece with their other schemes are the federal and at least two -state lotteries supported by the population mainly for the advantage of -the politicians. There are persons who contend that a lottery supplies a -harmless outlet for a natural craving for excitement, at a moderate cost -to the individual and with a benefit to the state that operates it. With -the Latin-American the intoxication of the lottery is said to take the -place of alcoholic intoxication in the Anglo-Saxon. All this may be more -or less true, but at least the state loses much activity of its -day-dreaming citizens, while the bureaucracy and the politicians are -fattening on the profits. Lottery drawings succeed one another with -feverish frequency in Brazil—the powers that be see to that, whatever -other duties they may be forced to neglect. The streets of every large -city swarm with ragged urchins and brazen-voiced touts who press tickets -upon the passer-by at every turn, each guaranteeing that his is the -winning number. Every block in the business section has its _cambistas_ -lying in wait in their ticket-decorated shops; besides the veritable -pest of street vendors pursuing their victims into the most secret -corners, there are _cambios_ all over the country and perambulating -ticket-hawkers canvassing even the rural districts. Everyone “plays the -lottery.” The young lady on her way home from church stops to buy a -ticket, or at least a “piece” of ticket, as innocently as she would a -ribbon; school children enter their classrooms loudly discussing the -merits of the various numbers they have chosen; the number of persons -losing sleep, or going to sleep on the job, figuring up what they will -do with the hundred thousand reis they are always sure of winning is -beyond computation. The lottery cannot but add to the natural tendency -of the Latin-American to put it off until to-morrow, for if it is not -done to-day perhaps he will win the grand prize this evening and never -have to do it at all. Brazil had long been struggling to get a loan from -Europe, but when the war gave capitalists a chance to lend their money -nearer home at higher rates and with better security the Brazilians were -naturally left out in the cold. Editors complained that when France -offered government bonds her citizens rushed forward and subscribed the -amount several times over in one day, while Brazil could not get any -response whatever from her own people. Yet not a scrivener among them -noted that if the Brazilian government could get at a fair rate of -interest on a legitimate investment a fraction of the enormous sums her -people pay into the state and national lotteries every week there would -have been no need to go abroad seeking a “refunding loan.” - -Brazil won her political independence a century ago, but economically -she is more dependent on the outside world to-day than in 1822. In -colonial times wheat was grown in all the half dozen southernmost -states; now the big flour-mills of Rio are fed entirely from the -Argentine. Brazil is so dependent on her imports, so self-insufficient, -importing even the food products she could so easily grow or the most -insignificant manufactured articles which she could readily produce, -even though she almost wholly lacks coal deposits, that any disturbance -of shipping throws her into a panic. Natives refuse to develop the -resources of the country, out of indolence, lack of confidence or -initiative, or because they prefer to squander their capital in fast -living; yet when the “gringo” comes in and starts an industry the native -either steps up with a title to the property showing that he inherited -it direct from Adam, or, if he cannot take it away from the newcomer in -that way, he taxes all the profits into his own pockets. The war forced -Brazil to develop some of her own resources, to produce for herself many -of the things she had always bought from abroad on credit; it compelled -a considerable agricultural development and reduced the number of -shopkeepers. Yet the country has already slumped back again into the old -rut, and to-day, as before the war, her imports are nearly three times -her exports and she is keeping her nose above water only by such -stop-gaps as “refunding loans.” - -By no means all Brazilians are pleased with the change from a monarchy -to a republic. There is still a large and influential monarchical party, -composed partly of the wealthier class and those who have always -remained monarchists, partly of citizens who have become disgusted with -the squabbling and graft of mulatto democracy, or who, on economic and -political grounds, have grown dissatisfied with the republican régime -and are convinced that the salvation of Brazil lies in the restoration -of the old form of government. It is rare and usually a mistake, -however, to back water in life, and the imitative faculty of the -Brazilian makes it all the more unlikely that the former régime will -return, unless a failure of democracy the world over makes it à la mode -to bring about such a change. - -There was, of course, corruption under the monarchy, but one need not -inquire long in Rio to find a man ready to admit that the pall of -mulatto politicians and bureaucrats which hangs over republican Brazil -is more burdensome than ever were the grasping Portuguese courtiers of a -century ago. At least the latter were limited in number and had -occasionally a _cavalheiro_ pride that sometimes resembled decency, and -old Pedro II in particular, whose habit it was to keep a little personal -note-book in which to jot down any lapse from honesty by a public -official and to startle the man and his sponsors by bringing up the -matter when it came time to reappoint him, is generally admitted to have -ruled honestly and generously. But though the revolution of 1889 was in -reality only another detail of the world-wide movement of the last -century or two for bringing the ruling power down from a select and -wealthy class to the uncultured masses, the triumphant proletariat does -not appear to have greatly gained by the change. It is natural that the -masses, like the foreign firms struggling to keep their heads above -water in the form of innumerable taxes and the constant hampering of -meddlesome officials, should begin to wonder whether Brazil is not -mainly suffering from too much government, whether after all there is -not something, perhaps, in the contention of anarchists that the best -thing to do with over-corpulent governments is to take them out into the -woods and shoot them through the head, as something more burdensome than -useful. - - One brilliant November day, perorates a Brazilian editor, a few - hundred soldiers, enthused by a lucid patriot, destroyed the last - American throne amid rousing cries of “Long live the Republic!” And - from city to city, from hamlet to hamlet, these words rang through - all Brazil. But now, barely a generation later, our armed force is - mainly used to suppress personal liberties, the tendency being - constantly toward dictatorships; education of the people is given - much less attention than is demanded in a democracy, and we are - overrun with a devouring swarm of politicians who have lost all - idealism and who scarcely occupy themselves with anything but their - personal interests, unscrupulously exploiting the public coffers. - -The tendency toward dictatorships and the use of autocratic power to -cover corruption and aid partizanship was visible even to the naked eye -of the casual visitor. At the time I reached Brazil it was ruled over, -ostensibly at least, by a nephew of Deodoro, the first president. Never, -perhaps, had an administration been so cordially hated. “Dudú,” as the -populace called the president, that being his eighteen-year-old wife’s -pet name for him, was hated not only for himself but as a tool of the -“odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul, chief of the “P. R. C.” -or Republican Conservative Party, and for some years the national boss -of Brazil. When “Dudú” became president, the popular idol and fiery -orator, Ruy Barbosa, only survivor of those who overthrew the monarchy, -senator also and leader of the “P. R. L.” or Republican Liberal Party, -had been the opposing candidate and, according at least to the Liberal -newspapers, had been elected by an overwhelming popular vote. To be -elected, however, does not always mean to take office in Latin-America, -and the combined machinations of the “odious gaucho” and the army, in -which “Dudú” was a field marshal, had reversed the verdict. - -To hold his own against the popular clamor the Marshal had used methods -taken from his own military profession, terminating finally in the -declaration of a “state of siege” in the federal capital and that of the -state of Rio de Janeiro, Nictheroy across the bay, and in the state of -Ceará in the far north. On the surface this did not mean any noted -suppression in the freedom of life. But if one happened to be a -political opponent of the party in power, or a newspaper publisher, the -sense of oppression was distinct. Under the sheltering wings of martial -law no articles could be published until they had been submitted to a -government censor, whose strictness made impossible the slightest -adverse criticism of the powers that were. The suspension of the right -of habeas corpus made it possible for “Dudú” to have scores of men -thrown into dungeons out on the islands in Guanabara Bay merely because -he or some of his followers did not like their political complexions. If -the friends or families of the victims happened to find out what had -become of them and got a writ of habeas corpus from the Supreme -Court—according to the constitution a mandatory order of release—the -government answered, “We are in a state of siege and the constitution is -not working.” It would be hard to compute the full advantage of this -little ruse to the ruling politicians, and the grafting that went on -under cover of such protection may easily be imagined. When the decree -was finally revoked, on the eve of a new administration, the suppressed -news that flooded the papers was little less astounding than the swarms -of political prisoners whom government launches brought back to the -capital after months of imprisonment without any charge ever having been -preferred against them. - -Outwardly, of course, the forms of republican government were regularly -carried out during all this period. Several times I dropped into the -Monroe Palace to watch the House of Deputies meet, report no quorum, and -adjourn. Once I went to the Senate, looking down upon that august body -from a miserable little stuffy gallery resembling that of a cheap -theater, where “any person decently dressed and not armed” had the -constitutional right of admittance—unless the state of siege was invoked -against him. Brazil’s most famous orator, late unsuccessful candidate -for the presidency and the idol of the _povo_, or collarless masses, was -whining through some childish jokes and puns on the alleged bad grammar -of a bill destined to establish a new public holiday—as if Brazil did -not already have enough of them, with her sixty-five days a year on -which “commercial obligations do not mature.” It was evident, too, that -the speaker had by no means gotten over his peevishness at not becoming -president, for his speech was turgid with personalities and full of -innuendos against “Dudú” and his fellow scoundrels. To see the leisurely -air with which the senate enjoyed this pastime one might have supposed -that no more serious duties faced the wearers of the toga. - -Brazil is the only republic in South America that has trial by jury, -hence her courts much more nearly resemble our own than they do those of -Spanish-America. I attended a trial for murder one afternoon. Whatever -other faults they may have, the courts of Brazil cannot be charged with -unduly drawing out a trial, once it is begun. The judge called names -from a panel of jurors, and as each man stepped forward the _promotor_, -or prosecuting attorney, and the lawyer for the defense looked him up -and down much as a tailor might a client and said “_Recuso_” (I refuse) -or “_Aceito_” (I accept) without so much as speaking to the man or -giving any reasons for their action. Evidently they were expected to -guess his acceptability as a juror from his outward appearance. Those -accepted took their seats, and in less than ten minutes the jury of -seven was chosen and the trial had begun. There are juries of three -sizes in Brazil, always with an odd number of members, and these do not -need to reach a unanimous decision. A simple majority is decisive, -though the larger the majority for conviction the heavier the penalty -for the crime. Brazilian jurors get no pay, but they are fined if they -fail to answer to their names when called. - -A paper was passed among the seven jurors, each of whom wrote his name -on it; but they took no oath, except that a clerk handed rapidly around -among them a glass frame inside which was the sentence in large letters, -“I promise to do my duty well and faithfully,” and on this each laid his -right hand in silence. There are so many Positivists, free thinkers, -fetish worshippers, Mohammedans, and other non-Christian sects in Brazil -that the Bible and “so-help-me-God” oath would be even more out of place -than in our own metropolis. Then the clerk of the court, who had neither -eyes, voice, nor physique, but was a mere living skeleton humped over a -pair of trebly-thick glasses, moaned for nearly an hour through the -entire proceedings in a lower court the year before. The prisoner was a -youthful _Carioca_, of white race and of the small shopkeeper or hawker -type. Throughout the trial everyone addressed him in a gentle, kindly -manner. He stated that he was twenty-one, but had only been twenty when -arrested, which the _promotor_ whispered to me was merely a ruse to get -the benefit of being a minor. More than a year before he had shot a man -of his own age in a downtown street, with premeditation, he naïvely -admitted. According to the degree of murder proved he might be sentenced -to twelve, twenty, or thirty years. There is no death penalty in Brazil, -nor will the Brazilian government extradite a refugee who may be -punished with more than thirty years’ imprisonment in the land from -which he fled, unless that country agrees not to execute him or exceed -that limit of punishment. - -At length the _promotor_, who might easily have passed for an American -lawyer in any of our courtrooms—until he opened his mouth—began an -address in the thinnest, weakest, most worn-out voice imaginable—a -common weakness among Brazilians and especially _Cariocas_, thanks -perhaps to the climate—mumbling something about a “villainous -premeditated crime” several times before he took his seat. During the -next few hours he and the attorney for the defense, the latter in a wire -cage across the room, quarreled back and forth, rather good-naturedly as -far as outward appearances went, the judge very rarely interfering. It -was hotter in the courtroom than in any possible place of punishment to -which the accused might be sent, in this life or the next, and the -entire throng, from the judge to the last negro loafer in the far -corner, was constantly mopping its face. Not a woman was included in the -gathering. After the first formalities were over the trial moved forward -in almost uncanny American fashion, but with what in our own land would -have seemed dizzy speed, for it was finished, with the verdict given and -a sentence of six years imposed, by one o’clock the next morning. - -Brazilian judges are reputed not often to be open to actual -bribery, but to be overrun with sentimentalism, nepotism, that -do-anything-for-a-friend or for a friend’s friend, that lack of moral -courage necessary to act with full justice when a personal element is -involved, which is a crying weakness in all Latin-American countries. -Striking evidences of this were frequently coming to the attention, more -often in the interior than in Rio itself. A politician in a city farther -north, for instance, killed a man of little standing, and went at once -to report the matter to his bosom friend, the circuit judge. “All -right,” the judge was reported to have replied. “Your sentence is one -day’s imprisonment—in my house,” and when a warrant for the assassin’s -arrest finally reached him, the judge marked it “Judgment given and -sentence served,” and sent it to be filed in the archives. Aside from -this weakness, the courts of Brazil seem to be fair; if anything they -are too lenient. Not a few Brazilians contend that the jury system is -not suited to the temperament of the nation, because it requires a -sterner attitude toward human frailty than they can attain. In fact, the -extreme leniency of juries is but another manifestation of the -liberty-license point of view of Brazil, the same weakness that spares -the rod and spoils the child. There were almost daily examples of this -attitude of irresponsibility, emotionalism, undue compassion, as if the -jurors considered a thief or an assassin at worst a poor unfortunate and -were thinking that the day may quite likely come when they will find -themselves in the same boat. A baker of a certain large city asked a -member of the Chamber of Deputies, to whom he had been supplying bread -for months without any suggestion of payment, to settle his bill. Being -of foreign birth, the baker may not have known that openly to dun a -Brazilian is so great an insult as to be dangerous. The deputy shot him -through the heart, and the jury found it “justifiable homicide.” A -_Carioca_ boy of fifteen, who had been in jail for a year charged with -murder, was tried during my stay in the capital. The whole trial took -place between one and twelve P. M., and the accused was found guilty of -“imprudence” and sentenced to fifteen days in prison. A well-known -citizen of Rio was assassinated on January 5 under revolting -circumstances. The case finally came to trial on the afternoon of -December 29; the court took a recess from seven to eight for dinner; at -11:20 the jury retired, and at 12:20 there was brought in a verdict -sentencing the accused to ten years’ imprisonment. Innumerable examples -might be cited, all showing extraordinary sloth in bringing criminals to -trial, lightning speed in dealing with them when at last they are -arraigned, and a mistaken soft-heartedness in punishing them. On the -other hand, the state may, and sometimes does, appeal a case and convict -a man acquitted by an earlier verdict. - - - - - CHAPTER X - MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE CARIOCAS - - -The mixture of races gives Rio a society very different from that of -Buenos Aires; its elements are more distinct, more complex, more -primitive, much less European. Probably it is the African blood in his -veins even more than his Latin ancestry which gives the _Carioca_ the -emotionalism and the unexpected violences that often carry the -individual or the population to excesses. The Brazilian character may be -said to consist of Latin sensibility tinged with the African traits of -superstition, fatalism, slovenliness, indiscipline, a certain -happy-go-lucky cheerfulness, and an almost total lack of initiative; and -to these the country owes most of its social and economic afflictions. -It would be unreasonable to expect high things of it. The Portuguese -were the cheapest race in western Europe, who won their place in history -simply because they happen to live on the sea, and in the New World they -mixed indiscriminately and in a purely animal way with the lowest form -of humanity. The negro gave the Portuguese more imagination and a better -adaptability to the tropics, perhaps an increase of cheerfulness; but -with these came other qualities that do not make for improvement. Though -he is often quick of intelligence, the _Brazileiro_ seldom shows -continuity of effort or any other sturdiness of character; he is -exceedingly susceptible to flattery and highly incensed at any mention -of the faults which he himself sometimes recognizes. Weather appears to -make a difference in man’s disposition, and the climate of Rio does not -seem to breed what we call “crankiness.” Outwardly the _Carioca_ is -usually good-humored and obliging, with less gruffness than the -_Porteño_. Yet it is evidently not best for a man to be too greatly -favored by nature; not only does it make him more indolent, but he seems -on the whole to be less happy than in countries where the struggle for -livelihood demands continuous and gruelling labor. Though individually -and superficially they may be cheerful, the general air of a group of -Brazilians is melancholy; as a character in a native novel of standing -puts it, “they always seem to be discussing a funeral”—“or pornographic -secrets,” adds another. There are more suicides per capita in Rio than -in almost any other city in the world, and the finer the weather the -more there seem to be reported each morning. - -That the Brazilian is superficially courteous and in his way kindly -there is no doubt; yet few traces of these qualities are to be found far -beneath the surface. Even if he protests, he does so in soft language; -_palavras grossieras_ under any provocation are considered exceedingly -bad form in any but the lowest classes. Yet there is a distinct -suggestion of decadence in this very softness of speech, and one comes -to long occasionally for the vigor and manliness of the doubled fist. As -fathers the Brazilians have few equals, in all truth, for almost no -other race on earth shows more indiscriminate diligence in peopling it. -But it is an excellency of quantity rather than of quality. They are -good husbands in the Brazilian sense, so long as the woman is content to -remain at home and raise children while her lord and master is -cultivating similar gardens elsewhere. Divorces are practically unknown -because the general sentiment of the country is still Catholic, for all -the prevalence of other theologies and philosophies, because the -Brazilians have something of the French point of view that the family is -primarily a business partnership not to be broken up for such light -reasons as lack of love or illicit intercourse, and because the country -has no divorce law. Married sons often live with their parents because -they are too proud or too lazy to go out and work—though there is a -strong family affection among all Latin-Americans, in the long run the -principal result of this particular custom is bad for the race. That the -rod is spared, often to the detriment of the child, especially of the -boys, there is no doubt; one finds proofs of it every hour of the day in -Brazil. The average Brazilian is an excellent illustration of the fact -that mankind must be disciplined, that even children cannot always be -ruled by love any more than they can be fed only on sweets, and the -sparing of the rod has had a very large and by no means always -beneficial effect on the male adults. - -Indeed, there is far too much liberty, too much laissez faire—or _deixa -fazer_, to use the native tongue—in Brazil, as in Spanish and Portuguese -life everywhere. No one in the country seems to recognize that liberty -may easily slop over into license, that the liberty of one may go so far -as to interfere with and even wholly annul that of many others. No doubt -democratic liberty should allow street-hawkers to howl the night as well -as the day hideous, or let a merry soul pound a tuneless piano until -three in the morning. To the newly republicanized Brazilians a law -forbidding the interspersing of brothels through every residential -district would no doubt be “a despotic interference with our sacred -constitutional rights as citizens and equals,” as it would be to compel -the hundreds of boys selling newspapers in the streets of Rio to learn -some trade or calling, that later they may find some better way to earn -a living than by hawking or thieving. But it is the Brazilian, as it is -generally the South American, way never to correct anyone or anything -unless it is absolutely unavoidable, until a confirmed democrat comes to -wonder whether the human race must always have kings or dictators to -rule over it rather than ever learning to rule itself. Then one recalls -that Brazil has been a democracy, even nominally, only since 1889, and -it is not so strange that she has not yet come to see that there may be -a seamy side even to liberty. - -Though they are constantly asking for credit abroad, either collectively -or as individuals, Brazilians trust one another even more rarely than do -the average of Latin-Americans. Everywhere are little hints of lack of -confidence. The cash system is widely prevalent, which does not merely -mean paying the moment the work is done, but often before it will be -undertaken, lest the client change his mind or prove insolvent. Thus one -pays a dentist before he fills a tooth, the doctor before he will remove -an appendix, and a photographer before he will undertake to print one’s -films. The mail boxes of Rio are automatic, for instance; the mailman -must shove a locked bag under them before they will disgorge their -contents, and both box and bag lock themselves as he pulls the latter -out again, so that he never sees a letter, much less gets his sticky -fingers on it. A judge of Rio stated publicly, when a jury let off a -palpable offender, that ninety-five per cent. of the fires in Brazil -were set by the owners or their hired agents in order to get the -insurance, but that “there are so many artists at this crime who -exercise their profession with such admirable perfection that few are -ever convicted, however convinced the judge and the public may be of -their guilt.” His Honor was, of course, incensed at a specific failure -to convict, and perhaps exaggerated somewhat, but there are evidences -that he had not greatly overstepped the truth. - -There is no more futile occupation on earth than trying to save money in -Rio de Janeiro. It melts away like ice under an equatorial sun; in fact, -money is of such slight value in Brazil that it seems foolish to try to -keep it. Do so and you are more likely than not to find that it has -grown even more worthless next morning in exchange for those things of -real value which man needs; that you have saved the cash only to lose -the credit. Prices were decidedly higher in Rio than in Buenos Aires, or -even in Montevideo. A small glass of not very good beer cost 800 reis; a -green cocoanut, that finest of tropical thirst-quenchers, growing in -superabundance along all the 5000-mile coast-line of Brazil, was -considered a bargain at the equivalent of a quarter—and a tip to the man -who opened it. The smallest bottle of native mineral water of -unquestionable antecedents cost at least a milreis, and thirst lurks on -every corner in sun-blazing Rio. Ordinary water? Certainly; if one cares -to flirt with the undertaker. Everything else was in proportion to this -most necessary source of expense. In the _Seccos e Molhados_, “Drys and -Wets,” as Brazil calls her grocery or provision shops, potatoes sold at -six hundred and more reis a kilogram; butter imported from Denmark into -this enormous country of splendid grazing lands was a luxury far beyond -the reach of any but the affluent. With the smallest coin in circulation -worth more than three cents, it was not to be expected that prices would -be cut fine. Moreover, there is the tendency of _fazendo fita_. A -Brazilian is ashamed to admit that his money is limited. He has the -reputation, and prides himself on it, of being a “good spender,” but -this is not so much due to his scorn for money as compared with the -better things that money will buy as it is to the fear of being thought -less well-off than his fellows. Commerce is largely carried on in -public, and the purchaser is thereby forced to pay more for dread of -being seen making a fuss. He is afraid to ask the price of a thing -before buying, or to protest against exorbitance, lest the by-standers -think money matters to him—the ally of the tip-seeker the world over. À -la carte restaurants in Rio almost invariably leave the price-space on -their menus blank and bring a check bearing only the sum total, knowing -that the average client will not have the hardihood to ask for a bill of -particulars. Even a Brazilian workman never protests against commercial -exploitation, never refuses to take a thing after he has asked for it, -but pays whatever is demanded as if it were a pleasure to do so. - -Even in the matter of prices a community gets about what it demands, and -this national lack of protest has lifted the cost of living in Brazilian -cities into the realm of the absurd. Prices of almost anything are out -of all reason; the people seem to have formed the habit of paying high -to cover the heavy import and other duties and the grafting of their -officials, and to expect everything to be marked up in the same -proportion. It seems to be more or less a matter of pride with them that -they pay more than other people. Third-class fare from Portugal to Rio -was 55$000; the return trip on the same ships cost 105$000. The attitude -of the entire population seems to be graft and let graft pay through the -nose because you can make someone else do likewise. The average -Brazilian does not look as hard at a 32-cent milreis as most Americans -do at a dime, or Europeans at a copper. Rio is one place where Americans -can realize how the European, earning his money with more difficulty -than we do, feels when he first comes into contact with our prices. - -Numerous proofs may be found that the Brazilian is rather an imitator -than an initiator. He seldom has a worthwhile idea of his own, but he is -supernaturally quick to grasp those of anyone else. A year or more -before my arrival a Portuguese opened a _caldo de canna_ shop in -aristocratic Rua Ouvidor. He set up a small cane-press, stood a bundle -of choice sugarcanes at the door, laid in a supply of ice, and waited -for customers. They soon came, for nowhere does a novelty take more -quickly than in Rio. Picking out their own cane as they entered, the -clients caused it to be run through the press, the juice straining down -through chopped ice, with the result that for a _tostão_ they had a -pleasant and refreshing drink. Within a fortnight of the establishment -of this entirely new industry fifteen other persons, all Brazilians, had -opened _caldo de canna_ shops in the three short blocks of that narrow, -vehicle-less shopping street, buying out the former occupants at any -price—with the inevitable result that within a month the entire clan, -including the originator, were bankrupt. To-day, when the stroller is -thirsty yet has no desire to consume alcohol, he can get a glass of iced -cane-juice only in a few shops which make this a side-line of their -regular business. This is one of hundreds of similar incidents in the -commercial life of Rio, and suggestive in general of Brazilian business -ethics. - -A Brazilian proverb has it that “A cauda do demonio e de rendas” (the -devil’s tail is made of lace). Whatever the scientific exactness of that -assertion, there is no doubt that the _Brazileiro_ is early, often, and -usually successfully tempted by what are sometimes vulgarly called -“skirts.” The same may be said of all Latin-America, but in Brazil the -undisguised prevalence of irregular polygamy probably reaches its -zenith. Rigid, yet provocative, seclusion of the women, thanks to -Moorish influence, the former teaching of the Jesuits, to the instinct -for self-preservation of the women themselves, is perhaps as much the -cause of this condition as the natural polygamous tendency of the males. -Being an accepted convention of society that freedom of social -intercourse between men and women is certain to lead to more intimate -relations at the first opportunity, the women of the better class are -inclosed within an impregnable wall of Oriental seclusion, and their -contact with men is almost wholly confined to those of their own family -circle. Even the French find Brazilian family life unreasonably -circumspect. Under such conditions there can, of course, be little -social or intellectual activity, little real human intercourse, and it -is not surprising that the eager and romantic young men who find it -impossible to meet girls of their own class without a cynical chaperon -hanging constantly at their heels should fall easy prey to the darker -skinned and more accessible members of the sex, or to the imported -demimondaines who flourish in all the larger cities. - -Naturally fecund, and of strong maternal instincts, the Brazilian woman -unquestioningly accepts the tenet that her place is strictly in the -home. Marriage does not bring her any appreciable increase in freedom -over her closely chaperoned days of virginity. But while she is expected -to conduct herself so circumspectly that not a breath of scandal shall -ever sully the honor of her fidalgo lord and master, the husband loses -none of his bachelor liberty. The average _Carioca_ can, and, above the -laboring class at least, usually does, keep a mistress, and not only -loses nothing of public esteem, but little of that of his own women. In -fact, the politician, the man of big business, of wealth, or of social -pretensions, is somewhat looked down upon if he does not maintain an -extra household or two; failure to do so is a fit subject for jesting -among his friends and acquaintances. The subsidized companions of this -class are almost always European, usually French, and preferably blond; -rarely are they native born, for the white and better class Brazilians -guard their daughters too closely to make possible any irregular -approach, and to take a “woman of color” would seem to the wealthy -Brazilian like buying poor native perfume when he can get, and all his -friends use, the best French product. - -But it is not so much the existence of this state of affairs as the -perfect frankness with which it is admitted and carried on that astounds -the Anglo-Saxon stranger in Brazil. Even the French have never attained -the openness and lack of hypocrisy in the sex relationship which has -been reached by the Brazilian. Not merely does unattached youth sow its -wild oats with perfect indifference to public knowledge; heads of old -and respected families cultivate the same crop with intensive, -experienced care, quite as openly. The Brazilian who would be ready to -challenge to a duel the stranger who spoke to one of the women of his -family often brings them to social events, to the races, to a patriotic -celebration, and, after installing them in a place of vantage, goes to -sit with his overdressed French mistress, as like as not within plain -sight of his family, apparently without incurring any censure or even -protest from his wife and children and certainly none from society. - -The means of acquiring a mistress of proper antecedents are varied. The -wealthy and traveled Brazilian brings her home with him from Paris, or -entrusts the commission to his friends. There is no difficulty whatever -about it, no inquisitive federal authorities, no inquiring protective -societies, “not even duty to pay, though that is our chief import,” as a -cynical editor put it. If neither of these means are available, and the -postal service is incapable of bringing him a prize, the seeker after -companionship may advertise in the public prints. Even the staid old -_Jornal do Commercio_, modeled on and in many ways resembling the -_London Times_, does not hesitate to run dozens of such “want ads” every -day of the year: - - A WELL-CONDUCTED GENTLEMAN - - Educated and serious, but with few - social relations in the city, wishes - to meet a pretty and like-minded - girl, in order to protect her - secretly. Letters to this newspaper - under the name “Xip.” - - PROTECTION - - A serious youth, married, - independent, in the flower of his - years, without children, wishes to - make an arrangement with a girl or - widow of good appearance who will - accept a monthly pe - - ADVANTAGEOUS OPPORTUNITY - - A distinguished youth who is not - ugly, who dresses well and has a - permanent income, wishes to meet a - pretty girl of poor family who is in - need of protection, demanding merely - that she be not more than twenty - years old, that she be white, or at - least light-gray (_parda_), in - color, elegant, of good education, - and _sympathica_. He guarantees a - good standard of living, and it - might be that in the future he would - even marry her, a thing which he - cannot do now because the laws of - the country forbid it. It will be - better to send photographs. Letters - to João da Silveira at Poste - Restante. - -Nearly all advertisers emphasize their seriousness and demand it in -return, and the word “protection” appears in almost every notice. Nor is -the weaker sex backward in appealing for protectors: - - PROTECTION - - A girl of fine manners and - bringing-up, aged 18, elegant, - serious, and well educated, will - accept the protection of a - _cavalheiro_ of the same qualities, - with wealth. - - GIRL OF DISTINGUISHED APPEARANCE - - needs the urgent assistance of a - gentleman of position, distinction, - and good resources, who will furnish - a house for her and give her a - monthly pension of 500$000. Letters - to “Velda” in care of this - newspaper. - -Naturally those of less individual lack of morals do not overlook the -opportunity of bringing themselves to notice in these columns, often -expressing themselves in French rather than Portuguese, not for the sake -of secrecy but because those who read French are more apt to belong to -the wealthier and better-conducted class to which the imported -aristocrats of the easy life appeal: - - JEUNE PARISIENNE - - arrivant d’Europe, chez Madame - Margot, Rua D. José de Barros, n. - 31. - - MLLES. AIDA and CARMEN - - advise their friends and comrades - that they have removed from 97 - Ypiranga street to 42 Maio, where - they have established themselves. - Telephone 4,406. - - YOUNG FRENCH GIRL - - 18 years, fresh and gay, arriving - from Reims, wishes to make the - acquaintance of several gentlemen - curious to talk over news of the war - and Prussian behaviour. Letters to - Mlle. H—— B—— in care of this - newspaper. - -In addition to all these more or less individual appeals, there is, of -course, a plethora of “_mulheres da vida_”—“women of the life,” as they -are called in Brazil, “who,” complains a lone pulchritudinous editorial -voice, “are gradually invading all the arteries of the city.” This class -has almost completely usurped the first half mile or more of dwellings -along the Beira Mar, facing the bay and one of the most gorgeous views -in the western hemisphere; yet the citizens of Rio think no more of -protesting against this invasion than of striving to hinder the usurpers -from drumming up trade from dusk until daylight by repeated trips along -the first section of the “Botanical Garden Line.” I am not of those who -believe implicitly in our American custom of playing ostrich and -concealing our heads in the sand of Mrs. Grundy’s garden, but there is -such a thing as overdoing frankness, of making temptation too -accessible, of chloroforming public opinion out of its legitimate -consciousness; and the ways of Rio and the average Brazilian city do not -indicate that perfect candor is any improvement over our own secretive -and hypocritical treatment of the same subject. - -There are other and more amusing things to be found among the “want ads” -of Rio newspapers. Beggars frequently run appeals for assistance: - - POOR BLIND WOMAN - - Francisca de Barros of Ceará, blind - in both eyes, crippled in one hand, - ill, and without resources, begs an - alms of all good charitable souls, - whom the good God will recompense. - It may be sent in care of this - paper. - - BY THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST! - - A lady who is ill and unable to - work, with a medical certificate to - prove it, a tubercular daughter, and - without resources to sustain - herself, suffering from the greatest - necessities, comes to beg of - charitable persons, by the Sacred - Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus - Christ, an alms for her sustenance, - which God will recompense to all. - Rua Senhor de Mattosinhos 43. - -If all such beggars were actually ailing or incapacitated, it would be -less surprising to find respectable newspapers running their -advertisements. But it has often been amply demonstrated that many of -them are the most brazen frauds. The editors of the same sheets which -run these alms-seeking petitions admit editorially that “Mendicants of -the aristocratic variety, who live well, eat well, and except at work -dress well, may be found in any street of the city going from door to -door, imperiously clapping their hands to call the attention of the -residents.” At a fixed stop of all “Botanical Garden” cars a young woman -of slight African taint and rumpled garments, with several children -quite evidently borrowed for the occasion and frequently changed, -canvassed every car, always with profitable results; yet at her home in -the outskirts of Ipanema she dressed and lived like an heiress. There -are deserving cases, or at least unfortunate ones, among Rio’s indigent -army, but the church and Iberian custom have trained the _Cariocas_ to -accept begging as natural, inevitable, and in no way reprehensible, and -the medieval conception of charity, that the bestowing of largess on -able-bodied loafers is to lay up favor in heaven, causes the giver to -lose little thought on the worthiness of the case so long as the -heavenly bookkeepers duly record his action. - -The announcements of “Spiritualist Somnambulists,” who can “diagnose the -future in time to permit applicants to change theirs before it is too -late,” are legion. One man ran permanently this long-winded assertion: - - CURE BY GOD - - The undersigned offers to cure - anyone of any ailment, cases that - are despaired of preferred, by the - laying on of hands, from eight in - the morning to eight at night, by a - special power given him by the - Almighty, and by prayer to the - invisible divine beings, the only - requirement being that those who - present themselves shall not be - under the care of nor taking any - medicine prescribed by, a physician, - and that they have faith in the - brilliant future of the divinely - gifted undersigned. - -Apparently he had no connection with the disciples of a similar panacea -in our own country. - -The more customary “want ads” of our own land, of persons seeking or -sought for work, are given a curious twist in Brazil for lack of the -succinct word “wanted,” which is replaced by _aluga_, really meaning -“rents.” Thus: “Aluga-se uma menina—there rents itself a girl to do -housework.” - -[Illustration: A news-stand on the mosaic sidewalk of the Avenida Rio -Branco] - -[Illustration: A hawker of Rio, with his license and his distinctive -noise-producer] - -[Illustration: The brush-and-broom man on his daily round through the -Brazilian capital] - -Not the least curious of the contents of Rio newspapers are the illicit -gambling advertisements. The state and federal lotteries are legal and -may advertise as freely as the _cambistas_ who sell the tickets on the -streets may howl day and night hideous with spurious promises of easy -fortune, but these official games reduce competition as much as possible -by legal enactments. Some twenty years ago the director of the Rio Zoo -began putting up daily on the gate a picture of one of the animals -inside, in order to attract visitors to the establishment. A bright -individual recognized this as a brilliant opportunity to start a new -gambling scheme. He took the director into his confidence, gradually -drew crowds to the gate, and the illicit lottery that resulted -flourishes to this day. It is called “O Bicho,” a word meaning literally -“worm,” but which in Brazilian slang applies to all animals, reptiles, -birds, and even vermin. Twenty-five different “bichos” are used in the -underground lottery of Rio, and every day the newspapers carry the -notice: “O Bicho—For to-morrow ...,” followed merely by tiny pictures -of, perhaps, a snake, a rabbit, and a bear. The game is against the law, -yet even the chief of police plays it, and newspapers cannot be enjoined -from publishing the announcements, because no jury has ever been -officially convinced that they are not merely enigmas for amusing -children. - -Two points of superiority Brazilian newspapers have over our own—they -are not besmeared with the alleged “funny pages” of paint-pot -cartoonists, nor do they “feature” divorce cases or any other form of -marital misdemeanor, possibly because domestic infidelity is too -commonplace to be “news.” On the other hand, they pander to that -ultra-morbid streak in the Brazilian temperament which African blood -seems to give it. Large front-page photographs of the victims of suicide -or revolting crimes are the joy of _Carioca_ editors and readers, the -“action of the crime” being posed for in all its gruesome details by -models if pictures of the real characters are not available. - -Speaking of crimes, there is a good police system in Rio, with several -excellent departments and a detective bureau that makes use of the -latest European science in the detection and capture of criminals. The -prevalence of warnings against “batadores de carteiras,” or pickpockets, -is a thermometer of the criminal element. This class is so numerous as -to have a thieves’ slang of its own, called “caló” by those who use it, -or, in the pamphlet vocabulary published by the police department, -“_Giria dos Gatunos Cariocas_.” Many of the expressions in this criminal -dialect of Rio would be Greek even to the man whose native tongue is -Portuguese, though a few of them are localisms in more general use. Not -a few of the words in the pamphlet grew familiar to my ear before I left -Brazil. I learned that “Noah’s Ark” is a pawnshop; to “perform an -autopsy” is to go through the pockets of a person fallen in the street; -“to strike thirty-one” is to die; a “bond” (in the legitimate language a -street-car) is a group of persons; to travel “by Italian bond” is to go -on foot; a policeman is a “button” or a “cloud”; a mounted policeman is -“a four-footed cardinal,” and “convent” means the Penitentiary. To “give -charity” is to kill a person while robbing him; to “disinfect the zone” -is to disappear from a given haunt; a patrol-wagon is either a “merry -widow” or a “chicken coop”; a “nose” is a person (“He came with three -noses”), the real nose being a “smoke-box.” A “soft” is a mattress; a -lawyer, a “talking-machine”; “synagogue” stands for head, and “Big Papa” -means the President of Brazil. Naturally money has many pseudonyms among -the class that is always seeking to lay illegal hands upon it, among -them “wind,” “light,” and “arame” (literally, brass or wire). The -expression “falta arame” (brass is lacking) is widespread. A ragged -youth frequently sidles up to the passer-by, rubbing his stomach and -asserting, “Falta arame pa’ matar o bicho” (literally, “money is lacking -to kill the worm”); what he really means to say is that he needs money -to stop the gnawings of hunger. - -It is a common human trait for those somewhat loose in their morals to -be doubly stern in outward manners. The Brazilian, even of the more -haughty class, is inclined to be lax at home, though in public outward -appearance is everything to him. One showy suit of clothes for street -and social wear seems to leave the average _Carioca_ willing to spend -the rest of his life in his underclothes. It is no unusual experience -when calling upon a man to be asked on some pretext to wait until he has -put on his outer garments; while among the women the wrapper habit -extends from the highest to the lowest ranks of society. The tropical -heat partly accounts for this sartorial laxity, but in many ways it -typifies the national habit of mind. At home the Brazilian, particularly -of the fair sex, can sit for hours in that utterly blank-minded idleness -of the Oriental; only when they come out to stroll the Avenida or the -Ouvidor late in the afternoon do most of the women put on real clothes -and dress their hair. Among the humbler class, the negroes and poor -whites of the _morros_ and the narrow valleys between them, or of the -one-story tenement houses known as _cortiços_, there is but slight sense -of privacy and much of the family dishabillé and domestic activities are -freely exhibited to the public gaze. - -Outside his home circle, however, the Brazilian is more than exacting in -such matters. In public a man must not only be fully dressed, but is -somewhat looked down upon if he indulges in any of those lighter garbs -of the “Palm Beach” variety that seem so in keeping with the Brazilian -climate. Especially if he is a politician, a business man, a member of -high society, or has a desire to attain to any of these categories, must -he wear a heavy dark suit and under no circumstances leave off his -waistcoat. To be without a coat is a criminal offense in many cities; in -the smallest village that has any personal pride, even among many people -living in the wilderness of the _sertão_, it is atrociously bad form. -The man riding with a negro functionary in the far interior of the -country must cling to his coat if he would not make his companion an -enemy for life. One of our recent presidents still has a low rating in -certain parts of interior Brazil because he entered a mud village of -unwashed, illiterate, largely illegitimate mulattoes in his -shirt-sleeves. When several of his party landed in Bahia they were met -by a courteous policeman and told either to go back to the ship and get -their coats or buy new ones in the shops. Yet in that very city hundreds -of men habitually wear no shirt or other garment under an often -wide-open coat. More remarkable still, while a man in his shirt-sleeves -is denied admittance to some of the most sorry establishments, it is -entirely comme il faut for him to come down to the early morning meal in -the best hotels in his pajamas. The negro captain of a little steamer -far up in Matto Grosso sent word to an American prospector of my -acquaintance, who appeared on deck in the latest model of soft shirt, -with belt and cravat, that he must not leave his cabin without his coat, -yet the majority of the native passengers were lounging about in -carelessly buttoned pajamas and kimonos, sockless slippers, the women -with their hair down their backs. During my first days in the country a -Brazilian aviator made the first non-stop flight from São Paulo to Rio, -breaking all South American records for speed and distance. The -newspapers shouted with glee at this splendid feat by a “son of the -country,” yet one and all commented in caustic editorials on his -shocking bad taste in leaving his coat behind and landing at Rio in his -shirt sleeves. The street-cars of Rio and every other city of size have -at least two classes. The fares are not greatly different, but unless a -man is wearing coat, collar, necktie, real shoes—not _tamancos_, or any -other form of sandal—_and socks_, he must ride second-class. Nor may he -carry with him in the higher form of public conveyance anything larger -than a portfolio. - -Rio gives the impression of being overcrowded. With emancipation the -ex-slaves flocked into town in quest of an easier livelihood than that -on the plantations, and immigration streams clog here. The swarms of -beggars, criminals, prostitutes, hawkers, adult newsboys, two drivers -for each automobile, the crowds frequently seen struggling for jobs, to -say nothing of the plethora of government functionaries, suggest an -oversupply of human beings. More than once in strolling along the -wharves I came upon a hundred men fighting for work where twenty were -needed to coal or stevedore a ship, often standing up to their knees in -sea-water along the Caes Pharoux battling for a seat in the tender -waiting to carry the score to their labors. Nor were they “bums” either, -but muscular, honest workmen, nearly all of the Caucasian race; while -just across the way indolent mulatto government employees lolled in the -shade of the customhouse as if they had settled down for life and need -never again exert themselves. A “pull” with the foreman who chooses the -workmen for a given job is usually essential to being taken on, and he -naturally expects his “rake-off.” One day a riot broke out among these -wharf laborers; two “fiscals” of the stevedores’ union were killed by -members who claimed they had been discriminated against; and the -newspapers treated the matter as if it were a frequent occurrence. - -Not the least picturesque of the many strange types of Rio are her -street vendors, who pass all day long in almost constant procession. The -Brazilian woman is not fond of shopping, or at least of going to market. -She has the Moorish custom of keeping to the house; she feels most -comfortable in négligé, and public appearance requires elaborate full -dress; nor does the blazing sunshine invite to unnecessary exertion. -This tendency to stay home, and the excess of men over jobs, has given -rise to innumerable street-hawkers, who go from door to door, selling -both the necessities and the luxuries of life. In the early morning, -often before sunrise in the winter months of July or August, one is -often awakened by a cry of “_Verdura! Verdureiro!_” and looks out to see -the “vegetable-man” jogging along under a load of green-stuff that would -break an ordinary man’s back. Then barely has one dropped off again -before there comes a bellow of “_Vassoura! Vassoureiro! -’asooooreeeeiro!_” from the brush-and-broom man, who marches by all but -lost under an arsenal of potential cleanliness, with a side-line of -baskets and woven baby-chairs to complete his concealment. Meanwhile -from down the street comes the increasing wail of “_’llinha! Gallinha -Gorda!_ (Chicken! Fat Chicken!),” and past the iron grilled window -shuffles a barefoot man with two large baskets at the ends of a pole -over his shoulder, or on the back of a horse or mule, offering -housewives their day’s roast or broiler. In Rio people always buy their -chickens on the hoof and avoid the risks of cold storage. Then comes the -“_Peixe! Camarão!_” man, whom we might call the fish-and-shrimp seller, -pausing here and there to cut up a fish on one of the round board covers -of his two flat baskets. He disappears earlier in the day than the -others, however, for seafood exposed after nine or ten in the morning to -the unshaded heat of Rio is likely to make a greater appeal to the -purchaser’s olfactory than to his optic nerves. - -Not all hawkers cry their wares. Some have, instead, their own special -noise-makers. The cake-and-sweetmeat man, with his large glass-sided -showcase on top of his head, strides along, blowing a whistle that looks -like half a dozen cartridge shells of varying size stuck together, or -like the conventional Pan’s Pipes, and the shrilly musical sound these -emit causes every child within hearing to canvass its pockets, parents, -or friends for a _tostão_. When a customer appears the cake-man squats -from under his load, depositing it on the pair of crossed sicks in the -shape of a saw-horse that he carries under one arm, and the bargaining -begins. The tin-man goes by, carrying a great stack of pots and pans and -calling attention to his existence by shaking a frying-pan fitted with a -clapper. The scissors-grinder stops every few yards to bring every nerve -to the top of the teeth by running an iron hoop over his emery-wheel, in -the hope of attracting trade. The man who sells plants and flowers comes -along, incessantly and regularly beating with a light stick the side of -the blooming box on his head. The seller of _azucarillas_, the ephemeral -sweets of Spain, is as familiar a figure as in the Iberian peninsula; -the “ice cream” merchant marches about with what looks like an oxygen or -gas cylinder on his back, playing a steel triangle to call attention to -his little gambling wheel, guaranteed to teach children to gamble early -in life by taking a chance on his effervescent delicacies. A few vendors -have a limited district, with grouped customers, especially the -bread-man who, with his great basket on his head and the stool to hold -it under one arm, has only to station himself in the _pateo_, or -courtyard, of a _cortiço_ to be surrounded by a clamoring throng, -children snatching the long loaves faster than their parents can buy -them and rushing excitedly into their one- or two-room homes with the -bread hugged tightly against their soiled chests. But the majority tramp -all day long, some treading the hot cobbles in bare feet, some wearing -the noiseless _alpargatas_ of Spain and Portugal, many scraping along -the cement pavements in wooden _tamancos_, invading every nook and -corner of the city and punctuating the whole day long with their cries -and signals. With rare exceptions they are Portuguese or Spanish—it -would be beneath the dignity of a native Brazilian to carry things about -in the hot sunshine; but the clothing trade is almost entirely in the -hands of “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrian, who peddles his -wares in every corner of the great republic in which the human race -sprouts. In Rio this perambulating clothing-shop announces himself by -slapping together two lath-like sticks, making a noise similar to, yet -entirely distinct from, that of the plant-and-flowers man. From daylight -until dark he plods, to wander back to his noisome little den when night -settles down without a slap left in his arm. During his first year or -two he carries his goods on his back, and looks at a distance like a -walking department store. But by the second year he has usually scrimped -enough to buy an elaborately decorated chest of drawers and to hire a -youthful or newly-arrived fellow-countryman to carry it, while he -wanders along with nothing to do but slap his sticks together and engage -in the long-winded bargaining which is unavoidable in any financial -dealing with the Brazilian housewives peeping out through their window -gratings. But the “Turk” is a more clever bargainer than the best of -them, and within three or four years he is almost certain to have -advanced to the ownership of a little pushcart and by the end of five -years it is a strange mishap if he has not set up a shop, become a local -nabob, and driven native competitors entirely out of his district. - -This does not by any means exhaust the list of vendors who add their -noises to the general hubbub of Rio. No one who has spent a week there -could forget the _cambistas_, the lottery-ticket sellers of all ages and -both sexes who invade the inmost privacy with their raucous howls, or -the never-ending cries of newsboys, some of whom spread their wares on -the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Central, while others race in and -out of the narrow streets on either side of it. Nor should one overlook, -even if it were possible, the creaking of enormous carts, their two -wheels twelve feet or more in diameter, with which an immense log or a -granite boulder is transported through the streets to the accompaniment -of hoarse-voiced cursing of the mule-driver in charge. - -If one grows weary of wandering Rio’s sun-bathed and colorful avenues -and _ruas_, there are indoor places worth seeing. The National Library, -for instance, is a magnificent building, at least in its material and -inanimate aspects. The human element is somewhat less perfect. The -president himself could not take a book out of the library; everyone -knows he would be sure to keep it or hock it. Being scribbled by hand, -the card catalogue is by no means easily legible; it is set so near the -floor that the reader of American height all but breaks his back in -reaching it, and there are so many authors of the same name that to hunt -up a given one is a serious task. Then there is a splendid Brazilian -system, evidently imported from Portugal or some still less respectable -region, under which directories, biographies, and the like are always -arranged in alphabetical order according to the _first_ name. - -Let us suppose that the only Brazilian opera of any importance, “O -Guaraní,” is soon to be given in the Municipal Theater, and that you -wish to know something about the man who wrote it. The announcement -mentions that his name is Gomes. You enter the sumptuous hall of the -library, hat in hand, wait for the negro attendant and his white bosom -companion to stop gossiping and give you a hat check, then you climb to -the next floor and, doubled up like a jackknife, claw through the -catalogue until you get the serial number of a biographical dictionary -in many volumes, containing the life story of the “Most Illustrious -Brazilians”—of whom there seem to be millions. Having filled out a -“bulletin” explaining which book you wish to consult, giving author, -title, the date, the “number of the set,” the “indication of the -catalogue,” your own name, address, and other detailed personal -information back to the fourth generation, you enter the sumptuous -reading-room. Or, more exactly, you wait patiently at the door thereof -until you are handed a _senha_, a slip of paper which gives you the -right to enter and—if you can still produce it—to exit. That in hand, -you choose a seat and write the number of it on the “bulletin,” hand -this to the gossiping tar-brushed attendant, and go and sit down. The -attendant finishes his gossip, looks at the slip, and carefully puts it -under a book on his desk. By and by he ends another gossip, picks up the -book, is astonished to find a slip under it, reads it carefully, and -puts it under another book on another part of the desk. Meanwhile you -cannot go to look up the books you might want to read at some future -date, because you cannot leave the reading-room without giving up your -senha with the attendant’s “o.k.” on it. You cannot bring along a book -of your own to read meantime, because any Brazilian knows that you would -bring some worthless pamphlet and manage to exchange it for a valuable -library volume. There is nothing to do but sleep, or study the -scattering of fellow-sufferers in the reading-room, where you are sure -to be struck by the absence of women. An old maid did enter the library -one day while I was there, but she was stared at so steadily that -neither she nor the men in the room did any reading. - -Finally, if this happens to be your lucky day, it may occur to the -attendant to put your book-slip into the automatic tube at his elbow and -send it off to the stacks. When the employees at that end of the tube -get through discussing politics or the lottery and send the book back by -automatic carrier, along with the “bulletin” signed by the man who -“executed the request,” a negro attendant wanders over to your seat with -it. Then you quickly discover that though the huge volume is devoted to -everything from “Gl” to “Gy” there is not a single Gomes in it. This -rather surprises you, since Gomes is as widespread in Brazil as Smith in -the United States or Cohen in New York, and at least one of that name -must have been illustrious at least in the Brazilian sense. But by this -time it is four-thirty, and the library takes a recess at five—that is, -everyone is ejected and the doors locked by that hour—so you give it up. - -Next day you discover quite by accident, your eyes having fallen upon a -frieze at the “Theatro Phenix,” that the musician’s name was _Carlos_ -Gomes. As soon as the library opens—at ten in theory and about ten-forty -in fact—you hasten back and go through the same tape-wound misery again -to get the fourth volume of illustrious Brazilians, and wallow for hours -through pages upon pages of “Carlos” without finding a single one of -them answering to the name of Gomes. Days afterward, when the opera has -come and gone, a _Carioca_ acquaintance casually remarks that the man -who wrote it was _Antonio_ Carlos Gomes, but that he never used the -first name! Back to the library to flounder once more in the ubiquitous -red tape, and late that evening you grasp the “A” volume of illustrious -Brazilians and finally at nine-thirty—Eureka! “Antonio Carlos Gomes, -Paulista, musician, born in Campinas, and ...” and just then you are -“put into the eye of the street,” for the library closes at ten and no -Brazilian official is so absurd as to let the closing hour catch him -still in the act of closing. Wandering homeward or out along the Avenida -you muse on how convenient it would be if strangers in our Congressional -Library had to look up the 28th president of the United States under the -name “Thomas.” - -Though at least two-thirds of the people of Brazil do not read or -write—more than half because they cannot and the rest because they have -no occasion or no desire to do so—Brazilians of the small “upper” class -are more cultured in the narrow, bookish sense of the word than the -average American of similar rating. “Everyone” knows everyone else in -this restricted little circle in Rio, and they retain many of the -old-fashioned opinions and manners of the days when the capital was -called “the court” and was overrun by the locust swarm of courtiers from -the old world. Embracing is still the knightly form of greeting between -males in this higher _Fluminense_ society, where it is the custom for a -man to kiss a lady’s hand—or glove—upon being presented, and in which -young men often give their fathers similar marks of recognition in -returning from or departing on a journey of any length. Many of this -caste are still monarchists, at least at heart, though they usually find -it to their advantage outwardly to acquiesce in, or even to show -enthusiasm for, the new form of government. - -I attended several “social functions” in Rio—always from a discreet -distance, “_a mocidade_,” which is the same foppish muster of youthful -“intellectuals” that is known as “_la juventud_” in Spanish-America or -“la jeunesse dorée” in France, was trying to establish a “Little -Theater” for the exclusive use of the élite, “with a view to -rehabilitating our histrionic art, so debilitated to-day.” Now and then -they perpetrated amateur plays which fortunately were not exposed to the -scorn of the general public. One afternoon they arranged a “literary -program” for the purpose of raising a monument to Arthur Azevedo, -Brazilian dramatist and writer of clever but salacious short stories. It -began at four in the handsome new “Theatro Phenix,” usually sacred to -the “movies,” and actually got started shortly before five. Being -primarily a social event, there were only four of us up in the gallery. -On the stage below, two young men in ultra-correct afternoon dress, -creased to the minute, displayed themselves to a select female audience -in recitations from Arthur’s stories (edited) and plays, with -extravagant and unnatural gestures. A self-confident lady who was just -recovering from being young, moaned through half a mile of something in -French—what this had to do with the glory of Arthur I did not catch, -high up under the eaves, unless it was meant to show how well the élite -of Rio have copied Parisian manners—and finally there was given a -one-act play by the same monumental author, which might have been very -funny had the acoustics of the house permitted us gallery slaves to -catch more than the reflected mirth of the audience. Through it all a -dozen of “our greatest literary geniuses” pranced about the stage before -the admiring audience on one excuse or another, while two photographers -toiled assiduously taking flashlights from all possible angles of the -correctly creased afternoon trousers. - -Still another day found me at a soirée musicale in the old “Theatro -Lyrico,” back of its newer and more aristocratic municipal successor. -This rather breathless old barn was the principal theater of Brazil -under the monarchy, and still retains unchanged the imperial loge, a -whole furnished apartment in Louis Philippe style. There was only a -slight negro strain in the audience, but the orchestra of fifty pieces -ran the whole gamut of human complexions. The recital by a pianist still -in her teens easily made up for all the tedium I had undergone in -attending other “social functions” in the Brazilian capital. As -Senhorita Guiomar Novaes has since won high praise in our own land and -in Europe, I am pleased to find in my notes on that day’s performance -the prophecy, “Here at least is one Brazilian who will prove of world -caliber.” - -One of the points that distinguish Brazil from Spanish-America is its -divergencies of religion. Here, too, the church got in on the ground -floor. As early as 1590 the Benedictine monks founded a monastery on the -summit of the Morro São Bento; soon afterward the Capucines established -themselves on top of the Morro do Castello, and in general the churchmen -showed great predilection for the high places of Rio, perhaps to get -that much farther away from the wicked world. For centuries Rome ruled -Brazil with her customary profitable sternness. Scarcely two centuries -ago Protestants attempting to spread their propaganda in the country -were roughly treated, and priests publicly burned in the _praças_ of -Bahia and other cities the Bibles and tracts offered by American and -other colporteurs. To this day and in the cathedral of Rio itself one -may find evidences of medieval fanaticism—women of the poorer class -making the circuit of the church on their knees, or kissing everything -in sight, including floor, walls, and all the wounds of a life-size -plaster-of-Paris crucifix under a thin shroud. A few of the hilltops, -too, are still sacred to the cloistered life, but the church has lost -much of its monopoly and is much less militant and omnipresent than on -the West Coast. It is the custom of Brazilian men, even in street-cars -or trains going full speed, to raise their hats, often in unison, when -they pass a funeral or a cemetery; but the same reverence in passing a -church door is by no means so general, and is usually confined to the -part-negro portion of the population. Indeed, it is almost unusual to -meet a priest, monk, or nun in the streets of Rio, and politically the -church is almost an outcast. - -Yet the capital pulsates with many religions. The transplanted faiths -of the many races that make up the modern _Carioca_ are so numerous -that, if we may believe a native writer, “every street has a different -temple and every man a different belief.” There are several sects of -African fetish worshippers, Methodists, Maronites, Baptists, -Physiolatras, Presbyterians, Satanists or worshippers of the devil, -Congregationalists, “Drinkers of Blood,” “Brothers,” Adventists, Jews, -followers of the “black mass,” Swedenborg disciples of the New -Jerusalem, exorcists, literary pagans, _sacerdotistas_ of the future, -descendants of the Queen of Sheba, worshipers of the sea, and -defenders of many other exotic dogmas, not to mention a large building -back of the Avenida Central occupied by the “A.C.M.” (_Associação -Christão de Moços_), in other words, the Y.M.C.A. As far away as the -Uruguayan border I had heard an unfrocked priest lecture on one of the -newer faiths of Brazil and was astonished to hear the loud and general -applause whenever he made a thrust at the fanaticism or immorality of -South American priesthood. Up in the Andes he would have proceeded -along that tack in public for about two minutes before having a -pressing engagement with the undertaker. In Santa Maria my -astonishment was as great when I passed an imposing Protestant stone -church on one of the principal streets and heard the minister—speaking -his Portuguese with a thick German accent—openly preaching his -particular doctrine to a large Brazilian congregation. Freedom of -worship reigned indeed; in that morning’s newspaper there was a -complaint from a town not far away that it could get no mail from -Friday until Monday, because its postmaster was an “_Adventista do 7º -Dia_!” - -The cult of the sea is found chiefly among the colonies of fishermen -scattered about Guanabara Bay. Some of these will under no circumstances -leave the sea or its beaches. Their children swim at two and go fishing -with the adults at ten. The moon enters considerably into their -fanaticism, and their veneration for and fear of the “Mother of Water” -is inferior only to their dread of the police, before whom, or in the -presence of non-conformists, they pretend to be strict Catholics. -One-fifth of all the spiritualist propaganda in the world is published -in Brazil, according to a native who made an investigation of the -question. This superstition is so widespread that men high in government -and business circles have been known to refuse to take a street car -which the rabble has left empty because “it is full of bad spirits.” -Synagogues are numerous in Rio, for there is a large Jewish colony, -running through all the gamut of society as well as of commerce, and -widely varying in orthodoxy and religious rites. There are rich Jews in -business along the Avenida who spend their winters “playing the markets” -and their summers up in Petropolis. In the less showy streets live -swarms of poor Armenian, Moroccan, Russian, Austrian, Turkish, French, -English, German, Arabian, and even African Jews, all engaged in their -customary occupation of buying and selling something or other. About the -Praça Tiradentes and in its radiating _ruas_ seethe Jewish women of the -streets and their male companions and exploiters, the _caftenes_, from -all the ghettoes of Europe. - -There are said to be more than eighty thousand Syrians in Brazil, of -whom by no means all wander through the streets slapping together a pair -of sticks. Down about the Rua da Alfandega and the lower point of the -city “Turks” own important business houses; in the colony are clever -craftsmen and even a few doctors, politicians, and journalists. More -than half the Brazilian Syrians are Maronite Christians from the -Lebanon; the rest are orthodox Mohammedans of somewhat lower social -strata, who earn their primitive livelihood as _carregadores_, carriers -of mankind’s material burdens, as shop-servants, and as petty peddlers. -Though many of these “Turks” find the difference in language a great -barrier to their native loquacity as bargainers, their qualities are -near enough those of the Brazilians to cause them to fit quickly into -their environment. - -Mohammedanism is not confined to the Syrians in the religious medley -that characterizes the capital of Brazil. Thousands of former slaves are -more or less followers of the Prophet of Medina, though barely aware of -it themselves. The negroes shipped out to Brazil in the olden days were -from many little nations scattered through the far interior of Africa; -hence their religions were as varied as their tongues. But just as the -general language of that continent, the _cubá_, suffices for simple -conversation throughout Africa or among the blacks of Rio, so the negro -religions practiced in the Brazilian capital may be roughly divided into -two general classes. The _alufás_ are more or less Mohammedan, with a -background of African superstitions; the _orixás_ are a still more -primitive sect upon which the influence of the prophet was never -brought. Outwardly, of course, nearly all the blacks are good Catholics, -but their saints and gods have been crossed with those of the church -until it is a wise negro who knows an African from a Catholic deity. -Then, too, the unadulterated fetish worship imported with the slaves -still persists, and Obeah and voodoo practices sometimes give evidence -of their existence. According to a reputable native writer there are in -the everyday crowd that surges through the Avenida, medicine men, -magicians, voodoo chiefs, _feiticeiros_ who will agree to mix a love -philter or to bring misfortune upon an enemy by mumbling an incantation -over a concoction of rat tails, cat’s head, finger and toe nails, and -the innocent passer-by would never dream what absurd African rites are -taking place behind more than one commonplace façade. There are “holy -men” living in the very heart of Rio surrounded by a swarm of -servant-women with whom they live in polygamy as in the wilds of the -black continent, yet many of whom dress for public appearance quite like -their Christian fellow-countrymen, play “bicho,” and die leaving to -their heirs many contos of reis. Negro Brazilians who know French and -even English, who have been educated abroad and have in some cases -become senators, or presidents of states, “men to whom I lift my hat and -with whom I shake hands,” in the words of the native investigator, still -cling secretly to the old African superstitions. There are rich -Brazilians who send their sons to Africa to study the religions of their -forefathers, and traffic between Rio, Bahia and Pernambuco and several -West African ports is heavy. - -Most conspicuous of the non-Catholic sects of Brazil, thanks less to -their numbers than to their political power and high intelligence, are -the Positivists. Auguste Comte, a Parisian mathematician who spent part -of his life in an insane asylum and the rest in penning voluminous -explanations of a “positive philosophy” which even the mathematical mind -seems to find difficulty in comprehending, suffered the customary fate -of the prophet in his own country. “Paris,” according to his Brazilian -disciples, “was not prepared for so advanced a doctrine.” In most other -countries he won only scattered followers—George Eliot and her lover -were among them—but in Brazil his doctrine not only survives but seems -likely to increase its standing before it goes the way of other ’isms. -Positivist propaganda began in Brazil during our Civil War, but was some -time in getting a footing. Finally the “Littréists” Miguel Lemos and -Teixeira Mendes became converts, the former becoming the head of the -sect in Brazil and the latter—now his successor—his chief lieutenant. -But it was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães who raised Positivism -to a political force, first teaching it more or less secretly in the -Military School and combining with it the demand for a republican form -of government until, in 1889, the sect joined with the army in -overthrowing the monarchy. The Brazilian Positivists credit themselves -with establishing the republic, separating the church from the state, -reforming the teaching and criminal codes, and many lesser -accomplishments. - -Strictly speaking Positivism does not pretend to be a religion but -merely a “philosophy of life.” Yet it bears many reminders of the -Puritanical and reforming sects so numerous in our own land. Positivists -advocated the abolition of slaves; they are opposed to the lottery; they -demanded an easier form of civil marriage in the hope of cutting down -illegitimate unions—in other words, they combine religion and morals, -which are so completely divorced in the ruling church of South America. -They are popularly reputed to be opposed to the use of coffee or tobacco -and to take that “blue law” view of life into which our Puritan virus -shows frequent tendencies to degenerate, but this they claim to be mere -ridicule or counter-propaganda of their enemies. - -I arranged by a “want ad” to exchange English for Portuguese lessons -with a well-educated native of Rio, who turned out to be a government -functionary and a Positivist. Possibly the most striking thing about him -was his almost Protestant moral code, contrasted with his genuinely -Brazilian tolerance in practice. He saw nothing reprehensible in -cheating the public out of more than half the time and effort which they -paid him to deliver; he asserted that he and Brazilians in general -believed their wives certain to betray them if given the opportunity, -and refused to credit my statement that the average American husband -does not consider eternal vigilance the price of his domestic honor. Yet -often in the same breath he pronounced some Positivist precept that -would fit snugly into the code of our sternest sects. - -I accompanied my student-tutor one Sunday morning to the principal -weekly service at the Positivist _Apostulado_, or “Temple of Humanity” -in the Rua Benjamin Constant. It is an imposing building in the style of -a Greek temple, said to be copied from the Panthéon of Paris. On the -façade is the Positivist motto in large bronze letters: - - O Amor por Principio - E a Ordem por Baze - O Progresso por Fim. - -Inside, the almost luxurious edifice, “sea-green in color, as if one -were bathed in hope, and with the high ceiling essential to lofty -thoughts,” still somewhat resembles a Catholic church. Around the walls -of the nave are fourteen “chapels” containing as many busts, each -representing one of the “saints” of Positivism and an abstract idea. -They are Moses—Initial Theocracy; Homer—Ancient Poetry; -Aristotle—Ancient Philosophy; Archimedes—Science; Cæsar—Military -Civilization; St. Paul—Catholicism; Charlemagne—Feudal Civilization; -Guttenberg—Modern Invention; Dante—Modern Epic; Shakespeare—Drama; -Descartes—Modern Philosophy; Frederick the Great—Modern Politics; -Bichat—Modern Science, and lastly, Eloïse, or Feminine Sanctification. -It would be easy, of course, to quarrel with the Positivists on several -of their choices as world leaders, were they of a quarrelsome -disposition. These personages also give their names to the fourteen -months of the Positivist calendar, which begins with the French -Revolution. Among the decorations are the “flags of the five -nations”—Brazil, China, Turkey, Chile and Haiti! Only two South American -countries are represented because “these are unfortunately the only ones -in which the Positivist faith as yet counts fervid adepts.” China wins -place as the “most vast nation of the Orient;” Turkey as the “most -cultured people of the East” (!), and Haiti is admitted “in honor of the -greatest of negroes, Toussaint L’Ouverture,” whose portrait is the only -non-Caucasian face among the many about the walls. There are of men of -all ages and nations, whom the Positivists consider of world -importance,—Camões, Lavoisier, Cervantes, St. Gall, Cromwell, and many -others, the only American among them being an atrocious chromo print of -Washington. Higher still, in decorative letters and the simplified -spelling of Positivist Portuguese, are scattered the words,—Space, -Industry, Architecture, Painting, Earth, Music, Poetry, Politics, -Proletariat, Priesthood, Monotheism, Astrology, Family, Humanity, -Patriotism, Fetishism, Polytheism, Woman, Morality, Sociology, Biology, -Soil, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, Logic. Above what, for want of a -better name, might be called the altar or the main chapel, runs the -inscription: - - “Vergine Madre Amen te plus quam me nec me nisi propter te.” - -No Catholic church was ever more crowded with images than the “Temple of -Humanity.” In fact, the more closely one looked the more did certain -forms and beliefs of Catholicism peer through the outward modern mantle -of Positivism, as if either the founder or his disciples had not been -able to divest themselves entirely of their inherited faith. The most -Catholic _beata_ in South America could scarcely have shown greater -reverence for the sacred pictures, graven images, and “relics of the -faith” with which the temple was crowded. Above the “pulpit” was a bust -of Comte on a column, its upper portion covered with green cloth -embroidered with white silk “by one of our young female proselytes.” -Portraits of Comte and his mistress, Clothilde de Vaux—both painted in -China and depicting them with almond eyes—hung in the main chapel, where -there were also paintings of each of them on the death bed. Pictures of -the Bastille, of Dante and Beatrice, of the Sistine Madonna surmounted -by a cross, “because she was an ardent Catholic,” were among the many -which a roving eye gradually discovered. Most astonishing of all was the -likeness of “Humanity,” a virgin figure with the features of Clothilde -de Vaux, dressed as a bride, with a green band at her waist and holding -in her arms a pretty boy who grasped a handful of daisies and pansies, -the Positivist flowers, and gazed up into the woman’s face, the whole -patently inspired by the Catholic madonnas which it closely resembled. -In the background were the Panthéon and Père Lachaise cemetery, where -Comte is buried. - -Like all religions, the new creed already tended to harden into set -forms, the failure to carry out which was evidently a more grievous sin -than the disobeying of the general principles of the order. Their -veneration of pictures of the dead was almost medieval; the railing of -the tomb of Clothilde had been brought from Paris and as much fuss was -made over it as ever devout peasants did over the shin-bone of a saint; -“first sacraments” were administered in the temple; “the faithful” were -urged to visit the “sacred places of Positivism;” they had a substitute -for crossing oneself, “a sacred formula of our faith in which it is -customary for all believers to stand up out of respect for Our Master.” -There was even a hint of Mohammedanism, a mark in the cement floor of -the porch under the pillars indicating the direction of Paris—the -thought of Paris as a sacred city was a trifle startling—“toward which -all Positivistic Temples should have their principal axes.” - -[Illustration: The sweetmeat seller announces himself with a distinctive -whistle] - -[Illustration: The opening of the “Kinetophone” in Brazil] - -[Illustration: The ruins of an old plantation house on the way to -Petropolis, backed by the pilgrimage church of Penha] - -In the basement of the temple was a printing plant from which issues a -constant stream of Positivist pamphlets, books, biographies of Benjamin -Constant, and similar forms of propaganda. Here, too, is the original -flag of republican Brazil, painted in crude colors on pasteboard by -order of Teixeira Mendes. The story of its designing is not without -interest. Having been assigned the task by the leaders of the -revolution, the present head of the Positivists of Brazil determined to -keep the general form of the existing national banner. João VI had given -the kingdom a coat-of-arms set in a golden sphere on a blue background. -Mendes changed the blue to green, basic color of the Positivist banner -and meant also to symbolize the tropical vegetation of the land, as the -yellow sphere does the gold in its soil. Then he called in an -astronomer, and taking the twenty principal stars of the southern -firmament at noon of November 15, 1889, to represent the twenty states -of Brazil, he placed nineteen below the equator-like band across the -golden sphere, and one above it to indicate that part of the country -north of the equator, or of the Amazon. The sphere was inclined on the -horizon according to the latitude of Rio, the tobacco and coffee on the -old royal coat-of-arms were removed, as “mere commercial things not fit -for a place on the national banner,” and along the equatorial band was -run a line from the Positivist motto. - -The women of the congregation sat on a platform in front of the “altar” -rail, the men down in the body of the “church.” Women should love -Positivism, according to its disciples, for it dignifies, venerates, and -raises them to their due elevation. The “3rd of Guttenberg” on which the -temple was dedicated is also the “Feast of Woman” day, on which -Positivists celebrate the “transformation of the cult of the Catholic -Virgin into the cult of Humanity.” Teixeira Mendes, long the head of the -sect in Brazil, sat in the “pulpit” beneath the bust of Comte and -“preached,” if his un-sermon-like remarks uttered in a weak, thin voice -barely heard through an immense white mustache may be so called. His -diminutive form was covered by a dark robe, with a green cord about the -neck and embroidered with the Positivist flowers. The “sermon” -emphasized the Positivist conception of the “virgin mother” as combining -the two great qualities of the feminine type,—purity and tenderness. -Like many other religions, this modern creed clings to the legend of a -virgin mother. As the gathering marched out to the tune of the -“Marseillaise,” I asked my cicerone to explain the frequent recurrence -of the “virgin mother” motif in temple and sermon. He replied that it -was the Positivist belief that humanity would gradually be educated up -to the point where “woman will be able to reproduce alone, without the -necessity of ‘sin’ with man!” - - - - - CHAPTER XI - STRANDED IN RIO - - -I had long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South -American wanderings. Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great -interest within me; a glimpse of Brazil, with possibly a glance at -Venezuela on my way home, to complete my acquaintance with the former -Spanish colonies, seemed a fitting conclusion of a journey that had -already stretched out into almost three years. When I had “fiscalized” -the “Botanical Garden” street-car line for nearly a fortnight, -therefore, and seen the chief sights of the Brazilian capital, I began -to think of looking into the question of getting back to the United -States. - -Contrary to my earlier expectations, it would not be necessary to sign -on as a sailor or stoke my way across the equator. With my unanticipated -salary of six thousand a day and by dint of long experience in -sidestepping high prices, I had succeeded in clinging to the equivalent -of a hundred dollars from my consular earnings, as a reserve fund for -this last emergency. With that munificent sum on hand, I might even -scorn the long-familiar steerage and treat myself to a second-class -passage on any of the steamers sailing frequently from Rio to New York. - -Unfortunately I had not been keeping my ear to the ground. Years of -care-free wandering in those sections of the earth where life is simple -and in which man learns to depend chiefly on himself had caused me to -overlook certain characteristics of the more complicated world I was -rejoining. There even a vagabond is only to a limited degree a free -agent. The reserve fund I had unexpectedly saved from the maw of -Brazilian profiteers was in paper milreis and as one had been able for -more than a decade to turn 300$000 into twenty English gold sovereigns -at will, I had neglected to do so at once. On the bright “winter” -morning of Saturday, the first of August, I strolled out of my modest -hotel and along the Avenida Central with my habitual air of a care-free -man of unlimited leisure—almost instantly to recognize that there was -something strange in the wind. Before the offices of the _Jornal do -Commercio_ and the _Jornal do Brazil_ were gathered seething crowds, -eagerly spelling out the voluminous bulletins in their windows. I paused -to read with them. Some one, it seemed, had kicked over the balance of -power in Europe and France and Russia had decided to try to give Germany -the trouncing for which she had so long been spoiling. - -The news came to me out of a tropically clear sky. I did recall having -glanced at a brief newspaper paragraph somewhere during my journey -northward from Uruguay, to the effect that some prince of Austria and -his consort had been killed at a Serbian town of which I had never -heard; but I had known other assassinations of Europeans of high degree -to blow over without a war resulting. Squabbling was always going on in -the Balkans anyway. Pessimists had it that there was going to be a long -and a real war; in common with all other wise men of the period I smiled -condescendingly at the silly notion. - -Yet here were very decided rumors of war. Maps were already appearing in -the windows of newspaper offices, with scores of black and red-headed -pins on them to show the advance of the various armies. The flurry might -not amount to much, but it was high time I turned my paper milreis into -real money, bought my ticket, and got out of this temperamental country -before something serious really did happen. I strolled on and dropped -into one of the countless “exchange” booths that flourish in and about -the Avenida Central. Handing out my three hundred thousand reis I -requested the man inside to hand me back twenty gold sovereigns. He -looked at me scornfully, pointed to a small paragraph in the newspaper -under my elbow, and went on painting a sign on a piece of cardboard. -Perusing these I learned the astounding news that the milreis, which had -been rated fifteen to the English sovereign as far back as men with -average memories could recall, had dropped overnight to _twenty-three_ -to the pound! In other words of the same profane nature, my hundred -dollars had dwindled in a few hours, merely on the strength of a bit of -news from squabbling Europe, to about seventy. I refused to be “done” in -that fashion. It was merely the old familiar trick of bankers who were -taking advantage of a temporary scare to rob the garden variety of -mankind of our hard-won earnings. In a day or so honesty, or at least -competition, would prevail, and my three hundred milreis would be worth -more nearly their honest value again. I re-pocketed them and decided to -wait until the exchange moderated—and two days later my seventy dollars -was worth less than sixty! - -It may seem ridiculous that a man with three hundred thousand in his -pocket should worry—at least to those who do not know Brazil, her -currency, her prices, and her profiteers. But I began to feel uneasy. -Not merely was the money I had by superhuman efforts saved to carry me -home calmly melting away in my pocket without even being touched, but -before long touching became unavoidable. In less time than would have -seemed possible a third of my miserable bills had disappeared. Even if I -got away at once, I should have to go straight home without stopping at -Venezuela, and if I did not hurry I should not get home at all. I raced -to the steamship offices—only to get a new shock. Not only had the value -of my money been cut in two, and a third of it used up, but the price of -steamship tickets had suddenly and mysteriously doubled, and only -English gold was accepted. If I could have jumped upon a steamer that -day, I could still have paid for a third-class passage. But there was no -boat due for three days, and there were good chances that this would be -several days late! - -The air was full of war-bred excitement. Before it was announced that -England had declared war, the British cruiser that had been lying in the -harbor for nearly a week with her fires up was out stopping and -searching all traffic along the coast. Several ships flying the German -flag were anxiously awaiting orders in the bay, little realizing that -their last voyage under that banner was over. Another German vessel -forcibly put ashore fifty Russian steerage passengers who had embarked -in Buenos Aires with all their savings, generously giving them back -one-third the money they had paid for passage to Europe. Detachments of -rifle-bearing Brazilian policemen patrolled the wharves to preserve -order between the various nationalities. The German consul general had -ordered all Germans on the reserve list in Brazil to report to the -nearest consulate prepared to sail for home. German reservists poured -into the capital from the southern states until it was only by climbing -over a score or so of them that I could reach my room, into which two of -them had been thrust. A standing client of the hotel, a business man of -some standing and education, presumed upon our slight acquaintance to -insist one evening that I walk out with him. As we stood before the -bulletin-blinded window of the _Jornal do Brazil_ with its pin-spotted -map of Europe, my companion gloated loudly over each piece of news: - -“In two veeks ve are in Parees! I go mineself to-morrow morning to offer -me to der gonsul. Oh, py Gott, ven only Eng-lant stop noytral, ven only -Eng-lant stop noytral!” - -Unfortunately, from the German point of view, England did not “stop -noytral,” and a few days later the German reservists began drifting back -to the _fazendas_ and _chacaras_ from which they had been called. - -A twelve-day holiday was declared by the government, so that even those -who had money in the banks were as badly off as I, and as the value of -the milreis went steadily downward, prices went skyrocketing. Day after -day I invaded every steamship office in Rio, without distinction as to -race, color, or customary rascality. I took captive every ship’s captain -who ventured ashore, offering to do anything for my passage from -shoveling coal to parading the poop with his wife’s pet poodle. Nothing -doing! Even if a ship did now and then lift anchor and sneak away in the -general direction of the United States, there were crowds of would-be -passengers with vastly more influence, and far more mesmerism over the -root of evil, than I, who were quite as willing to do anything within -the pale of respectability to reach “God’s country.” I might, of course, -have cabled home for passage money. There were one or two persons in my -native land who probably had both the wealth and the confidence required -to answer properly to such an appeal. But I had long since made it a -point of honor that when I got myself in a hole I should get out again -without screaming for a rope. - -Psychologists as well as mere world roustabouts will probably admit that -the more nearly penniless a man is the more ready is he to “take a -chance.” His condition cannot be worse, and it may suddenly become much -better. A vagabond evidently is subject to the same laws as more -respectable members of society. At any rate, with only a few milreis -left, I grew bold and instead of squeezing the last loaf of bread out of -them, I squandered them for lottery tickets. On the following Saturday -there was to be a “drawing extraordinary,” with the first prize nothing -less than a hundred million reis! With that amount I might even buy a -steamer for the trip home; besides, I had long wished to know how it -feels to be a multimillionaire. Even in real money and at normal -exchange a hundred million reis reached the respectable sum of $325,000, -and though Brazilian shin-plasters had dropped to half their pre-war -value, though every “piece” of ticket must pay a commission to the -vendor and must bear the ubiquitous “consumption” tax in the form of a -stamp, though the government takes five per cent. of all winnings and -loads down the lucky ticket-holder with so many other stamps, taxes, and -grafts that it requires a lawyer to dig him from under them, there would -still remain the price of the bridal suite on any steamer plying the -east coast of South America. - -A crowd of mainly collarless and rather vacant-faced men and women, who -for many years had been chasing that will o’ the wisp called the winning -number by buying a “piece” of ticket whenever possible, were already -gathered in and about the frontless shop down behind the main -post-office of Rio when I reached it. No small number of them were -plainly so carried away by visions of what they were going to do with -their winnings that they had played hooky and jeopardized their real -source of income. Even I felt the subtle breath of hope, fed mainly on -ardent desire, that swept through the sour-scented throng as the -formalities began. Five little girls in spotless white, but of several -shades of color—as if the officials in charge had sought to have every -complexion of their clients represented—stood behind as many whirligigs -fitted with the figures from 0 to 9. Every twenty seconds the girls gave -these a simultaneous whirl, and when they stopped the number indicated -by the five figures visible to the audience was called out by an -official in the front row. Then another girl thrust a hand into a -globe-shaped urn and, with averted face, drew out a wooden marble on -which was engraved the conventional signs for a sum of money. That -represented the amount of the prize for the number just whirled, and, -like it, was called out and then written down three times on as many -printed slips by dozens of men and boys seated around the walls of the -room, some of them government officials, some representatives of the -various lottery agencies. - -There are at least fifty prizes at each drawing, ranging all the way -from about the price of a ticket, the occasional winning of which keeps -the disgruntled clients from abandoning the game, up to the capital -prize. The deadly sameness of the process made the formality a soporific -which, combined with the tropical heat and the fetid breath of the -multitude, soon left me drowsily leaning against my compact neighbors. -Time and again some insignificant prize was announced and set down by -the scribes around the walls, until I began sleepily to wonder if the -hundred million ball had inadvertently been left out of the urn. When -the “_cem contos de reis_” was at last droned out by the wooden-voiced -announcer in the same bored, monotonous tone with which he had so often -mentioned the equivalent of a dollar, my thoughts were wool-gathering -and it was not until a flutter went through the crowd that I recognized -the significance of the announcement. I glanced at the ticket in my -hand, then at the number on the whirligigs. Protector of the Penniless! -They were the same—at least the first three numbers on them were! An -African-pated blockhead of unusual height blotted the last two of those -on the platform out of my field of vision. I shouldered him aside, -treading under foot a few immediate by-standers. The surge of pleasure -that was mounting my spine turned to angry disgust. The last two figures -were not even near enough my own to give me the “approximation” prize. -With my usual carelessness and stupidity I had bought the wrong ticket, -and the glamor of being a multimillionaire faded to the real but -familiar experience of being “dead broke” in a foreign land. My -disappointment was evidently widespread, for the tightly packed throng -began instantly to melt away like molasses from a broken jug, so that by -the time I reached the street there were hundreds of other glum-faced -individuals shuffling off in both directions. Only then did I realize -that the _cambio_ in which I had spent my last milreis was quite -fittingly named “_Sonho do Ouro_”—the “Golden Dream.” - -But at least, if one must be stranded, there were few finer spots than -Rio to be stranded in. I returned to my sight-seeing duties on the -street-cars, and, by dint of outwitting the German proprietor of my -hotel that evening, managed to save enough of that day’s six thousand to -run an appeal next morning in the two principal newspapers of the -capital. In all frankness it should have been lachrymose, but I had long -since learned that a bold and boastful manner, with a facetious tinge, -is more likely to bring real results: - - American Writer and Explorer, - university graduate, widely traveled - but still young, knowing fluently - Spanish, French, and German, and - understanding Portuguese and - Italian, being marooned here by the - present situation, will accept - temporarily any reasonable - employment, in Rio or the interior, - of sufficient interest to pass the - time. - -With no available means of moving on, I had time for anything—except to -be bored. - -That very evening I came within an ace of getting employment without -even waiting for replies to my printed appeal—or at least I came as near -it as did the suitor who would have been accepted but for the slight -matter of the answer being “no” instead of “yes.” The first Brazilian -singer ever heard in grand opera in Brazil was announced to appear at -the Municipal Theater, and with that splendid sense of propriety for -which the Latin-American is noted he had chosen, or been chosen, to make -his début before his admiring fellow-countrymen as the hero of Puccini’s -“Girl of the Golden West.” The ticket speculators were out in full force -when I scuffed my way down the mosaic-paved Avenida, but their -machinations were naturally of little interest to a man who could not -rub two coppers together. What had won my attention was rather a rumor -that a group of stage cowboys was needed, and as my worst enemy could -not have failed to admit that I came more nearly looking that part than -anyone else wandering the streets of Rio, here was my opportunity to -behold at close range the Brazilian misconception of the American wild -west and its bloodthirsty denizens; besides, the two milreis paid to -“supers” looked good to me. A veritable mob of loafers, rowdies, and -_gatunos_ surged back and forth in the narrow street behind the theater, -sweeping down upon the fist-less old “master of supers” as often as he -ventured outside the stage door. Several times he fled in dismay, but at -length, when the opera was about to begin and the marshaling of cowboys -was imperative, he ventured forth with the air of a man who is taking -his life in his hands and began letting his selections be thrust upon -him. I footballed my way through the crowd that was swinging to and fro -with his every footstep and offered my services. My wide-brimmed felt -hat alone should have won me a place. The harried functionary glanced at -me, mumbled something to the effect that I did not in the least fit the -part, and finally retreated within the stage door, followed by a motley -collection of spindle-shanked _Carioca_ street loafers who would have -made an ideal background to a melodrama set in a tar-brushed -Whitechapel. - -Hardly was my last milreis gone when exchange improved and Brazilian -money came halfway back to normal. The inevitable profiteer had already -grasped his opportunity, scattered groups of _populares_ took to mobbing -the shops that had most flagrantly boosted food prices, and though even -the courts did not function, because of the twelve-day holiday, the -government was finally compelled to take advantage of the state of siege -to punish a few of the most heartless offenders and publish a list of -prices which could not be exceeded without loss of license and possible -imprisonment. But the ways of the Brazilian are devious, and no great -improvement was accomplished. The semi-military police, their rifles -loaded with ball cartridges, patrolled not only those parts of town in -which the various European nationalities might meet, but wherever -disgruntled bands of the _povo_ were likely to gather. It would probably -not have been difficult to start a revolution in Brazil during those -eventful days. - -Meanwhile, not an answer did I get to my stirring call for employment, -except an offer to become a combination door-keeper and office-boy, -which I did not consider interesting enough even to pass the time. It -was after three of a blazing afternoon that I rode out in my official -capacity to Ipanema, where I had found behind a mass of rocks a little -cove in which no bathing-suit was needed. There was a marvelous private -beach, and a rock-walled dressing-room where only a stray negro wench -might see me if she chose to look, but from which I could see the tips -of the Corcovado and the “Sugar Loaf,” and, across the turquoise bay, -silhouetted at this hour against the sun side of the sky, box-shaped -Gavea, hazy blue with distance. - -I had ridden halfway back to town when I looked up from reading one of -Brazil’s epics and caught sight of the back of a head that looked -familiar. The hat above it and the coat below I had certainly never seen -before, and I could make out little of the face, but that little merely -increased my conviction. By the time we had passed the tunnel I decided -to make sure and, moving up close behind the man, I pronounced a name in -a mild voice that would probably not have attracted attention if it were -not the right one. The man turned around quickly, then thrust out a -hand. As I had suspected, he was Raymond Linton, not only a -fellow-countryman but a fellow-statesman, whom I had last seen in Buenos -Aires. - -A year before, Linton had acquired the Spanish-American concession for -Edison’s recently invented “Kinetophone,” or “talking moving-pictures,” -and, having played before all the uncrowned heads of Peru, Chile, -Uruguay, and the Argentine, was still operating two separate outfits of -this theatrical novelty in the last two of those countries. The -entertainment had taken so well in Spanish-America that he had purchased -the rights for Brazil also, and, having left Buenos Aires on the last -day of July, little suspecting what the world had in store for itself, -he was planning to start a third outfit in Rio de Janeiro. - -“But I’m in tough luck,” said Linton, after our preliminary greetings -and immediate personal history had ended. - -“How come?” I asked, rather idly, to tell the truth, for my thoughts -were still chiefly on my own predicament. - -“You remember my B. A. manager?” he replied. “Splendid fellow and just -the man I needed to handle the proposition up here in Brazil as soon as -I get it started. But he is a Frenchman, and the day after I sailed he -was called home to join the army. So now I’ve got to rush back to B. A. -to keep that end going, and I have a brand new outfit, with special -films in Portuguese and a man fresh from the Edison plant, landing -to-day from the States. This man knows all the mechanical and electrical -part of the job to perfection, but he probably never heard of the -Portuguese language and couldn’t tell a Brazilian from an honest man. So -I am mighty hard up for someone to take charge up here, and I don’t know -where on earth I’ll find another fellow like the Frenchman. - -“By Jove!” he went on a moment later, as the street-car swung out upon -the Beira Mar, “I wish you felt like staying down here six months or so -longer. I’d make you a proposition.” - -“For instance?” I asked, merely out of idle curiosity. “I will not spend -another month in South America under any circumstances, but I may have -to in spite of myself.” - -“If I could get a man who knows the South American from spats to -hair-oil as well as you should after three years down here,” went on -Linton with great earnestness, “I’d offer him a salary and a percentage, -guaranteeing that he would not get less than——” naming a considerably -larger sum than I had ever been paid as a respectable member of -society—“a month, with all his actual traveling expenses, first class, -all arrangements to be in U. S. currency, to take charge of the -Brazilian end of this business and play in every city of over fifteen -thousand population in the country—there are about fifty of them—and -cover the whole republic, coast and interior, from the Uruguayan border -clear up to where the Amazon begins to run down off the Andes. It would -mean about six months’ playing the principal towns, and after that the -man could take the thing around for another half year to the smaller -places, and by the time he got through he’d know Brazil better than -Edison knows electricity.” - -“Mighty interesting proposition,” I remarked, as the street-car drew up -at its destination beside the Largo da Carioca, “and I hope you find the -man you need. I have a serious problem on my hands, too, and that is how -to get back to the U. S. A. early enough this fall to join in an -important coon hunt.” - -For I did not for a moment seriously consider the offer as made to me, -or at least as acceptable. I had already been three times as long in -South America as I had expected to be when I first set out to explore -the traces of the old Inca highway between Quito and Cuzco. I was -decidedly “fed up” with “Spigs” and all their ways; too long a time -outside the United States atmosphere is not good for the mind one wishes -to keep American, just as too long a time in the tropics is injurious to -the body one would keep robust. Moreover, never having seriously tested -it, I was not at all certain I had the charlatanism indispensable to any -success in the realms of “practical business”—and there was still a -possibility that I might get aboard something or other northward bound. - -Next day I took to pursuing ships and skippers with renewed energy. But -the town was swarming with stranded Americans willing and able to pay -any sum that could be mentioned in one breath for the privilege of -sleeping in a stokehole of anything bound for the United States. That -afternoon I dropped in on Linton at his hotel and entertained him with a -hypothetical question. - -“Suppose,” I said in my most casual tone, “suppose such a man as you are -looking for would sign a contract for only six months, that he wanted -his salary to start at once, instead of the first of September, and that -on the day he signed he would need an advance of about five hundred -thousand—er—reis to get a proper movie-magnate silk hat and diamond -solitaire, what would be your private remarks when you reached the -bathroom?” - -“If he had your experience with South Americans, for instance,” came the -prompt reply, “I’d have the contract ready within half an hour.” - -“Thanks for the compliment,” I replied. “I just wanted to know, from a -sociological point of view.” - -Whereupon I set out once more and went over all the steamship offices -and captains’ favorite bar-rooms with a fine-toothed comb, only to be -more than ever convinced that my native land had lost all desire ever to -see me again. So, late that evening, having paused at the edge of the -impassable sea to shake a fist at the northern horizon, I stopped at -Linton’s hotel to sign the contract he had just drawn up. By its terms I -was to take full charge of the tour of the Kinetophone in Brazil, -playing the entire country, except the states south of São Paulo that I -had already seen, ending up on the Amazon six months later, and -receiving my first month’s salary at once—as soon as the banks opened. -Early next morning a messenger from the steamship-office I had most -often pestered brought me word that if I would report at once I could -sign on a ship sailing that evening for Pensacola, Florida; and later in -the day I was offered a chance to go to New Orleans as a deck-hand. But -then, it would have been a long walk from either of those ports to the -place I called home. - -During the remaining half of August I did little but spend my first -month’s salary, chiefly among the tailors of Rio, at prices which made -the advertisements in the New York papers look enticing. Linton had -arranged his Buenos Aires business to run on without him until we could -give the customary special performance before the president of the -republic. This he hoped would be within a week, but he had reckoned -without Brazilian red tape. The “outfit” arrived the day after I signed -the contract,—eight large pieces of what looked like the baggage of a -barn-storming company, and Wayne Tuthill of Long Island and the Edison -factory. “Tut,” as it was natural he should be quickly dubbed, was a -tall, handsome, ingenuous lad of twenty-four, of that clean-cut, -clean-minded type of American youth which makes the libertine _juventud_ -of South America stand out in such striking contrast. He had never -before been outside the United States—which I rated an asset—but had -been the unhesitating choice of the company when Linton wired for their -best practical electrician and operator who would accept a year’s -contract. - -On the following day I bade farewell to my little inside room in the -German hotel down in the raw-coffee scented heart of Rio, and moved into -a new home with what their “want ad” in the _Jornal do Brasil_ described -as a “family of all respectability.” There were hundreds of private -families only too glad to patch out their income by taking in a “serious -cavalheiro” as a paying guest. My new quarters were on the Praia de -Botafogo, in the district out beyond the tiny _praça_ and statue of José -de Alencar. From my easy-chair I could look out across the bay at one -end of the harbor and, though a headland cut off the “Sugar Loaf,” I had -a splendid view of all the long, fantastic sky-line of Rio, now -silhouetted against the sun-lighted clouds, now standing out in the -brilliant sunshine as if barely a stone’s throw away. The room had a -southern exposure, too, which is important in Rio, especially toward the -end of August with summer coming on. True, there were a few drawbacks. I -had to take board as well as lodging, though I was by no means sure that -a glimpse into Brazilian family life would offset the heaviness of -Brazilian family food. There were good electric lights, but no carpets -or rugs, virtually unknown in Brazil, and not a suggestion either of -bookshelf or wastebasket, while the table was a tiny thing implying that -at most the occupant might have now and then to write a perfumed lover’s -note. - -Though it was some time before we got our show started, or even got the -outfit ashore, we were a busy trio. First and foremost there was the -Herculean problem of getting the thing through the customs. This was no -such simple matter as going down to the ugly little green _Alfandega_ -building on the water front, opening the boxes, paying our duty, and -taking them away. Things are not done in that breathless manner in -Brazil. Knowing that it costs more to get a moving-picture film into -Brazil than to buy it in Europe or the United States, we were prepared -to be held up by the mulatto footpads masquerading as a government, if -only they would have it over with at once and let us go our way with -whatever we might have left. What we needed first of all, it seemed, was -a _despachante_, a native customs broker, familiar with all the ins and -outs of the laws on import duties—and an expert in circumventing them. -But could we not attend to this matter ourselves, seeing there were -three of us in the prime of life, two speaking Spanish and one more or -less Portuguese, and with nothing else whatever to do? We could not. We -must have the services of a regular _despachante_—just why, we learned -all in due season. The broker, however, did not rob us of occupation; in -fact, we were still permitted to do almost all the work. We spent -several hours one day hunting out our boxes amid an orderless jumble of -many ship-loads of warehoused merchandise and wrestling them out into -plain sight. The rest of the afternoon we wasted in coaxing the swarm of -supercilious officials who lolled about the place to examine them. They -paid us not the slightest attention, until our _despachante_ came to -vouch for our existence. Then one of them “examined” the eight boxes by -gingerly lifting half of the wooden cover of one of them, glancing at -the unopened inner tin casing, and ordering the covers nailed down -again. This, however, was only a preliminary formality, and while our -broker prepared for the next moves in their regular, deliberate order, -we contained ourselves in such patience as we possessed. - -Meanwhile we learned many interesting details about Brazilian customs -laws and those who enforce them. Portland cement, we found, pays duty on -gross weight. More than half the barrels of such a shipment had been -broken in transit, or by the wharf stevedores who landed it, and all -vestige of cement had been lost. The customs men carefully gathered the -scattered barrel-staves together, weighed them, and charged the assignee -duty on them as cement! Regular merchants in Rio have a _despachante_, -we learned, who does all the customs business of his client at a fixed -rate of twelve milreis a box, large or small. If he succeeds in avoiding -any part of the duty due, the merchant pays him half that amount as a -reward. Thus there arrives a box of twenty pairs of shoes, on which the -duty would be sixty dollars. The _despachante_ arranges with some of his -friends in the customhouse to let the box in for twenty dollars, and the -assignee pays that amount in duty and gives the broker, in addition to -his customary twelve milreis, one half of the forty dollars saved. The -Brazilians have no word for bribery; they use the expression _comer_ (to -eat). A merchant who has been forced to pay full legal duty on a bill of -goods asks his _despachante_ anxiously, referring to the strict new -customs official who passed on it, “_Elle já come?_” To which, perhaps, -comes the sad answer, “_Não, ainda não come_” (He doesn’t eat—yet). A -few weeks later the merchant sends the honest man a few bottles of -perfumery or some equally welcome present. If he sends them back, he is -not yet “ripe.” But at length word goes round, “_Já come_” (Now he -eats), and the merchants whose goods pass through his hands heave a sigh -of relief. - -“When your shipment arrives,” a foreigner long engaged in business in -Rio explained, “and the duty is large, say twenty or thirty contos, you -go to the customhouse yourself and say to the _conferente_, ‘I shall be -in my office from three to four to-morrow.’ Then you go away. The -_conferente_ is the official examiner; his assistant, who opens and -closes the boxes and does the other manual labor, is called his “fiel” -(faithful one). You cannot be a successful merchant in Rio without being -on friendly terms with your _conferente_ and his “fiel.” When his work -ends, at three, he drops in to see you before he goes home, and the -matter is fixed up to the satisfaction of both parties. If you try to -fight the system you are up against it. Only half the articles that come -into Brazil are on the tariff schedule, and if a _conferente_ has it in -for you he will decide that your declaration is made out wrong, no -matter how you make it out, and will fine you for trying to flimflam the -government—and a certain percentage of all fines go to the man who -discovers the ‘irregularity.’ Then before goods leave the customhouse -they must have the government consumption-tax stamps on them, and there -is another fine chance to ‘eat.’ The man who was at the head of the -stamp-selling down there for thirty-two years was recently retired on a -pension and written up in the papers as ‘a life-long and faithful -servant of the Republic’; yet ever since I have lived here he could be -‘fixed’ at from one fourth to one half the legal price of the stamps. -The young fellow who now has his job doesn’t ‘eat’ yet, so all the -merchants are cursing him, and his fellow-officials accuse him of -_fazendo fita_—of showing off. But word is going round now that he is -beginning to ‘eat’.” - -Beautiful scenery evidently does not beautify character. The dishonest -officials cannot plead the excuse of necessity, for their legal income -is high. Inspectors get three contos, _conferentes_ eight hundred to a -thousand milreis a month, which surely is generous to men who work only -from eleven to three, with much “tolerance” as to absences during that -time and at least sixty-five legal holidays a year. “Tariff -legislation,” says an outspoken Brazilian publicist, “more than any -other one thing, has been the source of the corruption that has rotted -public service, and in the growth of the sinister privileges fostered by -the ‘protective’ system there is almost sole responsibility for the -widespread perversion of ideals.” - -It took a full week to get our outfit through the customs, and it would -have taken longer had nature not gifted me with an impatience capable of -developing into profanity. Both our _despachante_ and the endless -gantlet of scornful officials which our case was forced to run were firm -believers in the efficacy of “amanhã”—which is our old friend “mañana” -of Spanish-America. How many sheets there were of laboriously -hand-written documents, signed every which way by scores of insufferable -loafers in the crowded _Alfandega_, in the intervals between smoking -cigarettes, gossiping with friends, scowling with a haughty air upon -whoever dared insist on attracting their attention, I have no means of -computing. Typewriting is illegal in government business in Brazil, as -in most of Latin-America; too many old fogies who know only how to -scratch with a pen would have to be dispensed with to make way for such -an innovation, and they are the backbone of political parties. In the -end Linton had to deposit $700, which it was solemnly promised would be -returned to him when the outfit was taken out of the country. -Officially, the American dollar is worth 3$120 in Brazil. I immediately -reduced the $700 to milreis at that rate, and Linton prepared to pay it. -But, we were informed, the government accepts its own money only at -4$120 to the dollar! More figuring resulted in the discovery that we -must entrust the Brazilian government with nearly three contos. -Thirty-five per cent. of this deposit must be in gold. I began to -compute this percentage by dividing by 4$120. The broker smiled at me as -at an amusing child. When the milreis is figured _back_ into gold, he -explained, the dollar must be taken at 2$120. In other words, a -Brazilian government official can demonstrate before your very eyes that -thirty-five per cent. of seven hundred dollars is $480! - -On the day after our outfit had at last been admitted to practice in -Brazil, and the _despachante’s_ seemingly exorbitant demands had been -satisfied, one of us happened to be in his office when in dropped the -bewhiskered old fossil who had “examined” our stuff. He was cheery and -gay now, all dressed up, his sour and haughty official manner wholly -gone, and he greeted everyone in the office like old and esteemed -friends. After the first embrace or two he and the _despachante_ sat -down on opposite sides of the latter’s work table, their hands met once -under it, then the fossil rose and went away with a satisfied smile -scattered among his untrimmed whiskers and a hand lingering -affectionately about one pocket. - -Our next task was to hire a lawyer to get the trademark “Kinetophone” -registered in Brazil in the name of the Edison Company. This matter is -of prime importance to anyone introducing a new invention into the land -of “amanhã.” It is not that the Brazilians are so inventive that they -can readily imitate new contrivances; on the contrary, their mechanical -genius is close to zero. But if he seldom invents or initiates, the -“Brazie” is not lazy in the sense of complete indolence. He has the -gambling instinct as well as the tropical desire to get through life as -easily as possible, and laborious trickery seems to him a lesser effort -than work. Being quick to appropriate the ideas of others, he is much -given to stealing trademarks. - -To tell the truth, the Argentine is worse than Brazil in this respect. -There is a regular band of rascals in Buenos Aires who do nothing but -steal and register foreign trademarks, while in Rio the traffic is at -least unorganized. The laws of both countries give the first person to -deposit a trademark in the national archives the sole right to use it. -The mark may have belonged for half a century to an American or a -European company; it suffices for some _argentino_ or Brazilian to get -it registered in his own name to prevent the legitimate owner from using -it in that country without paying the thief blackmail. One of this -gentry reads in a newspaper or a catalogue of some new foreign invention -with a catchy name, rushes to register it as his own, and then lies in -wait for the real owner. Even a trademark of the French government -tobacco monopoly was stolen by an _argentino_ and France was forced to -pay him a handsome sum to get it back. Upon his arrival in Buenos Aires, -Linton had found the Kinetophone already registered. But as the native -whose eye had been attracted by the word had not understood what it -represented, he had registered it as the name of a _lechería_, or -milk-shop! Nevertheless Linton was compelled to pay him several hundred -pesos for the privilege of using the word in his advertising or even in -the theater, for the moment he put up a poster or ran a film and record -in which the word “kinetophone” appeared, he could have been arrested -and his outfit confiscated. It costs only 120$000, including lawyer’s -fees, to have a trademark registered in Brazil, yet Americans have been -blackmailed out of as much as 30,000$000 for neglecting to do so in -time. - -It turned out that the Kinetophone had been overlooked by Brazilian -tricksters, but we had to wait three days to make sure of this before we -dared publicly use the name. Meanwhile we had visited incognito the -fifty cinemas then running in Rio, with a view to classifying them for -future purposes; we had offered the “A. C. M.” a benefit performance -later for the privilege of trying out our apparatus in their hall, and -had set out in trio to make our first contract. - -The chief moving-picture man of Brazil, with a string of cinemas in Rio -and São Paulo and connections elsewhere, was a Spanish ex-bootblack. -Like his colleagues and rivals, he informed us that it was not customary -in Brazil to pay a fixed sum for such a novelty as we had to offer, that -he “never risked a cent,” but that he would be willing to talk to us on -a percentage basis. Then we found that the ex-bootblack had Missouri -blood in his veins—perhaps because he had once driven mules—and that he -would not believe in the drawing powers of Edison’s new invention until -he had been shown. We had no misgivings as to our ability to show him, -so we went out along the Mangue Canal, with its mirrored double row of -royal palms on either bank, and rented for a day the old open-work -wooden “Theatro Polytheama,” where we gave the doubting Thomases of the -“movie” world, and a throng of newspaper men and “influential citizens,” -a convincing private exhibition. - -Next day we signed a “fifty-fifty” contract with the ex-bootblack to -play for sixty days in his establishments in Rio, São Paulo and -vicinity. By that time it was already September 7th, the first of -Brazil’s two Independence Days, and “Tut” and I had taken up our abode -on the Praia do Flamengo in the district called Larangeiras, or -“Orange-trees.” It was nearer town than my former room; moreover, while -I am duly exhilarated by the beauties of nature, no amount of scenery -will make up for a constant diet of black beans and dry rice, surrounded -on four sides by a constantly caterwauling Brazilian family dressed in -soiled underwear or grease-spotted kimonos. As a matter of fact I lost -nothing even of scenery by the change. We had a marvelous view of the -“Sugar Loaf,” of all the great bay and its islands, of Nictheroy and the -hazy outline of farther Brazil beyond. With our feet on our own railing -we could see the steamers that might be bringing us news from home come -slipping in at the harbor’s mouth, or watch a blood-red sunset on the -cloud billows across the bay. We were four doors from the President’s -palace of Cattete, and in the morning we could stroll across the Beira -Mar in our bathing-suits to dive off the president’s private wharf and -swim out to the little warship he always kept ready for the day when -motives of health should force him to leave Brazil in a hurry. Men, -women and children, with a towel over their shoulders, were familiar -morning sights all along the Beira Mar—the women, of course, chiefly of -foreign origin, for no real Brazilian lady would ever dream of -bathing—at least in semi-public. Swimming was allowed along Rio’s -magnificent driveway until nine in the morning, and some bathers were to -be seen now and then at other hours, for, as the resplendent black -policeman on our corner told us, while he watched several of them pass. -“Oh, yes, they do bathe after nine, but it is against the law.” - -Finally, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, the fourteenth of -September, we gave the first public exhibition in Brazil of the -Kinetophone—and before midnight we had given eleven of them. We had -opened in the “Cinema Pathé” on the Avenida Central, in many ways the -proudest and most fashionable motion-picture house not only of that -sumptuous thoroughfare but of all Brazil; but our début was not attended -with the customary formality. For a week Linton had been cooling his -heels in the anteroom of the Cattete Palace, hoping to have the -honor—and incidentally the prestige and publicity—of giving the -president of the republic a private exhibition before disclosing the -virtues of the new invention to the general public. But those were busy -times in government circles, for, in addition to his manifold political -troubles, the president had recently acquired an eighteen-year-old wife, -so that at length we were forced to start without his blessing and the -customary send-off of important novelties in Latin-American countries. -By this time the World War was on in earnest and Brazil was loudly -complaining of “_A Crise_,” or hard times; yet when our first day at the -“Cinema Pathé” was ended, we found that the box-office had taken in -considerably more than three million—reis! Even in real money that was -better than a thousand dollars. - -That very night Linton fled to Buenos Aires, leaving behind a document -making me the “Brazilian concessionary” of the Kinetophone, and the -weight of the whole enterprise fell abruptly on my shoulders. My first -duty was to get our share of the opening day’s receipts. High noon -having been agreed upon as the time to divide the previous day’s -earnings, I called at that hour upon the general manager for Rio of the -“Companhia Brazileira,” to get our half of the three million in -cash—Brazilian cash, unfortunately—and carried it to the British bank. -That was a daily formality thereafter, for while we had all due respect -for the Brazilian and his business methods, we adopted the same -viewpoint in dealing with him as the Scotchman who, asked for a -recommendation by a retiring clerk, wrote: - -“This is to certify that Sandy McCabe has worked for me the past twelve -years. Regarding his honesty I can say nothing, as I never trusted him.” - -The Kinetophone consists of a series of films projected from a booth -like an ordinary motion-picture film, and of a large electrically -operated phonograph, with six-minute records, set on the stage or behind -the screen and synchronized with the film by means of tiny stout black -cords running over pulleys attached to the walls or the ceiling of the -intervening room. As ours could not be thrown from the same projecting -machine as the voiceless films, the usual process was to set up our -special apparatus in the same booth with the other, if there was room, -cutting a second opening in the front of this to “shoot through;” -otherwise we required a special booth to be built for us alongside the -regular one. Our outfit consisted of fifteen films and their -corresponding phonograph records. First of all, on every program was an -explanation of the new invention and a demonstration of its power to -reproduce all kinds of sounds, a film specially made to order in -Portuguese, with the flag of Brazil, the president’s picture, and other -patriotism-stirring decorations in the background. The only other film -in the native tongue was a dialogue called the “Transformation of -Faust,” in which two Portuguese youths, who had somehow been enticed out -to the Edison factory, ranted for six minutes through a portion of -Goethe’s masterpiece. But there were extracts from five popular Italian -operas and three Spanish numbers, all of which took well with -Brazilians, and though the remainder were in English, they were musical -and comical enough to win interest irrespective of language. - -The Kinetophone requires two operators, one in the booth and the other -at the phonograph. Thus I was not only manager, auditor and -“concessionary,” but obliged to run the stage end of the performance. -Fortunately we did not furnish the entire program, our part of the bill -consisting of the “Portuguese Lecture” and two other numbers, filling -one-third of the hour constituting a “section” and leaving the rest of -it to ordinary films or whatever form of entertainment the local manager -chose to supply. Every hour, therefore, from one in the afternoon to -eleven at night, seven days a week, I had to be on hand to put on the -first of our records, jump out to the edge of the audience and signal to -“Tut” in his special booth, spring back again and touch off the -phonograph at exactly the right instant, repeat this with the other two -records, thrust these back into their special trunk, lock it—and spend -the next forty minutes, other duties willing, as I saw fit. Never during -those eleven hours a day did I dare go far enough away from the theater -to get a real let-up from responsibility. The most I could do was to -snatch a lunch or stroll down to one end or the other of the Avenida, to -see the ships depart or, on windy days, to watch the sea pitching over -the sea-wall of the Beira Mar, wetting even the autobusses—and then -hurry back again for our part of the next “section.” - -Besides running the films, “Tut” had to rewind them after each -performance, so that his leisure time was ten minutes less to the -“section” than mine. I soon found that he was not only a highly -efficient operator, but that he had just those qualities needed to make -a long companionship agreeable. Honest and genuine as gold coin in war -time, easy-going, optimistic, unexcitable, wholly ignorant of foreign -languages, temperaments, or customs, yet pleasant with all races and -conditions of men, he was an ideal team-mate, having large quantities of -that patience so much needed in tropical and Latin lands, and of which I -have so scanty a supply. Thanks to “Tut,” the Brazilians got better -Kinetophone performances than most Americans have heard. The novelty did -not take particularly well in the United States, though for no fault of -its inventor. The essential and all important thing with the Kinetophone -is perfect synchronization. If the character on the screen speaks or -sings exactly as he opens his mouth, the illusion is remarkable; let -there be the slightest interval between the sound and the lip movements -and the thing becomes ludicrous. When the invention was first shown in -the United States there was perfect synchronization, and a consequent -rush of orders for machines and operators. There being no supply of the -latter on hand, they had to be trained in a hurry. Many were ill -prepared for their duties, with the result that when they were hurriedly -sent out on the road they frequently gave distressing performances. -Gradually, therefore, the invention was withdrawn, with the promise to -perfect it further and make it “fool proof,” so that by the time Linton -had taken the concession for Brazil, “Tut,” the expert who had trained -others, was available and the new form of entertainment made a much -bigger “hit” in Brazil than in the land of its origin. - -I had only one serious fault to find with “Tut,” one that added -materially to those of my managerial duties which had to do with keeping -on pleasant terms with the somewhat sour manager of the “Cinema Pathé.” -Less fond than I of strolling the downtown streets during our breathing -spells, “Tut” usually spent them with an American novel or magazine in -the unoccupied second-story anteroom of the theater. There the “Pathé” -had stored its extra chairs, and from them “Tut” was wont to choose a -seat, place it at the edge of the stone balustrade of the balcony, where -he could look down upon the crowd surging up and down the Avenida, and -pass his time in reading. But the chairs, as is usual in South America, -were of the frail variety, and “Tut,” a generous six feet in height and -by no means diaphanous in weight, had the customary American habit of -propping his feet on a level with his head—with the result that at more -or less regular intervals “crash!” would go a chair. On the day when the -manager, his eyes bloodshot with rage, requested me to visit the -second-story anteroom with him, during “Tut’s” absence, the wrecks of -eleven chairs were piled in one corner of it. After that I never had the -audacity to go up and investigate, but crashing sounds were still heard -during the half hour devoted to the silent films. - -The “Companhia Brazileira” advertized extensively, and the Kinetophone -was well patronized from the start. Brazilians take readily to -novelties, especially if they can be made the fashion, and our audiences -of the second day included both priests and “women of the life,” which -is a sure sign of popular success in Brazil. As our doubled entrance fee -of two milreis was high for those times of depression, also perhaps -because the “Cinema Pathé” was considered a gathering place of the -élite, we entertained only the well dressed, or, perhaps I should say, -the overdressed. They were blasé, artificial audiences, never under any -circumstances applauding or giving any sign of approval; they always -gave me the impression of saying, “Oh, rather interesting, you know, as -a novelty, but I could do much better myself if I cared to take the time -from my love-making and risk soiling my spats and my long, slender, -do-nothing fingers.” But as they continued to bring us as our share of -the receipts more than a conto of reis a day, it was evident that they -found the performance pleasing. - -The moving picture might be a real educating influence on the -imaginative and emotional Brazilians, were it not that those who -manipulate this business see fit to put their faith in an intellectual -bilge-water which gives chiefly false notions of life in the world -beyond their horizon. The same “Penny Dreadfuls” in film, concocted of -saccharine sentimentality, custard-pie “comedy,” and a goodly seasoning -of the criminal and the pornographic, that add to the weariness of life -elsewhere, are the rule in the Brazilian capital. Here even the élite, -or at least the well-dressed, flock to see them. This is partly due to -the lowly state of the legitimate stage in Brazil and the atrocious -performances given by nearly all the “actors” who seek their fortunes in -South America. Though some Latin-American playwrights, and a few of the -players, have done things worth while, the stage depends almost entirely -upon “talent” imported from Europe, entertainers of Spanish (or, for -Brazil, of Portuguese) origin, with the crudest notions of histrionic -art, or superannuated discards from the French or Italian stage, mixed -with youthful hopefuls who have crossed the Atlantic to try it on the -dog. These misplaced porters and chambermaids, mere lay figures dressed -to represent certain characters, romp about the stage in their natural -rôles, their eyes wandering in quest of friends in the audience, whom -they give semi-surreptitious greetings and seek to charm by “grandstand -plays,” making the while the mechanical motions they have been taught -and automatically repeating what they are told to say by the prompter. -It is strange that the often artistic Latin races will endure the -prompter, instead of insisting that actors learn their parts. It is a -rare experience to find a place in the house where one can hear the play -and not hear the prompter snarling the lines five words ahead, so that -any semi-intelligent person in the audience could repeat them after him -more effectually than do most of the louts behind the footlights. As is -the case with literature, the theater in South America is mainly -designed to appeal to the male. Respectable women are rarely seen at the -average playhouse, not merely avoiding the “casino” with its “specially -imported blond artistes” of not too adamantine morals, but even what -corresponds to our vaudeville, where the audience sits smoking with its -hat on and the boxes are graced by demimondaines. In fact, the stage and -respectability have no connecting link in the Latin-American mind. All -over South America, and especially in Brazil, “actress” is synonymous -with less complimentary terms; nor is it possible to convince a -Brazilian that such is not universally the case elsewhere. Rarely -anything better than stupid and salacious appeals to men, it is small -wonder that the living drama has been nearly ousted from South America -by the cinema, with its easily transportable, international form of -entertainment. - -The motion-picture having come after all the business part of Rio was -built, there was no room to erect “movie palaces” which have elsewhere -followed in the train of Edison’s most prostituted invention. All the -cinemas along the Avenida Central are former shops, without much space -except in depth, and as the temperature quickly rises when such a place -is crowded, the screen often consists of a curtain across what used to -be the wide-open shop door, so that one on the sidewalk may peep in and -see the audience and even the orchestra, though he can see nothing of -the projected pictures within an inch of his nose. Alongside the “movie” -house proper another ex-shop of similar size is generally used as a -waiting-room. Here are luxurious upholstered seats, much better than -those facing the screen, and some such extraordinary attraction as a -“feminine orchestra specially contracted in Europe.” For the -waiting-room is of great importance in Rio. It takes the place in a way -of a central plaza and promenade where the two sexes can come and admire -one another, and it is often thronged immediately after the closing of -the door to the theater proper, by people who know quite well they must -sit there a full hour before the “section” ends. In fact, young fops -sometimes come in and remain an hour or two ogling the feminine charms -in the waiting-room and then go out again without so much as having -glanced at the show inside. In contrast, many cinemas have -“second-class” entrances, without waiting-room and with seats -uncomfortably near the screen, where the sockless and collarless are -admitted at reduced prices. - -It does not require long contact with them to discover that Latin films -are best for Latins, for both audience and actors have a mutual language -of gestures and facial expressions. The lack of this makes American -films seem slow, labored, and stupid, not only to Latins, but to the -American who has been living for some time among them. It is a strange -paradox that the most _doing_ people on the earth are the slowest in -telling a story in pantomime or on the screen. What a French or an -Italian actress will convey in full, sharply and clearly, by a shrug of -her shoulders or a flip of her hand, the most advertised American “movie -star” will get across much more crudely and indistinctly only by -spending two or three minutes of pantomimic labor, assisted by two or -three long “titles.” The war quickly forced the “Companhia Brazileira,” -as it did most of its rivals, to use American films; but neither -impresarios nor their clients had anything but harsh words for the -“awkward stupidity” and the pretended Puritanic point of view of those -makeshift programs—with one exception, Brazilian audiences would sit up -all night watching our “wild west” films in which there was rough -riding. Curious little differences in customs and point of view come to -light in watching an American film through South American eyes. For -instance, there is probably not a motion-picture director in the United -States who knows that to permit a supposedly refined character in a film -to lick a postage stamp is to destroy all illusion in a Latin-American -audience. Down there not even the lowest of the educated class ever -dreams of sealing or stamping a letter in that fashion. An American film -depicting the misadventures of a “dude” or “sissy” was entirely lost -upon the Brazilian audiences, because to them the hero was exactly their -idea of what a man should be, and they plainly rated him the most -“cultured” American they had ever met. Bit by bit one discovers scores -of such slight and insignificant differences, which sum up to great -differences and become another stone in that stout barrier between the -Latin and the Anglo-Saxon divisions of the western hemisphere. - -On Thursday came the customary mid-weekly change of bill, and we were -thankful for a new program after hearing the old one more than thirty -times. Also the “music,” which the cinema orchestra ground out -incessantly during every moment when we were not giving our part of the -show, changed, though hardly for the better. We were a godsend to the -musicians of that orchestra, especially to the player of the bass-viol. -Hitherto they had been required to play unbrokenly from one in the -afternoon until nearly midnight; our advent gave them ten or eleven -twenty-minute respites during that time. This they usually spent lolling -around the room behind the screen, about the phonograph and our trunks, -where they frequently fell asleep. Particularly the anemic quadroon who -manipulated the largest stringed instrument seemed never to catch up on -his sleep. Barely did our part of the program begin than he stretched -out in such comfort as he could find in the improvised green-room and -went soundly to sleep, so soundly that no noise under heaven could wake -him—save one. When it came time for them to return, his companions would -shout at him, jostle him, sometimes even yank him erect; nothing had the -slightest effect on his somnolence. But the instant the first strains of -their never-varying “music” were heard in the orchestra pit outside, the -sleeper would awake with a flash, make one spring through the door, and -be automatically scraping off his part with the others by the time they -had reached the second or third note. - -Sunday is the big theater or “movie” day in Brazil, for then the -families of the “four hundred” turn out in full force. On our seventh -day they were standing knee-deep in the waiting-room most of the -afternoon and early evening. The congestion increased that part of my -duties which had to do with auditing, for the head of a family often -paused to shake hands effusively with the door-keeper, after which the -entire family poured boldly in, and it became my business to find out -whether there had been anything concealed in the effusive hand, and if -not, why the box-office had been so cavalierly slighted. - -One afternoon the Senhor Presidente da Republica came to honor the -fourth performance of the day with his patronage, and to give us the -official blessing without which we had been forced to open. A corps of -policemen was sent first to hang about the door for nearly two -hours—giving passers-by the impression that the place had been -“pinched.” There followed a throng of generals, admirals, and -un-admirables in full uniform, who waited in line for “His Excellency.” -The president came at length in an open carriage, his girl wife beside -him, two haughty personalities in gold lace opposite them, and a company -of lancers on horseback trotting along the Avenida beside them. The -waiting line fawned upon the leathery-skinned chief of state, bowed over -the hand of his wife, then the whole throng surrounded the loving pair -and, pushing the humble door-keeper scornfully aside, swarmed into the -cinema without a suggestion of offering to pay the entrance fee. Luckily -the doors were not high enough to admit the lancers, who trotted away -with the red of their uniforms gleaming in the afternoon sunshine. It -was my first experience with the official “deadheads” of Brazil, but by -no means my last. - -We quickly found, too, that the official gathering was bad for business. -Surely any American theater holding 510 persons would fill up when the -President of the Republic and his suite were gracing it with their -presence! Yet here there was only a scattering of paying audience as -long as the “deadheads” remained, which, thanks perhaps to a film -showing them in the recent Independence Day parade, was until they had -heard the entire program once and the Kinetophone twice. The president, -it seemed, was hated not only for his political iniquities, but the -élite looked down upon him for marrying a girl little more than -one-fourth his own age and letting her make the national presidency the -background for her social climbing; and to enter the theater while the -president and his retainers were there was to risk losing both one’s -political and social standing as a high class Brazilian. - -It soon got on our nerves to know that we were the only persons, alive -or dead, in the whole expanse of Brazil who could operate the -Kinetophone, that if anything happened to either of us it meant a ruined -performance, our income cut off, and an unamused Rio élite. Let one of -us fail to be on the dot ten times a day and the thing would have been -ruined, for the _Carioca_ is nothing if not critical and of so little -patience that, had we missed a single performance, word would have gone -out at once that the “novelty” at the “Cinema Pathé” had failed. I -decided, therefore, during our second week to get and break in a native -assistant, and next morning the two principal dailies contained this -appealing announcement: - - _Preciza-se de um operador de - cinema, jovem, sem familia, com ao - menos dois annos de experiencia, - sabendo bem a electricidade e algo - de inglez._ - -I intended to be particularly insistent on those points of youth, -“without family,” and “something of English,” but I soon found that we -would be lucky even to get the other and indispensable requirements of -cinema experience and a knowledge of electricity. In Buenos Aires mobs -had besieged Linton’s hotel in answer to a similar announcement; in New -York it would probably have brought out the police reserves. Yet hardly -half a dozen applicants turned up at the Praia do Flamengo after our -morning swim, languidly to inquire our desires. The first was a stupid -looking negro who did not seem to fulfill any of the requirements; the -second was a shifty-eyed mulatto with no physique—badly needed for the -one-night stands ahead; the third was quite visibly impossible. I -engaged the fourth man to appear. Carlos Oliva was about “Tut’s” age, -which did not hinder him from already having a wife and four children. -But then, so do all Brazilians, legitimately or otherwise. He was a -_Paulista_, that is, born in São Paulo, though of Italian parents, a -practiced mechanic and experienced operator of ordinary “movie” films, -and he looked intelligent. To be sure he spoke no English, but that vain -hope had died early and it became evident that “Tut” would have to learn -enough Portuguese to get along when it came time for me to go ahead of -the show to make bookings. - -I had gradually been acquiring a better command of that tongue myself, -and now made use of it to draw up a formidable contract tying Carlos -hand and foot. Though I was forced to pay him the equivalent of a -hundred dollars a month and traveling expenses, I required him to stay -with the Kinetophone until the tour of Brazil was completed, not to -exceed one year. On every “second feast day” after the first month he -was to get four-fifths of his pay, the rest to remain in the hands of -the “Linton South American Company” until the tour was finished, when -the balance was to be paid him in a lump sum, together with his fare -back to Rio. If he left before that time, both the balance and the -transportation were forfeited, for we did not propose to spend weeks -training a man only to have him leave us at the first whim or better -offer—though the latter contingency was not likely. Lastly, he was not -to engage in any other occupation while with us, he could be discharged -upon a week’s notice if he proved unsatisfactory, with balance and fare -paid, and he was required never to show or explain to others the -workings of the Kinetophone, nor disclose knowledge of anything -connected with our company which he might learn directly or indirectly. -With all these clauses duly included and the document signed in -duplicate, I fancied even a Brazilian could find no means of leaving us -in the lurch. Little had I suspected, when I was tramping the streets of -Rio six weeks before, carrying all my worldly possessions wrapped in a -square yard of cloth, that I should soon be strutting down the Avenida -Central as one of her captains of industry, laying down the law to mere -mortals, and shouldering my way daily through her narrow downtown -streets to deposit a large sum of money. - -About the time Carlos joined us I found myself in new and wholly -unexpected trouble—silver trouble. It scarcely seems possible that -anyone could protest at getting too much silver, but many strange things -happen in Brazil. There is no Brazilian gold, except in theory; and its -paper does not suffice for small transactions. One day the Rio manager -of the “Companhia Brazileira” met me at our usual noonday conference -with the announcement that he would have to pay me a part of our -percentage in silver. I saw no reason why he should not, other than the -trouble of carrying it a few blocks to the bank, and accepted 200$000 in -paper-wrapped rolls. But when I dropped these down before the receiver’s -window, he declined to accept them. I fancied the tropical heat had -suddenly affected his sanity, and went in to see one of the English -“clarks.” From him I learned that it was only too true; the banks of Rio -_do not_ accept silver! I had heard of South American bankers doing all -kinds of tricks, but I had never before known one to refuse money. I -tried several other banks of various nationalities with the same result; -they all accepted only silver enough to make up odd multiples of ten -milreis. The English manager of the British bank, who had lived so long -in Brazil that he had lost some of the incommunicativeness of his race, -took the trouble to explain the enigma to me. The year before, the agent -of a German firm had arranged with certain Brazilian officials to issue -a new coinage and the firm had flooded the country, about the capital, -with shining new silver 500, 1000, and 2000 reis pieces. But silver is -legal tender in Brazil only up to two milreis; therefore, when it -suddenly became plentiful, the banks could not accept any great amount -of it because they had no outlet and would have had to build new vaults -to hold the stuff. At the cinema door we naturally took in much _prata_, -so that even after making change a donkey-load of it remained to be -divided each noonday. I could not buy drafts with it on New York; the -government would not receive it—nor its own paper money in most -transactions, for that matter; being “made in Germany” it was hardly -worth melting up. The one rift in the silver clouds was that merchants -were so anxious for trade during this period of depression that they -would accept any kind of money in any amount if only people would buy. -We paid Carlos in silver and we spent silver ourselves whenever we had -to spend. What we could not get rid of in that way I could only sell at -a four per cent. loss, and as I was already paying 5$000 a dollar for -drafts, I finally took to dropping pounds of silver into our trunks. - -But the worst was still to come. Commerce was suddenly swamped under a -flood of nickel! Its “refunding loan” having failed, Brazil was hard put -to it to find money for current expenses, and disgorged anything that -could be found lying about the federal treasury. If the government -refused to take its own silver and nickel, it did not by any means -refuse to pay it out. The lower and less influential officials were -paid, when at all, in rolls of silver, those without any political pull -whatever in nickel, and there were cases of being paid in _vintems_, the -obsolete copper coins of twenty reis each which may be seen in use only -among beggars and negro street hawkers. On government pay-days, ever -more rare now as time went on, one might see a government bookkeeper or -a school teacher come in to buy a long-needed bar of soap and a flashy -new shirt, lugging in both hands, like dumbbells, great lumps of -paper-wrapped silver, nickel, and even copper. - -It was not until September 25 that I could risk letting Carlos run the -stage end of the show, even under my immediate supervision, but he -learned with reasonable speed and three days later I spent the afternoon -climbing Tijuca and turned up at the cinema after eight, much relieved -to find that nothing had gone awry. “Tut,” however, was forced to stick -close to his booth during all performances as long as we remained in -Rio. - -Then came the end of the month, the figuring up of accounts, and the -startling discovery that I was a millionaire! In a single week I had -earned more than I had spent since entering Brazil three months before, -and my salary and commission for the month, little more than half of -which we had been playing, summed up to 1,250,000 reis! What it would -have been under normal conditions, when Brazilians were able to maintain -to the full their reputation as “good spenders,” only the mathematically -minded can compute. Now that I had my first million, by all the rules of -Wall Street I should have had no difficulty in rapidly joining the -multimillionaire class. However, when I found that at the prevailing -rate of exchange my earnings amounted to barely three hundred dollars, -and when I added the knowledge that a five-cent handkerchief sold for -1$500, that it cost 600 reis to have a collar badly laundered, and that -rather a thin letter mailed to the United States required the equivalent -of twenty-five cents in stamps, I realized that I was in no immediate -danger of descending into the pitiable class of the idle rich. - - - - - CHAPTER XII - A SHOWMAN IN BRAZIL - - -Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first -morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable -old station of the Central Railway of Brazil. Having a suitcase now and -lacking time to wait for the second-class trailer in which persons so -plebeian as to carry baggage may ride, the trip by taxi cost me—I mean -Linton—9$600 instead of 400 reis! Nor was that the only shock I got at -the station. On my journey northward from Uruguay, with my worldly -possessions in a bundle under one arm, the fact that the railroads of -Brazil have no free baggage allowance had scarcely caught my attention. -But now I was responsible for an outfit consisting of half a dozen large -trunks and an enormous phonograph horn in its special case, totaling -about a thousand pounds. Hence the seriousness of the discovery that for -the single day’s trip from Rio to São Paulo personal baggage paid 256 -reis a kilogram and all other kinds 400! No wonder Brazilians drag into -the trains with them all manner of strange and awkward bundles, for -though any portable amount of hand-luggage is transported free of charge -in the passenger-cars, everything else must pay almost its weight in -human flesh. In fact, a fat man can travel more cheaply on Brazilian -railways than can his equally heavy trunk. - -There are private, state, and federal railways in Brazil, and the -“Estrada de Ferro Central” belongs to the last category, being operated -by the national government. I had already seen public ownership of -railroads working—or failing to work—in Chile, however, and was -therefore not so surprised at some of the manifestations of the system -as a complete stranger might have been. One quickly learned that -government railways are operated primarily for the convenience of -trainmen and government officials, and that the public is privileged to -fight for any space that may be left after these have been accommodated. -Our cars were as sadly down at heel as any I had seen since leaving -Chile, yet in the station from which we departed stood an official train -of the “Administração e Inspecção” that was the last word in -transportable sumptuousness, its sides almost wholly of plate-glass and -its interior fitted with every luxury. In this, and others like it, -government railway managers and higher officials not only flit about at -will but carry a host of political friends and their relatives down to -the fourteenth cousinship. The “Central” shows a firm belief, too, in -the modern trade-union principle of never letting one man do what four -men might pretend to be doing, so that not only do useless higher -officials swarm but the actual railroad men are little less numerous -than the passengers. - -Notwithstanding my rule never to go over the same ground twice when it -can possibly be avoided, I was returning to São Paulo because our -contract with the “Companhia Brazileira” specified that we present the -Kinetophone there during the month of October. The night train would -have been more comfortable and a bit swifter, but I had never been -overland between Brazil’s two largest cities; besides, I wished to have -things prepared for our _estrea_ when “Tut” and Carlos arrived next -morning. The day train covers the 310 miles in twelve hours—at least on -the time-table. For the first of them it was but one of a constant -procession of trains in both directions, not only the “Central” but the -private-owned and contrastingly efficient “Leopoldina” railway -maintaining incessant service to the suburbs. Then we took to climbing -from the coast to the great interior plateau, more or less following a -small river sprawling over rocks and boulders, passing many tunnels that -brought out the incompetence of the train gas-lamps, a low-wooded valley -sinking below us as we rose ever higher. Once out of this and above the -coastlands, we turned southwest across an almost flat plain. By no means -covered with the jungle of the imagination, it was dry and bushy, -sometimes wholly bare, occasionally somewhat grass-grown. Reddish trails -along which wandered mules and donkeys, and now and then one of the -humped sacred bulls of India between the thills of a heavy cart, climbed -away across scrub-covered, mist-touched foothills or low ridges here and -there punctuated with decapitated palm trees. The soft coal that Brazil -imports for her railroads abetted the dustiness of the season in making -the trip uncomfortable. Beyond Cruzeiro, already in the state of São -Paulo, huge dome-shaped ant-hills of hard, reddish earth began to litter -the brownish landscape. The low hills had been ruthlessly despoiled of -their natural adornment by the systematic incendiarism of man, who for -long stretches had made his destruction of the primeval forest absolute. -It struck a note of sadness, this devastation of the beauties of nature -for utilitarian purposes, without even the excuse of necessity, since -the forest had been destroyed merely to save the trouble of cultivating -more intensively and by more modern methods lands that had become weary -from overwork and lack of fertilizing nourishment—and because of the -native superstition that soil which does not produce forest will not -grow anything else. Long lack of rain had left the whole country -powder-dry and water-longing; even the palm-trees drooped as if tired -and thirsty. In folds of the earth clumps of bedraggled banana plants, -sometimes with a few choked coffee bushes beneath them, called attention -to primitive huts before which a black colonist, squatting aimlessly on -the ground, and his numerous brood offered to the sun’s caresses skins -which it cannot tan. It is a nonchalant life at best where the earth -gives a maximum of return for a minimum of exertion. Here and there a -bit of late spring plowing was going on, giving the ground a suggestion -of the same nudity as the happy-go-lucky inhabitants. Now and then, from -the summit of a ridge, we caught sight of an old plantation house with a -long series of walls behind which only a generation ago were herded -troops of negro slaves, and about it vast coffee-fields abandoned for -want of labor. Everywhere was an air of do-nothing poverty and -ruination, coupled with a fatalistic surrender to circumstances. The -unimportant towns along the way, little less thirsty and weary of life, -seemed to be inhabited only by non-producers, ranging from priests to -shopkeepers. At length the thick dust-and-heat haze of day turned purple -with evening, a heavy sun went down somewhere to the west, leaving a -great red blotch irregularly radiating on the horizon, the night grew -almost cold and, two hours behind time, we rumbled into the glass-domed -Luz station. - -São Paulo was not what I had left it ten weeks before. Not only had the -drought made it dry and dusty and even more hazy than Rio, but the war -had brought its industry almost to a standstill. Swarms of workmen -without work competed with hungry boys for the chance to sell a few -newspapers. In the poorer section a serious epidemic of typhoid had -broken out; the hotels that had seemed numerous before, now, with only a -guest or two each, appeared trebly so; “actresses” who had always had a -native “friend” to help out, had taken to suicide because even the -_amigo_ could no longer pay their rent. The very _cafés concertos_ in -which rich _fazendeiros_ from the coffee-growing interior had been wont -to squander fortunes on blond charmers from across the sea were -succumbing one by one to the “brutal crisis.” Everywhere the city had a -sad air and many of those one met were too sad to speak; even the -weather was gloomy, in the face of approaching summer. The sun was -rarely seen; palm-trees shivered in a cold wind; disheveled banana -plants huddled together as if for mutual warmth. Professionally the -“industrial capital” looked unpromising indeed. The _Paulista_ had not -yet come to realize that the war was really the opportunity for a land -with such vast resources, so far barely touched by commercial -enterprise, to shake off borrowing and indolence and become one of the -wealthy and powerful nations of the earth. - -Approached from the federal capital, São Paulo showed at a glance the -effect on the human race of even a slight difference in climate. Though -not appreciably farther from the equator than Rio, and barely half a -mile above sea-level, its atmosphere was wholly different. The negro -element is conspicuously less and seems to be decreasing, so that a -century hence, São Paulo will have perhaps no more of the African strain -than the Portuguese have now. The average citizen one saw in the -business streets, or in the palatial homes of coffee kings and captains -of industry—not to mention successful politicians—out along the Avenida -Paulista and in other flowery and fashionable suburbs had much less in -common with the motley _Carioca_ than with the people of southwestern -Europe. - -“Tut” and Carlos arrived at dawn with the outfit. I had been -disgruntled, though not greatly surprised, to find that our coming had -not been advertised, except with a small portrait of Edison in some of -the newspapers, the ex-bootblack being a true Latin-American in never -believing a promise until it has been fulfilled. This was contrary to -our contract and it would have caused us to lose not one, but several -days had I not obliged the distrustful Spaniard to let us open at one of -his theaters the following night and to plunge at once into advertising, -which I aided by a special performance to the press and “influential -citizens” at six that afternoon. As we were booked for a month in the -city, “Tut” and I took quarters—the scarcity of transients having -brought them within our means—in a palace overlooking the stately and -dignified Municipal Theater, from which we could look down upon the -band-concerts in the gardens below as from a balcony—unless they -coincided with our own performances. Carlos, being in his home town, -joined his increasing family in one of the sections chiefly devoted to -workmen of Italian antecedents. - -The “Companhia Brazileira” operated eight cinemas throughout the city, -and these were in the habit of changing their programs nightly, instead -of twice a week. As we were to play in all of them, I set to work to -shift our numbers in such a way as to give us more than twenty-five -combinations of program with our fifteen films, both in the hope that -those who might already have heard one number would be attracted by the -other two and because Brazilians will not stand for _sopa requentada_ -(reheated soup), as they call a repetition of program. Our work in São -Paulo was quite different from that in Rio. Here the cinemas ran only -two, or at most three, sessions, totalling less than four hours a night, -with matinées only on Sundays. One man could easily have done all that -the three of us were called upon to do in those days, had he been able -to split himself into triplets at the critical moments. Nor was our -income cut down as much as the difference between two or three and ten -performances a day would suggest, for the theaters were large, with -boxes, balconies and galleries, and the public was accustomed to take -its entertainment in common at reasonable hours. Theatrically, however, -the _Paulistas_ were quite like the _Cariocas_. Their favorite in the -“movies” was a Parisian comedian whose specialty is the -fall-into-a-coal-bin-in-evening-dress brand of humor, and it was -difficult to unseat this king. To be sure, São Paulo audiences did show -a few more signs of life than those in the national capital, an -occasional snigger at least; but on the other hand, unlike Rio, with its -pose for the exotic, they somewhat resented that our records were not -all in the native tongue. “Tut” suggested that we take them out and have -them translated. - -Though the “Companhia Brazileira” was required by the terms of our -contract to do all advertising, I decided to try my own hand at -flim-flamming the public. The usual posters, newspaper notices, and -banners were all very well, but I wanted something special, something -unusual, that could not fail to impress upon everyone that “the -Kinetophone, the wonderful talking-moving pictures, the marvel of the -age,” and so on, was in São Paulo for a very limited time indeed, “_só -trez dias_ (only three days)”—after which it would move to another -theater a few blocks away. Our enterprising partners were not so -conservative in advertising as they were lacking in new ideas. But -though they were always harping on the American genius for publicity and -insisting on their eagerness to be shown, they invariably backed water -when any unfamiliar scheme was physically laid before them, and this -dread of the unusual was so often in evidence during our tour of Brazil -that it is evidently a typical Brazilian characteristic. In São Paulo I -hired an Italian dwarf, who had been hanging about appealing for a job, -to parade the streets as a sandwich-man. That particular form of -advertising apparently had never been seen in Brazil. The company highly -approved of the scheme in outline, but refused to sponsor an -unprecedented innovation when the time came actually to carry it out. I -determined, therefore, to risk a few dollars of Linton’s money. Taking -two of our large cloth-mounted portraits of Edison as a background, I -had special sandwich-boards made on a design of my own—except that the -painter, frightened at any suggestion of novelty, reduced my idea to the -commonplace, and then told another man to complete the job. This he did -eventually, under my stern supervision, and I turned the innovation -loose on São Paulo. An hour later, I met my dwarf carrying the two -boards above his head in the form of a banner that had been the “last -cry” in Brazilian advertising for at least a decade! He had some maudlin -excuse to offer for not carrying out my orders and next day he left even -the banner loafing on a corner while he worked at a better job during -the best hours of Saturday, leaving me no choice but to turn him back -into the ranks of the disgruntled unemployed. Thanks to rain, the war, -and other drawbacks, we did so poor a business on several nights that -the ex-bootblack talked of breaking the contract, for though they expect -“um inglez” to live strictly up to his side of an agreement, on their -side a contract means nothing whatever to these people. To make things -worse the milreis dropped again to five to the dollar, yet money was so -scarce that we dared not raise our admission price. By moving every -three days to a new theater, however, we got fair-sized audiences and -did moderately well, though nothing like what we should have done before -the war. - -All my other troubles as a theatrical potentate, however, were nothing -compared to my struggle against “deadheads.” Though our contract called -for “complete suppression of the free list during this engagement,” the -carrying out of that clause was quite another matter. Excuses for -entering a theater in Brazil without paying an admission fee are without -number. One might suppose that a Justice of the Supreme Court would be -ashamed to use his office to force his way into a “movie” house, -admittance to which cost barely the equivalent of a quarter. But many -men of that class not only usurped free admission, but usually took -their entire families with them—and the average Brazilian family can -fill many seats. It is the custom in Brazil for theaters to send annual -passes to all higher politicians. Thus the judge is given a richly -engraved yearly pass, which claims to be non-transferable and for his -personal use only. But he cannot, of course, be expected actually to -show it, like a _popular_, or a common fellow, or to have his right -questioned to bring with him such guests as he may choose. It is the -business of everyone connected with the theater to know the judge and -not put him to the annoyance and degradation of showing that pass, which -would be an insult comparable almost to dunning him for a debt. So he -thrusts the obsequious gateman haughtily aside and marches in with his -whole progeny—and a little later a barefoot negro boy appears with an -elaborately engraved annual pass which states that he is a Justice of -the Supreme Court, and he must be let in without question, lest one have -to answer next day to contempt of court! - -We were incessantly pestered by official mendicants and well-to-do -beggars, by friends of the management or of the cinema employees, by -“influential people” in droves. Favor to a friend, a relative, an -acquaintance, the friend of a friend’s friend, to anyone with an -authoritative manner, and the lack of moral courage that goes with it, -is the curse of all Brazilian door-keepers. If a man had ever met a -person in any way connected with the institution, he expected to get the -glad hand and a smiling invitation to “go right in.” It was not so much -that they were trying to save money; the milreis admission fee was not -serious to the official and influential class; it was _fazendo fita_, -showing off by stalking past the cringing ticket-collector with an air -of daring him to challenge them. To march in with his whole decorated, -upholstered, and perfumed family gave a man the sense of being a person -of superior clay, for whom there are no barriers. This attitude ran the -full gamut of government officials. One of the standing privileges of a -newly appointed Minister of War is to go to the theater and ignore the -ticket collector; it is his visible and final proof of office. Negro -youths employed in the customhouse forced their way in without protest -because some form of trouble would be sure to follow any interference -with that class. My ears were constantly being importuned with, “Please, -senhor, may I go in? I am an ‘artist’ or a poet, or fourteenth cousin of -the _delegado_, or great-grandmother of the town dog-catcher, or a bag -of wind, or....” When mail arrived for me at our consulate the native -clerk was careful to keep that fact to himself if I called during the -day, so that he could bring it to me at night and use it as a ticket for -himself and his female hanger-on. In addition to all this, the -short-sighted managers think it necessary to give permanent passes to -many of the “influential families” in their neighborhood so that others -will see that the place is fashionable and will patronize it. As a -result, those who have money do not need to spend it, because they have -season tickets, and those whom they are expected to imbue with the -desire to go cannot do so because they do not have the money. - -A woman of the comfortable class comes to the cinema with two, or even -three nearly full-grown children, and though she knows perfectly well -that they are expected to pay at least half-fare, she presents a single -ticket for herself and starts to drag the children in after her. If the -door-keeper has the courage to halt her, the woman, feigning great -indignation, says: - -“Why do _they_ pay admission, little bits of children like that?” - -“Yes, senhora,” replies the bowing manager, with far more courtesy than -firmness. - -“Oh dear,” sighs the woman, “I have just ten _tostões_ with me for my -own ticket and I’ll have to go way back home and get the rest”—whereupon -the manager hastens to say, “that’s perfectly all right, senhora, go -right in,” for he knows that if she turns homeward it will be in wrath -and he will lose even the “_dez tostões_” she has paid for her own -ticket. As often as she comes to the cinema the woman, and many like -her, works the same trick with a most serious and innocent face. - -We had to admit free the chauffeurs of private automobiles in order to -keep the friendship and family influence of the patrons who came in -them. Sometimes it was evident that the cinema was making use of us -during our short engagement to win friends for themselves during the -rest of the season. One manager went so far as to try not to include us -in the program at all one Sunday afternoon, knowing he would fill the -house anyway with Edison’s portrait outside and not have to share the -receipts with us. Then anyone in any way connected with a newspaper, -from the office-boy down to the editor’s third mistress, must be let in -without question or the entertainment is forever blasted in that -community. A decent and unusually good show for Brazil opened near us -one evening. Being newly arrived from Europe, the manager gave two seats -each to the principal newspapers, instead of allowing anyone attached to -them to get in merely by mumbling that fact as they passed the -door-keeper. Next day, after highly praising a salacious and worthless -thing at another theater, the papers one and all announced that no -decent Brazilian families should be seen at this one, and the following -night the police closed the performance. - -At the “Cinema High Life”—the mulatto boy operators had chalked the name -on the back brick wall of the stage so that they could remember how to -pronounce it, “Ai Laife,” in three syllables—which prided itself on -attracting “le monde chic” of São Paulo, I counted 215 “deadheads” one -night out of an audience of barely six hundred, and I missed a number -when duties took me away from the door. Moreover I did not count the -score or more in uniform, nor the friends of the stagehands who saw the -pictures from the rear. - -I soon cut off some of this dead-heading, but it was at the expense of -much diligence and audacity, not to say diplomacy, for one cannot -manhandle the Brazilians as one can a more straightforward people, -without running the risk of being boycotted by the entire community. It -meant constant vigilance, too, for the crooked are notoriously more -energetic and cunning than the honest. In the beginning I lost -considerable sleep over this petty form of grafting, but one soon learns -in Brazil to take a new view of life, to smile and be “sympathico” and -fit in as well as possible with the society about him. It is the only -society he will find in any appreciable quantity as long as he remains -in the country, and he may as well make the best of it. - -Once in a while, though by no means often enough to make up for the -“deadhead” losses, men went to the other extreme in _fazendo fita_. A -fop now and then came in alone and bought an entire box for himself; or -men well known in the community might come the first night with their -families, thrusting the door-keeper aside, and take seats in the -parquet, while the next night, when he came with his bejewelled -mistress, the same man would take the best box available, and pay for -it, less out of a sense of fairness than in order advantageously to -display his prize to his envious fellow-citizens. - -However, in compensation for my troubles new honors were heaped upon me. -The Brazilian dearly loves an honorary title, and being unable to think -of any other that would fit a man of my undoubtedly important position -as “concessionary” for all Brazil of a great invention, they took to -calling me “doctor.” In time I grew accustomed to being introduced with -deep bows and the words, “Permita-me presental-lhe o Doutor Frawnck.” In -“movie” circles I let the error pass as unimportant, but when one day -even the American president of the college of São Paulo publicly -addressed me by that title, I protested. - -“But you have a bachelor’s degree, haven’t you?” he asked, in some -surprise. - -“Yes, I believe so, if I haven’t lost it somewhere along the road, -but——” - -“Then you are a doctor in Brazil,” he replied, “for the bachelor’s -degree carries with it that title in this country.” - -“Dr.” Franck I remained, therefore, as long as I continued to manage the -Kinetophone. - -With matinées only on Sundays, I found plenty of time for my favorite -sport of tramping the countryside. One afternoon I strolled at random -out beyond the low, dry, reddish cliffs at the edge of town and struck -off in the direction of São Caetano. Great banks of white clouds lay -piled into the sky on all sides, and the dead-dry, almost burning -stretch of rolling country was half-hidden under a haze of red dust. I -passed several suburban beer-halls, each with its “Giocce di Bocce,” or -Italian nine-pin earth court behind it, and wandered on along more red -roads, the light-colored houses scattered over the rolling country -showing up in front and disappearing behind me in the thick, dust-laden -atmosphere as in a fog. Gradually I came to realize that almost a -procession of men, women and children was bound in the same direction, -some tramping the dusty road on weary, blistered feet, others lolling at -their ease in carriages and automobiles. Not a few of the latter were -expensive private cars with chauffeurs in livery. - -For nearly an hour I followed the same direction. Then all at once, -topping a slight ridge, I came upon all the concourse that had gone -before—automobiles, carriages, and pedestrians—gathered in a broad bare -space on the brow of a treeless, thirsty hill. Down below the throng was -a small tile-roofed hut with two bar fences so arranged before it that -only one person at a time of the crowd that was jammed up against it -could enter and bend over a sort of counter across the open door to talk -with a man inside. Each ended the interview by handing the man a ten, or -more, milreis note and passed out through a gap between fence and hut. -Though the entire assortment of Brazilian complexions was to be found in -the throng, many were full whites, blond European immigrants as well as -women in silks and diamonds, dandies in gloves, spats and canes—and -every mother’s son and daughter of them talked with bated breath while -they waited their turn to approach the counter. When this came, the men -reverently raised their hats, the women gave a species of curtsey and in -many cases kissed the man’s hand, then conversed with him for two or -three minutes in an undertone, which could not but have been heard by -those crowded nearest to the speaker. Then they paid the fee and passed -on, with as contrite and sanctified a look on their faces as if they had -just ended a private conference with St. Peter. Each carried away a -mammoth visiting card bearing the name Vicente Rodriguez Viera, and at -the exit a shaggy countryman halted each by thrusting forth photographs -of the man behind the counter, which each hastened to buy with a meek -and grateful countenance, as if by divine command. - -Inside the hut was an electric push-button which, like the back door, -connected with a rambling lot of _fazenda_ buildings, and near at hand -was a large liquor emporium and two restaurants of a crude, -frontier-like variety. I was preparing to sample the attractions of the -latter when the man behind the counter suddenly rose and strolled toward -the farmhouse in the rear, leaving the perspiring crowd—automobiles, -diamonds and all—to await his sweet will about returning. He was a big -bulk of a countryman, plainly a _caboclo_, or copper-colored native -Brazilian of considerable Indian and probably some negro blood, with a -great bushy black beard. Dressed in an uncreased, broad-brimmed felt -hat, a heavy, dark suit, and black riding-boots, he wore also a colored -handkerchief knotted loosely about his neck, a conspicuous watch-chain -and charm across his slightly prominent abdomen, and huge brass rings on -seven of his fingers considerably enhancing his general air of cheap -vulgarity. His face was puffy under the eyes and had a “foxy” expression -that no one of a modicum of experience with the human race could have -mistaken for anything than what it was,—proof of cunning rascality. - -As the fellow was returning to the hut I approached the vendor of -photographs and asked who the man was. His ally gave me a look of -mingled astonishment and disgust for my ignorance and explained that the -noble being was a _curandeiro_, or a “curer.” - -“You mean a physician?” I suggested. - -“No, senhor, not a doctor; a _curandeiro_.” - -“Does he give medicine?” - -“None whatever.” - -“Does he cure by laying on hands?” - -“Not at all. He merely gives them his card and they buy his picture. -After nine days they come back again, and three times in the next month, -and then once or twice a month, if they are still ailing, until they are -cured. He is a _caboclo legitimo_” (a dyed-in-the-wool Brazilian) “and -has been here eight years.” - -The “curer” was taking in money at a rate that should have allowed him -to retire in much less time than that, but no doubt pride in his work -kept him at it. Formerly he had operated in São Paulo itself, but had -been banished outside the city limits. An elaborate enameled sign -announced that on Sundays and holidays he gave no cures, “no matter what -the provocation.” As he reëntered the hut, the whole throng uncovered or -curtseyed. A peculiar fact was that a large number of his clients seemed -to be in the most robust of health; no doubt in these cases his cures -were most effective. Several well-dressed little girls were forced in to -consult him, plainly against their wills and better judgment, for they -laughed at the silly fraud, and one of them shocked the sanctimonious -crowd by calling him “velho barbudo” (old bewhiskered). There is a -Brazilian saying that “E mais facil enganar a humanidade que -desenganal-a,” which might be freely translated, “It is easier to -squeeze the human head into an uncouth shape than to squeeze it back -again to normal.” - -We found that the Kinetophone appealed less and less as we descended the -scale of wealth and education. In the workingman’s district of Barra -Funda, to which we went after a week down in Santos, we were escorted by -mobs of urchins until we felt like a country circus, but there was -little gain in playing to such audiences. In the slang of Brazil, “brass -was lacking,” and we gave matinées to scatterings of “deadheads” and -half-price children and evening performances to thin, apathetic houses. -The young toughs we would not let in free took revenge by mutilating our -cloth-mounted posters, the managers lost our newspaper cuts, and nearly -half our slight share of the receipts was paid in nickel! We were held -up, too, by one of the ubiquitous national holidays. The second of -November was the _Dia dos Finados_, a sort of Brazilian Memorial Day -sacred to weeping and the laying on of flowers—not to mention -flirting—in all the cemeteries, and not to be enlivened by mere -theatrical performances. Those of the undress variety “got away with it” -by announcing a “solemn program,” but when I protested against this -forced holiday, contrary to contract, the irreverent ex-bootblack grew -wrathy and insisted that on such a day our show was “too frivolous!” - -But if the human audiences did not respond, we now and then got proof, -sometimes in disastrous form, that our entertainment was realistic. In -several of the barn-like theaters in the outskirts of São Paulo we were -obliged to “shoot from the back,” that is, the projecting machine was -set up at the rear of the stage and the pictures were thrown upon the -back of the curtain. One evening some friend of the stage hands brought -a terrier with him. Among the demonstrations of the “Portuguese Lecture” -with which we opened our part of the program was a collie that rushed -out barking upon the screen stage. Barely had he dashed into view this -time when the terrier sprang madly upon him and all but wrecked the -curtain and the performance. - -It was not until the fourth of November that my real job began. Our -engagement with the “Companhia Brazileira” was drawing to a close at an -old theater out by the gas-works, and the hour had come for me to find -out whether I was a real “movie” magnate or merely a ticket-taker; for -the carrying out of a contract made by someone else is quite a different -thing from faring forth into the world and making contracts. I set out -for the interior of the State of São Paulo, therefore, with misgivings, -not only as to my own abilities but because only “Tut” and Carlos, who -did not yet speak the same language, were left to run the show. - -I was bound for Campinas, third city of the state, but the town of -Jundiahy looked promising and I dropped off there. It was a straggling -coffee center of some sixteen thousand inhabitants, rather picturesquely -strewn over a rolling hillside, at the summit of which bulked a big -yellow building bearing the familiar name “Polytheama.” In the -electric-light plant next door I learned the name of the manager, but I -visited a dozen other buildings before I ran him down, only to find that -the real owner and contract-maker was the prefect and chief mogul of the -town. We found him surrounded by much ceremony and a score of cringing -fellow-citizens in his inner sanctum of the _prefeitura_. I introduced -myself with as brief formality as possible and told him that the -Kinetophone was to end its engagement in São Paulo a week later and that -it might be to his advantage, as well as to that of Jundiahy, to have it -stop there for the night of Friday, the thirteenth, on our way to -Campinas. He replied that he had made a special trip down to São Paulo -to see this new “marvel of the American wizard,” but that he had never -dreamed we might be induced to come to Jundiahy. He was highly -flattered, but could he and his modest little town really afford so -remarkable an entertainment? I offered to book the attraction for a -hundred and fifty dollars. He looked up the rate of exchange in the São -Paulo morning paper, smiled sadly over the figures he penciled on the -margin of it, and regretted that it was impossible to pay a fixed sum, -especially in such hard times. - -I took leave of him and turned back toward the station. But I felt -almost superstitious at the thought of failing in my first attempt to -make a contract and yielded to the entreaties of the manager beside me -to return and seek some other basis of arrangement. The prefect showed -more pleasure than surprise at my return and offered to rent me the -“Polytheama” for one night at 80$, we to pay for orchestra, light, -license, employees, and all the rest. I declined. “Tut” could scarcely -be expected to handle so complicated a proposition to our advantage. It -then being my move, I dug down into my portfolio and brought forth a -contract which Linton by some stroke of luck or genius had made in a -small town of Chile, giving him seventy per cent. of the gross receipts. -I would gladly have accepted the “fifty-fifty” basis on which we were -then playing, rather than begin with a failure, but by judicious use of -the Chilean contract and my ever improving Portuguese I got the prefect -to offer us sixty per cent., and having asked and been refused the -privilege of charging to his account the cost of our transportation from -São Paulo, just in order not to seem too eager, I agreed. I drew up -duplicate contracts on the spot, left a reasonable amount of advertising -matter, and still had time to snatch a lunch before catching the next -train north. - -It was mid-afternoon when I reached Campinas in its lap of rolling -coffee-clad hills, and the siesta hour was not yet over. I took a -_tigre_, a two-wheeled hack, to the center of town, and having installed -myself in a big bare front room of the principal hotel, began my -professional inquiries at once. The important theaters were the “Casino -Carlos Gomes” and the “Theatro Rink.” The former looked rather small and -dainty for our purposes; besides, it ranked as a municipal playhouse, -and I did not yet feel like going into politics on so lavish a scale. -The “Rink” was a great barn of a place of less aristocratic appearance, -and in the course of an hour I coaxed the negro boys attached to it to -rout out the manager. He was a plain, business-like young fellow with -almost American ideas of advertising and management, and we were soon -engaged in the preliminary matching of wits. I drew out clippings, old -programs, articles on the Kinetophone from American, Brazilian, and -Spanish-American papers as they were needed to clinch my arguments, and -as he grew interested we sat down at a table on the gloomy unlighted -stage where a Portuguese company was stuttering and ranting through the -comedy they were to perpetrate that night. The first two days we might -devote to Campinas were much more important than the one I had booked in -Jundiahy. For one thing they were Saturday and Sunday, and in addition -the latter was November 15th, Brazil’s Second Independence day. I -proposed that we play five nights at two hundred and fifty dollars a -night. The manager smoked half a cigarette pensively, then said that if -I had only come before the war he would readily have consented, but that -now it was impossible. I sprang the incredible Chilean contract on him. -No, he would only split even, and there we stuck for some time. He was -adaptable, however, and we finally came to an agreement. He was to -double the price of admission, advertise “three days only” with much -gusto, including a special street-car covered with banners and filled -with musicians to parade the streets, and give us half the total -receipts. On the less important days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday he -was to give his customary subscription section without our assistance, -we to appear about nine, which is the fashionable hour in larger -Brazilian towns, with the price reduced to the normal one milreis—this -concession to be kept dark, of course, until the double-priced holidays -were over—and we to get sixty per cent. of the gross receipts during our -sections. - -My misgivings had largely taken flight, for before sunset of my first -day “on the road,” in this new sense, I had contracted the principal -theaters in two important towns at better terms than Linton himself had -been able to get in Brazil, and had the show booked for two weeks ahead. -It took me all that evening to draw up the contracts with the “Rink,” -write the contents of them in English for “Tut” and in Portuguese for -Carlos, and explain to the manager our several advertising schemes, but -I went to bed at last as highly satisfied with myself as it is well for -frail humanity to be. - -After so good a day’s work I decided to allow myself time to look -Campinas over, instead of departing at dawn. It is a place of -considerable importance, both as a coffee center and as the largest and -most prominent city in the interior of the State of São Paulo. Only a -few years before it had been a focus of yellow fever; now that scourge -had disappeared and sanitation seemed to have come to stay. Any city on -earth would point with pride to the rectangle of royal palms, here -growing unusually far inland, which surround the Largo Carlos Gomes. -That name is widespread throughout the city, for it was here that the -mulatto, Gomes, composer of the opera “O Guaraní” and generally rated -Brazil’s chief musician, was born. There is a statue of him, baton in -hand, bronze music-desk behind him, in a prominent little square in the -center of town—a fragile fellow of typical Brazilian lack of physique, -overweighed by the mass of unbarbered locks which seem to be the sign of -musicians irrespective of nationality. Campinas appears to have a -special trend toward music, for it is also the birthplace of the -pianist, Guiomar Novaes. - -The train sped away through endless rows of coffee, stretching out of -sight over rolling horizons. The region seemed more fertile than that -about São Paulo city, with a redder soil, though this may only have been -because here it had recently rained. Unlike those elsewhere, the -Brazilian coffee bushes stood out on the bare hillsides entirely -unshaded, the fields often looking as if they had been combed with a -gigantic comb. Within an hour I stopped at Villa Americana, a small -country town with a plow factory, a cotton-and-ribbon-mill, and a -fertile landscape in every direction. It is the railway station for -large numbers of Americans, or ex-Americans, chiefly farmers, who are -scattered for many miles roundabout. I found the first of them opposite -the station, a doctor who had been practicing here for a quarter of a -century, and who stepped to the telephone to call upon one of the colony -to act as my cicerone. The youth of twenty who responded was, in dress, -looks, manners, and speech, a typical young American of our southern -states, but he was a native of Villa Americana, one of many children of -a white-haired but still agile man of aristocratic slenderness who lived -in the chief mansion of the town, beside a spireless brick Protestant -church which he had been mainly instrumental in building. - -In 1867 bands of disgruntled Americans from our southern states -emigrated to Brazil and settled in the five provinces nearest the -federal capital, where they were later joined by others who had first -tried their luck in the Amazon regions. The father of my guide and -several brothers had come from Georgia with their father, who though he -had been a merchant at home and was seventy years old, had started anew -as a farmer. The present head of the family had served two years in the -Confederate army, and was still bitter over the sufferings of his family -during Sherman’s march to the sea. Virtually every American of the older -generation in this region had fought through the war as “Johnny Rebs,” -as they still jokingly called themselves, and had fled to Brazil soon -after the beginning of reconstruction days “to escape carpet-baggers, -free and insolent niggers, and because we fancied the Yanks were going -to eat us up; also so we could keep slaves again.” They still called -Americans of the North, particularly New Englanders, “them down East -Yanks,” and seemed hardly to recognize that the Civil War is over. Any -of them could quickly be wrought up into a heated discussion of slavery, -the character of Lincoln, and the other questions that sent the founders -of Villa Americana off in a huff to the hills of Brazil. The Americans -were the first to bring modern plows into the country, with the -resultant advantages in production when high prices prevailed. But the -majority spent their fortunes as they earned them, thinking these -conditions would last forever, and to-day they are little more -prosperous than their Brazilian neighbors. Though many owned slaves up -to 1888, there seems to be no bitterness against the men who brought -about emancipation in Brazil. They had, however, by no means lost their -color-line. - -Most of these transplanted Americans now admit that they would probably -have done better, at least economically, to have remained in the United -States, but none of them seemed to be thinking of returning. They retain -the good-heartedness and the unassuming hospitality of the southern -plantation in slave days, and with it all the old class distinctions of -the south. Such a family among them they spoke of as “belonging to the -overseer class,” others as “right low down trash.” On the whole, the -colony seems to have clung rather tenaciously to the American standards -of morality, though I heard mention of exceptions to this rule. It was -surprising how American the better class families, such as that of my -guide, had kept. Thanks to their own private schools, their vocabularies -were fully equal to those of the average educated American, though their -pronunciation had peculiar little idiosyncrasies, such as giving a -Portuguese value to the letters of words that have come into our -language since the Civil War. Even the men who were born in the United -States mixed many Brazilian words, particularly of the farm, with their -English. Their farm-hands they called “comrades,” though these were in -almost every case black and little more than peons, earning an average -of 2$500 a day, with a hut to live in and room to plant a garden about -it, if they chose, which few of them did. The older men spoke Portuguese -with the same ease with which they rolled and smoked cigarettes -Brazilian fashion, while the younger generation, of course, preferred -that tongue, except in a few houses where the parents had insisted on -English. Among the “low down trash,” most of the second generation was -said to know no English whatever. On the whole, the colony was another -demonstration of the fact that South America does not assimilate her -immigrants to any such extent as does the United States. - -When we had eaten a genuine Southern dinner of fried chicken and all -that goes with it, the son “hitched up” and drove me out through -eucalyptus trees and whole hills of black-green coffee bushes to visit -another American family. There was a suggestion of our southern -mountaineers about this household, the women diffident, silent, and -keeping in the background, though the men had excellent English -vocabularies and the mountaineer’s self-reliance. Yet they were not -always quite sure of themselves and were leisurely of wit, with a manner -which proved that the intangible something known as American humor is -the result of environment rather than bred in the bone. The colony -introduced watermelons into Brazil, but the fruit is nearly all in -Italian hands now, great wagon-loads of them having passed us on their -way into town. When the Americans first arrived, they had planted much -cotton and sugar, but these crops have been almost wholly abandoned, and -they rarely raise more than enough coffee for their own use, giving -their attention chiefly to corn and beans. - -It is a great misfortune to Brazil that nearly all her rivers run inland -to the Plata or the Amazon, for lack of this natural transportation has -undoubtedly retarded the development of the country, though it has -probably also abetted the development of railroads. Particularly in the -State of São Paulo there is perhaps as great a network of them as -anywhere in the western hemisphere outside the United States. No fewer -than five systems, better laid and equipped than the Brazilian average, -and with many branches, connect São Paulo city with the rest of the -state and with those to the north and south, while a few months after I -passed that way one of these opened direct rail communication to -Corumbá, far across the wilderness of Matto Grosso on the Paraguay -river. One of the results is that the coffee state is surprisingly well -developed, with many important towns, vastly more agriculture, and much -less forest than the imagination pictures. - -As far as Rio Claro, a few hours north of Villa Americana, the railroad -service was excellent. Beyond that large, one-story, checkerboard, -monotonous town ran a wood-burning narrow-gauge, the tenders piled high -with cordwood. Though ours was a “limited” train, passing many stations -without officially stopping, the British “staff” system required the -engineer to exchange orders with every station master, and made it -necessary to slow down to a walk at every settlement. The farther we got -into the interior the more often were we entrusted to wood-burners, the -smaller became the trains, the closer the engines with their deluge of -smoke, sparks, and cinders, and the more we pitched and rolled along the -narrow tracks, which wound incessantly among low hills. The landscape -grew more and more wild, almost a wilderness in places, though no such -tropical jungle as I had imagined, with sometimes no real stop for an -hour or more. - -São Carlos was a lively town of some 15,000 people in a hollow among -rolling hills, its houses separated by masses of green trees. There were -plenty of Fords at the station and swarms of _carregadores_, -baggage-carriers with license numbers on their caps—you couldn’t sell -your old shoes in Brazil unless you wore a license showing that the -politicians had given you permission to do so. Here one was struck again -by the fact that great competition does not necessarily mean low prices. -Considering themselves lucky to get a job or two a day, these carriers -growled at anything less than a milreis for the slightest exertion, and -expected enough for carrying a suitcase across the street to keep their -families for a week. - -In the best room available at the best hotel I could scarcely turn -around without barking my shins, and the window opened so directly on -the sidewalk that the shoulder of every passer-by seemed to jostle me. -The weather was volatile as a Brazilian, with heavy downpours for ten -minutes alternating with ten minutes of sunshine. I waded down into the -valley through wide streets reeking in blood-red mud and up to the -“Theatro São Carlos,” the manager-owner of which I at length unearthed, -in spite of the prevarications of his negro servants. As usual he was -one of the pillars of the town, of that aristocratic flimsiness of the -man who has never done any real work for generations back, and his air -said plainly that he knew he could outwit any simpleton of a foreigner. -I set my first demands high, therefore, in order to give him the -satisfaction of feeling that he had driven a close bargain when he at -length agreed to as much as I had expected and ten per cent. more than I -would have accepted under compulsion. I got his name signed to duplicate -contracts while he was still under the influence of my hypnotic eye and -was giving him instructions, in the guise of information, on advertising -and the arrangement of programs, when he remarked casually: - -“Of course Edison himself comes with the show? Our people will be as -anxious to see him as to get acquainted with his new invention, of which -I have heard such splendid reports.” - -“Why—er—it may be that he will not be able to get here,” I stammered. -“You see, he has several little things on hand; besides, he is a married -man and—and——” - -How excellent my Portuguese and my winning salesman manner had become -was proved by the fact that in the end I did not have to abrogate the -contract for two days at the “Theatro São Carlos.” - -[Illustration: At a suburban cinema of São Paulo the colored youth -charged with the advertising painted his own portrait of Edison. He may -be made out leaning affectionately on the right shoulder of his -masterpiece] - -[Illustration: The central praça of Campinas] - -[Illustration: Catalão and the plains of Goyaz, from the ruined church -above the town] - -[Illustration: Amparo, like many another town of São Paulo, is -surrounded on all sides by coffee plantations] - -The town of Araraquara proved to be of about the same size and activity -as São Carlos, and especially well off in public buildings somewhat out -of proportion with its general appearance. Clustered in the center, -about the large, red-earth praça, was the church, an old sheet-iron -playhouse, an ambitious Municipal Theater, closed as usual, a large and -well-arranged cinema bearing the unescapable name “Polytheama,” and, -across the street in a red lot of its own, an ambitious new two-story -building labeled in English the “Araraquara College.” I took a turn -through several of the wide, irregular, red-smeared streets to make sure -that the place was worth playing, then found that the man I sought was -also manager of the largest store in town, next door to his playhouse. -He proved to be a short, unshaven young Italian who had not been long in -Brazil, which accounted for his being so good-hearted and easy-going -that I had no difficulty in taking sixty-five per cent. away from him -for Saturday and Sunday night performances. I might have had as large a -share of the special Sunday children’s matinée, but as what had become a -custom required him to distribute candy and toys to the children, I took -pity on him and split that part even. - -One of my fellow-countrymen was head of the college. His most noticeable -characteristics were as a smoker of corn-husk wrapped cigarettes and as -an authority on the history of Brazil. He had long been a teacher and -would have preferred to spend his summer vacations in the land of his -forefathers; but these came in December and January, when it is cold in -the United States, and it would take nearly the two months to reach and -return from there, while he could cross to Lisbon in twelve days and -spend most of his vacation comfortably tramping about southern Europe. -His Brazilian wife and two bilingual daughters were almost American in -point of view, though by no means in appearance. The boys of Brazil, the -head master asserted, are more tractable than American boys, also more -superficial, learning more easily but forgetting much more quickly—a -statement frequently heard from American educators throughout South -America. That they were tractable was quickly evident, for when a native -teacher sent to show me over the establishment called a boy away from a -football game—rugby is popular even with workmen on coffee estates in -São Paulo State—he trotted meekly off to do an errand without a hint of -resentment. There were half a dozen American boys in the school, all -Brazilian born of men from our South, and not merely had they taken on -many of the characteristics of their companions, but they had washed-out -complexions and no suggestion of that “scrappiness” familiar on our own -playgrounds. This pastiness of skin is general among the sons of -northerners born in Brazil and quite different from the color of the -blonde descendants of Portuguese in whom the Goth crops out. - -Morally the head master had been thoroughly Brazilianized. He had grown -tolerant of the many little things which are not quite as they should -be, having lost the familiar American longing to reform the world and -fallen into many of the lesser vices and easy-going customs of Brazil. -He had, however, introduced coëducation into his school, against the -advice of the natives, because he believed it necessary to proper sex -development, and now the families that had been most strongly against it -sent their children to the college. In the afternoon we drove by -automobile to the professor’s fruit-farm, which a former slave was paid -75$ a month to keep in order. Two of his piccaninnies followed us around -like pet raccoons, constantly holding plates of fruit within our reach, -and the atmosphere of the place was much what it must have been in our -South before the war when the “mastah” visited one of his plantations. -On our return we met an American farmer from far out in the country. He -had come to Brazil twenty years before, when already an adult, but he -spoke English with considerable difficulty and a distinct accent, though -his Portuguese was by no means perfect. - -Beyond the River Mogy Guassú, the first I had crossed since leaving São -Paulo, I changed from the “Paulista” railway system to the winding and -narrow-gauge “Mogyana.” We passed many fields of charred stumps, -suggesting how _matta_ was cleared for the planting of coffee. The rare -towns were monotonously alike, dull-white walls and red-tile roofs of -the same shade as the soil, which turned all light-colored animals, -including the children who played in it and the men who worked in it, a -pinkish hue. This red soil is the terror of housewives in São Paulo -State, especially in the dry season, when it sifts thickly over -everything and clings tenaciously to every exposed surface. Soon we were -completely surrounded by coffee fields, _sertões_ of coffee, a world -absolutely shut in by coffee bushes, which actually brushed the sides of -the train and stretched away, endless and straight and unerring as the -files of a well-trained army, up and down over hill and dale, with never -the slightest break in alignment, into the dense-blue horizon for mile -after swift mile. - -One plantation through which we traveled for more than an hour has -2,500,000 bushes; an English corporation owns an unbroken sixteen -kilometers of coffee trees, crisscrossed by a private railway. Down in -the hollow of each _fazenda_, or section of plantation, were long rows -of whitewashed, tile-roofed huts, all run together into one or two -buildings, sometimes with a church attached. These were the homes of the -_colonos_, or coffee workmen, once negro slaves, now chiefly Italians, -though I caught glimpses of a number of Japanese, the women still in -their native dress and carrying their babies on their backs by bands -across the breast. Some years ago a few ship-loads of Japanese were sent -to Brazil, landing in Santos, and most of them came so directly into the -back country, and are so nearly segregated there, that even their racial -tendency for imitation has not caused them to throw off home customs. -Here and there, too, were groups of European immigrants still in the -costumes of their homelands in the year, in some cases distant, when -they left them. Italian colonization succeeded negro slavery closely in -São Paulo State, which owes its prosperity and its leadership in the -world’s coffee production mainly to these newcomers. In addition to -their living quarters and modest wages, the _colonos_ are usually given -a piece of ground on which to plant corn, black beans, and mandioca for -their own use, and sometimes permission to graze a few head of stock. -One of the chief troubles of the coffee _fazendeiro_, however, is the -tendency of Italian _colonos_ to abandon the sun-drenched fields as soon -as they get a bit of money together and go to town to engage in some -minor form of business. - -Coffee blossoms and berries are often found on the same bush at the same -time, and there are seven grades of the product, according to the time -in which it is picked. The regular harvest is from May to July or -August. Then the ground under the bushes is carefully swept, if it is -smooth, or is spread with cloth, and the berries are scraped from the -branches with one motion of the hand, sparing as many leaves as -possible, after which all is swept together and sent to great drying -platforms that look not unlike concrete tennis courts. The _colonos_ -labor on the piece-work system, each family being responsible for a -given number of plants and the picking being paid by the liter. The -berries are planted some eight feet apart in both directions, making -straight rows from four angles. It is better to set out young plants -from a nursery, but this is too slow a process for large plantations. -Some of the land was formerly treeless campo, but a large part, and the -most fertile, has been cleared of dense _matta_ in the crude and -wasteful way of pioneer communities, leaving only here and there a -majestic tropical tree topping a ridge. The plant begins to produce in -about four years, and has been known to continue to the age of a hundred -and thirty, growing up from the stump as often as it is cut down. An -ordinarily good tree will produce twenty-five quarts of berries, which -in their maturity considerably resemble small cherries, the two coffee -beans inside requiring continual attention before they are finally dried -and sorted and disappear in sixty-kilogram sacks in the direction of -Santos and the outside world. - -The plants were brought to Brazil from French Guiana long ago, and -coffee-growing was a paying business in the State of São Paulo “until -the government heard of it.” The number of non-producers who get a -finger into the coffee cup before it reaches the actual consumer is -beyond belief. Taxes begin with so much per thousand “feet” of plants, -and continue incessantly until the product reaches the retail market. -Transportation from the field to Santos is ordinarily two or three times -as much as from Santos to New York, and a sack for which the grower -received ten dollars the grocer in the United States has been known to -sell for forty-five, even in the days before the World War produced so -many experts in profiteering. It is often asserted that the coffee -_fazendeiro_ makes more profit out of renting the bottom lands, where -the danger of frost makes the planting of coffee inadvisable, as -_chacaras_, or small market gardens, or from the catch crops that can be -planted between the rows after picking-time, than from his many times -more acres of coffee-trees. Throttling taxes are his greatest trial, and -the prophecy is frequently heard that this growing habit of Brazilian -government will eventually ruin the great coffee industry of São Paulo. - -At sunset we coasted down into Riberão Preto, fourth city of the state, -in the bottom of a great shallow bowl of earth lined uninterruptedly -with coffee bushes as far as the eye could reach. In the pink glow of -evening a _carregador_ put me and my baggage into a carriage before I -had time to express any personal desires on the subject, and I was -driven through the Saturday night activities of a lively, rather -frontier-like town to the chief hotel. What the other half dozen in town -must have been I dread to imagine, for this resembled nothing so much as -a dingy, careless, unadorned, lack-comfort style of barn, suggesting -that I was getting back again into the real South America, away from the -fringe of near-civilization on the coast. It was seething with -travelers, salesmen, an Italian theatrical company, servants, dogs, and -innumerable caged parrots, and I was assigned another of those -intolerable ground-floor rooms opening directly on the street that are -unescapable in the one-story towns of interior Brazil. Nor had I had -time to test the one comfort of such establishments, the shower bath, -when a jangling bell demanded that all guests come to supper at once, on -penalty of going without it entirely. - -It would be difficult to speak kindly of Brazilian hotels. As in -Spanish-America, nothing but black coffee is to be had until _almoço_, -or “breakfast,” between ten and eleven, which is followed about sunset -by _jantar_. Both these meals are heavy, lacking in everything but -quantity, and made up almost entirely of meat. This _carne verde_ -(“green” meat), having just been killed and so called to distinguish it -from _xarque_ or _carne secca_, the salted or sun-dried variety familiar -in the rural districts, is cooked in several different ways, all of -which leave it hopelessly tough. Whether in hotels or railway-station -restaurants, the menu is unvarying, and eight or ten huge plates of meat -are slapped down in the middle of a long, noisy, public table, where -each guest grasps what he can before his neighbors make way with it. To -save time or trouble all dishes are served at once, and are habitually -cold before they reach the ultimate consumer. There is a great paucity -of vegetables, even potatoes being considered a luxury and rarely -reaching the interior of the country. Instead, there stands on every -table a glass jar of what looks like coarse yellow salt, but which -proves to be _farinha_, flour made of the mandioca or _yuca_ that is -served boiled in the Andean countries, and which is used throughout -Brazil to thicken soups, or eaten dry. - -The hotel proprietor usually gives his attention exclusively to the bar, -which he claims to be the only paying part of his establishment. By -night a servant sleeps just inside the front door, leaving room between -it and his cot for the belated guest to squeeze through; in the daytime -the _pateo_ is an uproar of unguided servants and ill-bred children. If -you ask to have your bread brushed off after the waiter has dropped it -on the floor you are henceforth known as “that curious gringo”; if you -prefer your coffee or soup made without having an unwashed cook -frequently dip in her spoon to taste the progress and toss the residue -back into the pot, there is just one way to get it—by bringing your own -cook with you. In your room the mirror is certain to be placed at about -the height of the average American’s belt buckle, so that to shave -requires either kneeling on the floor or sitting on something, usually -not to be found, about the size of a soapbox. Hot water being unknown, -shaving becomes an ordeal equal to trying to shut out the sight of a -mulatto across the table inhaling a mammoth all-meat meal with such boa -constrictor ease that he needs only to give the tail of an occasional -extra large mouthful an affectionate pat with his knife as it goes down. - -Whatever he lacks in other ways the typical Brazilian hotel-keeper makes -up for in prices. He is rarely a native, and you can scarcely expect a -European to come over and set up hotels in the wilderness of South -America out of mere love for his fellow-man. Usually his only interest -is to make as much as possible as soon as possible and hurry back to his -native land. Not merely are the rates high, but it is the almost -invariable custom to manipulate the items in such a way that a stay of -twenty-four hours becomes at least two days. Personally, I early adopted -the habit of handing the proprietor the amount called for by his posted -daily rate and assuring him that I would look on with great interest -while he collected more than that; but the native Brazilian has the -notion that he loses caste if he protests at any price charged him, so -that the foreigner’s refusal to be fleeced is sure to make him -conspicuous, even if it does not cause his fellow-guests to rate him a -freak and a nuisance. - -Nearly every street of Riberão Preto runs out into red earth, a -tenacious soil that is tracked along the sidewalks and into every shop -and dwelling, until the whole town takes on a reddish tinge. Near the -center of town, at the lowest spot of the hollow in which it is built, -there is a perpetual frog chorus, and from the outskirts coffee-fields -stretch up out of the great shallow bowl and away over endless horizons. -The Italian company announced its début on the evening after my arrival -by shooting off fireworks, one advertising scheme that had not occurred -to me. There were so many cinemas in town that I had to spend real money -to visit several of them before I was competent to decide which one -would best answer our purposes. All those of importance, it turned out, -from the municipal “Theatro Carlos Gomes,” covering a whole block in the -center of town, down through the inevitable “Polytheama” to the -loose-mannered “Casino,” flowing with liquor and aging French -adventuresses, were in the hands of a hard-headed Spaniard of long -Brazilian experience, so that I considered myself fortunate to get his -name at the bottom of a contract giving us fifty-five per cent. of the -gross receipts during a six-day engagement. - - - - - CHAPTER XIII - ADVENTURES OF AN ADVANCE AGENT - - -We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto -on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town -of any size. Coffee-fields at length gave way to brush-covered campo and -grazing cattle, the train winding in great curves around slight hills, -like water seeking an outlet or a lost person wholly undecided which way -to go. Early in the afternoon we crossed the Rio Grande into the State -of Minas Geraes, which at once showed itself less developed, more dry -and sandy, with an increasing number of wooded valleys and ridges. There -was some coffee here, too, but cared for in a half-hearted way compared -with the great plantations of São Paulo. We passed a large gang of -Japanese workmen, and many zebus or humped cattle, both in the fields -and working as oxen. The ride was not only too dirty and dusty to be -pleasant, but sparks from our wood-fired engine poured in at the open -windows until, for all my dodging and brushing, a dozen holes were -burned in my still comparatively new movie-magnate garb. One station -stood 3400 feet above sea-level, and we all but shook ourselves and the -cars to pieces as we rattled down again into Uberaba, at an elevation of -2500, just as day was escaping over beyond the mountains. - -The place was smaller and less progressive than I had imagined, with -certainly not more than ten thousand inhabitants, instead of the 25,000 -credited to it by the “Handbook of Brazil.” I was not over-anxious to -make a contract with the one pathetic little cinema in town, at least -until I had seen what lay beyond and decided whether it would be worth -while to come this far inland. The manager, a clerk in the local -drugstore, was more than eager to present so extraordinary an attraction -to his fellow-townsmen, but fares and baggage rates would have cut -deeply into our profits and I refused to sign without a guarantee of a -conto for two days’ performances. He offered 800$ and would undoubtedly -have given almost any percentage, but I held out for the million reis -until we finally parted good friends but not business associates. - -Somehow I had always thought of Minas Geraes as rocky, arid, dry, and -cold, something like upper Peru; the mere name “General Mines” had a -hard and chilly sound to it. But long before noon in Uberaba, high as it -was, I was reminded that it is well north of Rio and almost tropical. -There was an old air about the town, partly because the humidity causes -grass, bushes, and even trees to grow on and about the churches and -other loose-jointed buildings of stone and porous bricks, but also -because Minas is a much older state than São Paulo, overrun by miners -long before the agricultural riches of its neighbor were scratched. - -We were off again at one behind the same old narrow-gauge wood burner, -through a rolling, bushy country, and scattered with huge ant-hills, -mildly similar to the Bolivian Chaco. The only real town along the way -was Uberabinha, squatting in the bottom of a sandy and shallow valley, -inhabited by barefoot and red-earth smeared people whose only place of -entertainment seemed to be the double-towered church bulking above the -general hut level. Night was falling when we pulled into Araguary at the -end of the “Mogyana” railway. The tidal wave of baggage-carriers and -hotel touts was only less in size than those farther south, but for once -I escaped them entirely by putting my valise on the head of a negro boy -and wading through the mud with him to a _pensão_ run by an old woman. -The room was really a mud cave, the mattress filled with corn-husks, and -I was reduced to candle-light for the first time in Brazil. But the -special chicken supper was a great relief from the avalanche of meat, -surrounded by wolfing natives, that would have been my lot at a hotel, -and, best of all, the _pensão_ was just across the way from the first -station of the “Goyaz Railway,” on which I was to depart at dawn. - -It was pitch dark, with frequent heavy showers, when I set out to wander -incognito through the town. The weak electric-lights along its -mud-and-grass streets and praças suggested fireflies or -will-o’-the-wisps flitting about through the thick, black night. There -was, to be sure, a dentist, who was also owner, editor and printer of -the local paper, and the town undertaker—and the tombstones behind the -lips of many of the inhabitants hinted that he mixed the three -professions. - -I came more or less near requiring his services in his least popular -capacity. As we were drawing into the station the mob of porters and -hackmen had given me their special attention, one negro in particular -thrusting his uninviting face through the car-window and pawing me with -his long unwashed hands in that half-affectionate, half-wheedling way of -his class and profession throughout Brazil, at the same time offering -his undesired services some seventy-five times at the top of his voice. -When I could endure him no longer, I rapped him over the knuckles with -the handle of my umbrella. Now a blow, however light and for whatever -provocation, is a shocking indignity in Brazil, only to be properly -wiped out in blood. I was not long, therefore, in recognizing the fellow -again when, during my stroll about town, he suddenly bobbed up -noiselessly out of the night and, after bawling a mouthful of vile -language after me, slipped away again with the information that he would -fix me yet. I gave him no more attention than one usually does a -half-drunken negro in tropical lands, and had entirely forgotten the -incident when I boarded another tottering little train next morning. All -at once a sound caused me to look up from my reading in the first-class -car I was sharing with one other passenger, to see the same negro -advancing swiftly down the aisle toward me, grasping a long and -sinister-looking knife. It was my luck to be unarmed for the first time -in Brazil that I had needed a weapon, having left my revolver with “Tut” -as a protection for the money he might take in. Even my umbrella, which -would not have been wholly useless in a hand-to-hand encounter, was in -the rack above me, and to rise and grasp it might suggest fear. I sat -where I was, therefore, with my feet drawn up on the opposite seat, -where they could shoot out quickly if danger became really imminent, and -stared at the fellow with the unwinking eye of the professional -lion-tamer. Whether it was this or his lack of any other intention than -to retrieve his reputation among his fellows and salve his injured -feelings by a threatening gesture, he confined himself to flourishing -the knife, advancing several times with rolling eyes almost to within -reach of my feet, and then backing away again. Finally he retreated -toward the door with an expression ludicrously like that of a whipped -animal, while I rose and walked leisurely down upon him with the same -fixed stare until he stepped to the ground. During it all neither train -nor local authorities made any attempt to come to my assistance, and I -carried away the impression that I should not have gotten out of -Araguary in a hurry had circumstances forced me to shoot a man of the -same color as the majority of the population. - -We tossed and creaked along all the morning to cover the seventy miles -of the little bankrupt line that penetrates the south-westernmost corner -of the great interior State of Goyaz. The bustling modern civilization -of São Paulo and the coast had gradually petered out to nothing more -than two telegraph wires jumping from pole to crooked pole across a more -or less rolling wilderness of bushy forest, _pura matta_, as the -Brazilians call uncleared country, in a voice almost of terror. Here and -there were vast, heavily wooded basins around the edge of which we -slowly circled, fighting wood-burner sparks with one eye while taking in -the slight scenery with the other. There was a bit of coffee-growing and -a bit of lumber was being cut, but as a whole the region was completely -undeveloped and unexploited. A flaming purple tree here and there broke -the rolling, bushy, brown monotony. The scant population was a sort of -semi-wild outcast of civilization, wedded to dirt and inconvenience, -living in open-work pole houses covered with aged thatched roofs that -resembled dilapidated and sun-faded straw hats. The men wore wide belts, -with many silver, or imitation silver, ornaments and with half a dozen -leather compartments in them for their money and other small -possessions. In a pocket of their thin cotton coats even our local -fellow-passengers carried the dried covering of an ear of corn, and when -they wished to smoke, which was almost incessantly, they pulled off a -corn-husk, shaped it with a knife, rolled it up and put it behind an -ear, cut off a bit of tobacco from a twist plug, crushed it between -their palms, and rolled a corn-husk cigarette. - -At eight we rumbled across the River Paranahyba into the State of Goyaz. -At the same time we crossed the nineteenth parallel of latitude, and the -climate should have been warm and humid; but as all this vast tableland -averages 2500 feet above sea-level, it had distinctly the atmosphere of -the temperate zones. There were a few cattle, less well-bred than those -of Minas. At Goyandira, a few scattered huts beside a small stream, we -were given time to gorge the customary Brazilian meal on a table already -crowded with dishes when we arrived, and at eleven we drew up at -Catalão, last outpost of civilization in this direction, and a -personified End of the Railroad. - -It was evident at a glance that I need not consider Catalão from a -business standpoint. Though from a distance it had looked like quite a -town, it was merely a village of a scanty thousand inhabitants scattered -along a small creek, with mangos trodden underfoot, its houses built of -mud plastered on sticks and then whitewashed. Compared even with the -_Mineiros_ over the nearby state border, the _Goyanos_ were -backwoodsmen; beside the energetic, up-to-date _Paulistas_ they had the -vacant expression of ruminating cattle. About the town an almost -treeless world, rather dry for lack of rain, stretched endlessly away in -every direction. When the midday heat had somewhat abated—for there was -nothing cold about Catalão, for all its altitude—I climbed to a barren -hillock topped by an old ruined church in which scores of black rooks -had built their nests and from which bushy and rolling Goyaz spread away -like a lightly broken sea. The view was so vast that one could see the -curve of the earth, the blue haze ever thickening until it grew almost -opaque on a horizon so distant that it seemed raised well above the -general level. The line of this was quite distinct for its entire sweep, -yet it joined almost imperceptibly a sky heaped and piled with irregular -masses of white clouds that cast their broken, fantastic shadows -everywhere across the spreading plains, yet did not conceal overhead the -sky of mother-of-pearl tint. Below, the village, like a capricious waif -that has come here far from nowhere out of mere spite or unsociability, -made itself as comfortable as possible in its shallow hollow among -dark-green masses of mango-trees. Roads, just born rather than made, -straggled out of it in all directions, soon to be lost in the green and -haze-blue immensity, as if man had dared venture only a little way out -into the unpeopled universe, vast and trackless as the sea. A few -venturesome _fazenda_ houses peered forth from their mango groves a mile -or two from the town, but these did not noticeably break the uninhabited -and virgin world, the _sertão_ or _matta_, which mere mention of “the -plains of Goyaz” calls up in the imagination. It was a distinct pleasure -to be again entirely beyond the hubbub of cities, beyond the reach even -of the ubiquitous trolley, with the world below deadly silent but for -the occasional far distant, yet piercing scream of an ox-cart creeping -imperceptibly along one of the languid, haphazard, straggling trails -that appeared from somewhere out in the wilderness. They sounded like -factory whistles, these distant _carros de boi_, with their solid wooden -wheels and total innocence of grease on their turning axles, the scream -of which—_chiar_, the Brazilians call it, aping the sound—ceased at -length abruptly before the principal shop, run by a “Turk,” where the -eight or ten oxen, steered by a driver who prodded them in the neck with -a goad lying over his shoulder without so much as glancing back, and -whom they followed unerringly, fell into the spirit of the scene, the -silence broken now only by the occasional sharp, vexed note of a worried -rook and the somnolent humming of flies. The End of the Railroad means -far away and quiet, indeed, in these seething modern days. Before long -we may not be able to find it at all; yet one feels at times impelled to -come to such ends of the road and climb to a high place overlooking the -world, there to sit and unravel the tangled threads of life into some -semblance of order again before descending to plunge once more headlong -into the fray. - -The worst of coming 710 miles up-country from Santos—and the time it had -taken made it seem ten times that—was that I must spend as long, without -even the reward of new sights and experiences, to come down again. The -same glorified way-freight carried us southward in the morning, and for -once it was crowded. Not only were there all my fellow-guests at the -run-down hovel owned by a “Turk” who had lived so long in Brazil that he -seemed to prefer Portuguese to his native Arabic, all of whom had spent -the night playing some noisy form of poker, but a new fork of the -railroad was being opened that day to Roncador (“Snorer,” it would be in -English), and everyone in Catalão who owned shoes had been invited to -ride out and help inaugurate. In consequence our tiny two-car train was -so densely packed with well-meaning but unpleasing mortals of all ages, -sexes, sizes and colors that we mere ticket-holders were crowded out of -seats and forced to stand on the swaying platforms as far as the -junction of Goyandyra. There we had to go without “breakfast,” because -the inaugurators assaulted the limited table supplies in such force that -passengers could not get within grabbing distance. It was perhaps as -well, for hunger is slight suffering compared with watching at close -range the contortions of such a throng stoking away whole knife-lengths -of those viands which they did not spill on the earth floor. - -Below Uberaba the “Mogyana” branches, giving me new territory all the -way back to Campinas. Most of it looked unpromising for our purposes, -until nightfall brought me to Franca, only three hours north of Riberão -Preto and the terminus of a daily express. Here were two cinemas, side -by side on the central praça. I drifted into one of them and handed my -card to the owner-manager. When the crowd at last gave us a chance to -talk it over, I set my remarks to the tune of “Oh, this is an -unimportant, far-away little place and I don’t believe we will bother -with it.” The result was that I soon had the man all but on his knees to -have us come. He offered to rent the theater for ten per cent. of the -total receipts, and when I declined the trouble of staging the affair -ourselves, he begged me to let him do everything and take as our share -seventy per cent. of the proceeds. At last I had equalled that fabulous -Chilean contract! Indeed, had I been born with a mean disposition I -fancy I could have made that pillar of Franca do anything, short of -presenting me with his playhouse, to keep me outside the doors of his -hated rival. - -I was gone again at sunrise and know naught of Franca, except what may -be seen at night and one added bit of information. It has a match -factory in which a huge stock of an article that the region still -imports from the outside world is locked up by government order because -the owners cannot raise the seven contos in twenty-reis stamps needed to -decorate the boxes before they can be placed on the market. Only once -during that day’s journey did I halt. At Cascavel, fittingly named -Rattlesnake, I took a branch line into the cool, grassy uplands of the -“Brazilian Switzerland” and spent the night in Poços de Caldas. This is -far-famed throughout the country as a watering-place at a goodly -elevation for Brazil, with sulphurous hot springs much frequented by -well-to-do natives during the season. But that was over; the -barracks-like hotel with its monasterial cells of rooms had only a -scattering of guests, and there was no visible reason why the -Kinetophone should journey to a spot that had fallen upon such lean -days. Half a day south I might have taken a direct line from Mogy Mirim -to Rio, but it was eleven days since I had heard our artists sing or -learned how things were faring with my two companions without a tongue -between them. I hurried on, therefore, to Campinas in time to be refused -admittance to our first performance at the “Rink”—until the youthful -manager, catching sight of me, thrust the door-keeper aside with -extended hand. - -I found “Tut” and Carlos conversing freely together in a language that -was not Portuguese and certainly was not English. In Jundiahy they had -carried out my first contract so well in the face of rainy weather, -toboggan streets of uncobbled red mud, and a reputation as a “poor show -town,” as to win high praise, while even here in such a metropolis as -Campinas they showed every evidence of being able to give their -performance, watch the doors and at least count the “deadheads,” and -collect our share of the money without my assistance. The manager of the -“Rink” had lived up to his promise in the matter of advertising, and had -sent a street-car carrying a band and entirely covered with posters and -the likeness of Edison over every trolley-line in town. Yet our -audiences were not all they should have been on Brazil’s second -Independence Day, whether by reason of the possibility of a political -upheaval at the change of the national administration, that musical -Campinas was too “high-brow” for what Edison had to offer, or, as we -suspected, because city, state and nation were beginning to feel -seriously the pinch of the “brutal hard times.” - -On the morning after our Campinas engagement the show and I again parted -company. While the former sped away up the broad-gauge “Paulista” to São -Carlos and points beyond, I took the slow and narrow “Mogyana” back the -way I had come, intending to catch the noon train westward from Mogy -Mirim toward Rio. But the pleading of a compatriot slightly altered my -plans. In Campinas we had made the acquaintance of a man from New York -and Jerusalem who was misusing his racial talents in strenuous efforts -to refute, in the interests of an American insurance company, the -Brazilian argument of “But why should I have my life insured and leave -my wife a lot of money to spend on some other man when I die?” Ideas, -specially those with a $ attached, sprouted overnight in the fertile -brain of my misplaced fellow-countryman, and bright and early that -Thursday morning he came running down to the station with a new one. He -had suddenly seen a chance to retrieve recent bad fortune by hiring the -Kinetophone outright at the conto for two nights which I had set as the -fixed price for small towns and taking it out to his old stamping-ground -of Amparo, where he proposed to enlist the services of his bosom -companions, the priests, nuns, and other Biblical influences of the -town, into selling tickets beforehand on the church-festival plan. I am -always ready to let a man make money, especially if he makes some for me -at the same time, so we dropped off at Jaguary and took the branch to -Amparo. - -It was an unusually pleasing little town for Brazil, with all its -streets paved in stone blocks, several pretty little parks, and spread -along so narrow a valley that one could fancy the beans from its -coffee-clad hills rolling right down into the central praça ready for -roasting. But, like all the State of São Paulo, Amparo had unwisely put -all its eggs in one basket—the coffee basket—and whereas ten milreis an -_arroba_ is considered by coffee-growers only a fair price, Brazil’s -chief export was then selling for 3$500! Hence the town was “muito -ruim,” cold, stony dead from the theatrical point of view, and, though -there was a nice little theater with cozy seats and plenty of boxes for -the “excellentissimas familias,” the impresario had lost his nerve -completely. When my friend and guide gently mentioned 600$ a night as -the bargain of a life-time, the manager all but swallowed his neck, then -recovered sufficiently to say that a Portuguese company of the type most -beloved in Brazil had given a first-night the week before, after an -uproar of advertising, and had taken in just 25$! I immediately lost all -desire to bring the Kinetophone to Amparo, though my friend from -Manhattan and the Holy Land, with the admirable buoyancy of his race, -went up to the convent school to talk it over with the mother superior, -and saw his efforts crowned with success—to the extent of an invitation -to dinner. - -From Mogy Mirim a shaky little train carried me westward through more -wilderness than coffee, past the lively little town of Itapira roofing a -slight hill, to a helter-skelter village called Sapucahy, where it -unloaded us on a platform, bag, baggage, and bathrobes, and backed away. -As frail a train backed in from the other direction and loaded us up -again, all the Brazilian travelers paying _carregadores_ to set their -bags down from the windows and up again, and after more than an hour of -fuss and frustration we creaked on. The yellow creek of Sapucahy, it -transpired, was the boundary between São Paulo, where the “Mogyana’s” -concession ended, and the State of Minas Geraes, where we had been taken -in charge by the “Rede Sul Mineira,” a branch of the “Brazilian Federal -Railways.” - -The land was somewhat swampy now, more wild and unsettled, with parasol -pine-trees beside slender, undeveloped palms with thin tufts of -disheveled foliage. The town of Ouro Fino (“Fine Gold”) was a small, -off-the-main-line sort of place, but here the daily train got in at five -at night and did not leave until five in the morning, so whatever we -might make would be money in pocket. After supper I set out on the steep -hillside up which the town is built and down which run red mud streets, -and at length found at his club—_the_ club, in fact—the manager of the -local theater, a tar-brushed youth of aristocratic manners, or at least -gestures, who naturally accepted and signed without argument the -contract I handed him. Upon my return to the hotel I found the -dingy-looking room I had left an hour before gay with speckless white -bedclothes and fancy mosquito canopy, evidently in honor of the large -theatrical troupe which rumor already had it would soon be following in -my wake. Our train stood all night just outside my window, giving me, -perhaps, too great a feeling of security, for I was all but left behind. -It was already pulling out toward a faint crack in the darkness when I -scrambled on board, breakfastless and not fully dressed, and with the -privilege of paying a fifty per cent. fine on my ticket for not having -bought it at the station. - -Long piles of wood for the locomotives stood along the way through a -wilderness inhabited by “poor white trash” in rags smeared with red -earth, who crowded to the doors of their thatched huts as we passed. For -some time we followed the Sapucahy, swollen red with floods that gave a -picturesque appearance to the hilly village of Itajubá on its banks. -This was a friendly little town where everyone spoke to strangers, after -the pleasant manner of back-country districts, but though it has an -important engineering school, it is little more than a grass-grown -hamlet, with a populous cemetery conveniently situated on a hill close -above it, so that all the inhabitants can drink to their ancestors. -Itajubá was just then the object of a general interest out of all -keeping with its size. Just next door to the “Cinema Edison” in which I -arranged for our appearance was the modest home of the new president of -Brazil. There he had lived most of his life—even since his election on -March first, though he was “Dudú’s” vice-president and required by the -constitution to preside over the senate—and he had left less than a week -before for his inauguration. - -The train next set me down at Caxambú, another of the watering-places on -the irregular line across southwestern Minas, where the rolling country -from the Plata northward begins to break up almost into mountains and -produces a stratum of hot and cold mineral springs. Huge hotels -accommodate those who come to “take the waters” in Caxambú, as in Poços -de Caidas not far distant, and a mineral water that sells all over -Brazil at a milreis or more a small bottle is here as free as the air. -The largely negro and barefoot local population comes in a constant -stream, carrying every species of receptacle, to a low spot in the -center of town in which the water bubbles up incessantly, and where all -manner of paupers and loafers sit under the feathery plumes of waving -bamboos, drinking in turn out of a broken bottle. - -[Illustration: Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former -Brazilian president] - -[Illustration: Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes] - -[Illustration: The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello -Horizonte, are decorated with paintings] - -The same ancient, dirty, German-made cars that had bounced me into -Caxambú bounced me out again in the afternoon, and all the rest of the -day I bumped along at the tail end of a way-freight that seemed -constantly on the point of falling to pieces as it thundered in and out -of the hills on a warped and unrepaired old track. To the north the -earth lay piled high into the heavens, for Minas has some real -mountains. Swift tropical darkness fell, and we went banging on into the -night, our old wood-burner leaving a trail of fireworks behind us that -gave it the suggestion of some fire-spitting dragon of medieval legend, -and yanking us at last into Cruceiro. Next morning I took the direct -line from São Paulo to Rio, and it was pleasant indeed to ride once more -on a broad-gauge, roomy, coal-burning train. Rain had given the country -an aspect quite different from that of two months before, but nothing -could disguise the lesser industry and progress toward civilization in -the State of Rio de Janeiro than in that of São Paulo. Rezende, the -first town over the boundary, proved to be a village posing as a city, a -ragged, barefoot place, overrun with dust and squalor, with ambitionless -loafers and negro good-for-nothings. Professionally, too, it was a -shock; far from finding it worthy of a Kinetophone performance, we could -not have given a dog-fight there to advantage. - -The slightly fertile country began at length to tip downward and we -descended through long tunnels between vast opening vistas cut off at -some distance by a great blanket of fog coming up from the sea. At Belem -there was already an atmosphere of Rio, still some thirty miles away, -with frequent towns and suburban service from there on, though we halted -only at Cascadura and drew up at length in the familiar scent and hubbub -of the capital. _Carregadores_ snatched my belongings without so much as -“by your leave” and bundled me into a taxi—which reminds me that inside -my unlocked valise, that had been tossed about and left lying in all -manner of places since leaving Campinas, there were a million and a half -reis of our earnings in Brazilian bills. One’s possessions are so much -safer under such circumstances in South America than in the United -States that what would seem criminal carelessness in the north becomes a -common habit. - -It was like getting home again to hear the newsboys bawling “_A Rua!_” -“_A Noite!_” “_Ultimas Noticias!_” in the guttural throat-growl peculiar -to Rio, to be accosted by the same old lottery-ticket vendors, the same -street-car conductors, to see the same “women of the life” strolling the -Avenida and riding invitingly back and forth on the first section of the -“Botanical Garden Line.” There was almost a monotony of familiar faces, -so accustomed had I been for years to always seeing new and strange -ones. The “Sugar Loaf,” hump-shouldered Corcovado, topsail Gavea, lofty -Tijuca, and all the rest still looked serenely down upon the human ants’ -nests at their feet with the immutability of nature’s masterpieces. - -Yet Rio was different than I had first known it. Had I left it for good -and all when I had expected, I should have had a better impression, but -a false one; I should have known only the winter Rio, which is -magnificent and has little in common with Rio of the summer-time. -Statisticians assure us that, thanks to the trade winds and its greater -proximity to the ocean, Brazil’s metropolis falls several degrees short -of Buenos Aires in the most infernal months of the year, but it is -doubtful whether anyone except the thermometer recognizes the advantage. -In late November it lay sweltering under a lead-heavy blanket of heat -that drenched one at the slightest exertion, mental, moral, or physical. -No sooner did one put on a collar than it melted about the neck—and not -only is a fresh white collar indispensable in Rio, but they cost sixty -cents each and twelve cents a washing, and rarely outlive more than four -journeys to the beat-’em-on-a-rock style of Brazilian laundries. - -There was less evidence, however, than I expected of the rioting that -had marked the change of administration a few days before,—a few broken -windows between the office of _O Paiz_, chief journalistic supporter of -“Dudú,” and our first Brazilian playhouse, a bullet-mark in a stone or -brick wall here and there to recall the battling hordes that had surged -up and down the Avenida. The trouble had started on the eve of the -inauguration of the man from Itajubá. Among “Dudú’s” Machiavellian bag -of tricks was a company of government bouncers and strong-arm men under -command of a ruffian known as Lieutenant Pulcherio. On Saturday night, -in the last hours of the detested régime, the lieutenant and his -fellow-officers were discussing their glorious past over a quiet -whiskey-and-soda in the Hotel Avenida bar when a group of the -_populares_ they had so long oppressed stopped to mention what they -thought of them. The political protegees replied to this vile affront to -their noble caste by firing on and attacking with swords the mainly -weaponless _populares_, and among other gallant deeds worthy of their -past killed a negro newsboy of twelve. The _povo_, however, for once -vulgarly resisted their noble superiors by laying hands on bricks and -cobblestones and weltering back and forth across the Largo da Carioca -and the Avenida, managing in the process to prepare the beloved -Lieutenant Pulcherio for funeral. - -Early the next morning the opposition newspapers were already pouring -out their pent-up spleen on the head of the outgoing president, -resurrecting censored articles and deluging the disappearing -administration with vituperation. The names they called the “odious -gaucho” were scarcely fit to print; those applied to “Dudú” sometimes -had the genius of intense exasperation. There were columns of such -gentle remarks as: - - The four years now terminating mark - the blackest, the most nefast page - in our history, the most painful - calamity with which Providence has - flagellated us since Brazil was - Brazil. During the administration of - the analphabetic sergeant who got - possession of the chief power by - knavery and the imposition of the - barracks, justice was disrespected - and reviled, immorality created - rights of citizenship, robbery and - corruption ruled unrestrained. There - has not been a day since the - inauguration of this unpleasant - mediocrity, degenerate nephew of our - great Deodoro, that the President of - the Republic and his auxiliaries did - not go back on their plighted word, - in which there was not registered a - new political infamy, in which we - did not hear of a new crime or a new - immorality. Praise God, this - terrible four years of darkness is - ended! - -The inauguration took place in the early afternoon of Sunday, the -fifteenth of November, anniversary of the day on which the republic was -declared. In Brazil this ceremony is as simple as the swearing in of a -juror. The incoming president takes the oath privately, signs his name, -bids farewell to his predecessor, and the thing is done. On this -occasion things moved even more swiftly. The instant the other had taken -his place, “Dudú” sprang into an automobile, even forgetting in his -haste to embrace the new president, according to time-honored Brazilian -custom—of thirty years’ standing—and fled to the protection of -Petropolis and his youthful consort. He had good precedent for his -eagerness; other retiring presidents of Brazil have done likewise. When -Campos Salles left the presidency in 1902 he was stoned by the populace, -yet all Brazilians agree that he was by no means as corrupt or poor a -president as the “unpleasant mediocrity” who was just then fleeing. - -It quickly began to be apparent, however, that perhaps “these terrible -four years of darkness” were not entirely ended. The new president was -considered an honest and, within Brazilian limits, a democratic man, but -he was evidently not quite strong enough to throw off the domination of -the national boss, the “odious gaucho” senator from Rio Grande do Sul. -It was partly due to this feeling of disappointment, partly to the -increased wrath caused by publication of censored articles left over -from “Dudú’s” reign, reciting unbelievable official thievery and -corruption, and to the release of great bands of political prisoners -from dungeons in the islands of the bay, where they had been sent -without trial or even accusation, that serious riots again broke out -soon after my return to the capital. This time the fuss was started by -students from the schools of medicine, law, and the like, who decided to -“bury” the ex-president. Something like burning in effigy, this was -considered a great insult not only to the former executive in person but -to the army which he, as a field marshal, represented. The army general -in command of the police brigade of the federal district went out to -stop the outrage. The students were already parading the streets with a -gaudily gilded “coffin” and using the offensive nicknames of “Dudú” and -“Rainha Mãe,” when the brigade was set in motion. Before it could -accomplish its purpose, orders came from the newly appointed minister of -justice to let the students go on with their _brincadeira_ (child’s -play), whereupon the general in command rode back to the ministry and -resigned—knowing he was to be dismissed next day anyway. Meanwhile the -students had been joined by an immense mob of _populares_, mainly -barefooted out-of-works and men of the porter, street-sweeper and hawker -type, who marched back and forth through the business section and at -length broke out in attacks on “Dudú” sympathizers or beneficiaries, -which resulted in several deaths. When night fell a regiment of cavalry, -another of infantry, and all the police of the federal district were -protecting the palace of Cattete and that of Gaunabara, in which the new -president had chosen to make his home. Nictheroy, across the bay, also -was seething; even São Paulo threatened to join the revolt, to avenge -the insult of having been offered the most unimportant post in the -cabinet, with oily words about being the “agricultural state par -excellence.” But the new government, like the old, had too firm an ally -in the army for a revolution, with no other support than the weaponless -_populares_, to be successful. Gradually the rioting died away, though -by no means the criticism of the new administration, and Brazil settled -down to another four years not unlike those that had just been so -fittingly brought to a close, but which were to be marked a few months -later by the assassination of the “odious gaucho.” - -Though they were empty, I did not feel like again taking our old rooms -out on the Praia do Flamengo. They seemed hot and stuffy; the very -waters of the bay felt tepid; even the president’s palace of Cattete -next door had been abandoned in favor of the newer and more sumptuous -one of Guanabara. I hunted Leme and Copacabana over in vain for quarters -overlooking one of those peerless beaches where the air from the open -ocean might make life endurable, but the houses along the shore belong -to the well-to-do, who do not have to take roomers even in “brutal hard -times.” During my search I accidentally dropped into the Cinema -Copacabana, a pleasant little place in one of the most prosperous -sections of town. The slow-witted Portuguese who announced himself the -owner and manager soon proved to be merely the hen-pecked consort of the -real director. But the place promised well, if properly managed, and I -finally signed it for five days—and fled to Petropolis for Thanksgiving. - -Out at the Praia Formosa—which is no more a beach than it is beautiful—I -found a mob of drenched and wilted people fighting about a tiny, -discolored hole in the station wall, of the height of the average man’s -knees, for the privilege of buying tickets to the “summer capital.” For -though there were many daily trains, even when train schedules were -being reduced all over Brazil because of the war-created difficulty of -importing coal, there were thousands of regular commuters and few places -left for the poorer _Cariocas_ who scraped together enough for a -round-trip ticket or two during the season. Most of the commuters had -their permanent seats, with their names and their business or rank -posted on the backs of them, and the mere traveler had to wander through -several cars before he could find a place, like a stranger seeking a pew -in a fashionable church. - -The Leopoldina Railway between Rio and Petropolis is the oldest in -Brazil, having been opened to the foot of the range in 1854 so that -Emperor Pedro II could flee from hot weather and yellow fever in the -summer months. We raced without interruption across a low, jungled plain -until the mountains grew up impassable above us. Formerly this region -was well cultivated, but man was unequal to the grim struggle with -nature, especially after the emancipation of the only race that could -cope with the swampy, matted jungle, and to-day the ruins of many a -plantation house lie buried beneath the invading bush, while the few -hovels with their little fenced gardens look like islands in the tangled -wilderness. Yet we sped through many suburban villages shaded with -palm-trees and adorned with immense tumbled rocks. On top of one of -these, high above the surrounding landscape, sat the two-spired church -of Penha, a famous place of pilgrimage. A few peasants were plowing and -loading cut grass upon carts drawn by zebu-sired oxen. Puffs of white -clouds, like exploded shells, hung here and there above the brilliant -horizon. The three-cows advertisement of a well-known malted milk -company suddenly loomed up against the background of jungle, its -Portuguese words making it doubly fantastic in this exotic setting. Here -and there we passed section gangs poling themselves homeward in their -unpumpable hand-cars with long bamboo staffs, like Dutch canal boats. - -The first-class seats, cane-covered in respect for the climate, were -divided by an extra arm in the middle, obviating personal contact, which -is the way train seats should be, no matter what fat men or honeymooning -couples may prefer. Many of my fellow-travelers were as much worth -watching as the scenes along the way. Here a man as black as a -beachcomber’s hopes of signing on in Singapore leaned back in pompous -full-dress in his placarded seat, acting like the millionaire president -of some great corporation as he pored over the contents of his elaborate -leather portfolio. I would have given the price of a Brazilian meal to -have seen the couple across the aisle from me suddenly transported to -one of our “Jim Crow” states. He was a self-important mountain of a man, -as white as you or I; she, just as self-important, dressed in rich -plumes and Paris fashions, hideous with diamonds and other glittering -pebbles, was about one-third negro. One poor woman farther on had only -ten fingers, two ears, and as many wrists—her skirts covered her ankles, -strangely enough—on which to wear her jewelry, though she had made the -most of her meager opportunities by putting three or four rings on each -finger. Still farther along an old woman in mourning had bits of black -cloth sewed over her earrings. A nice jet nose ring about two inches in -diameter would have been so much more original, and as becoming, and -would have made conspicuous one’s poignant grief even to those who might -miss so commonplace an adornment as earrings. - -There came a stretch of swamp and uninhabited lowland, thick with -bulrushes, then heavily wooded hills grew up before us and we came to a -halt at the edge of the plain. A little engine, built like a kangaroo, -took charge of two of our cars and shoved them up the steep mountainside -on a rackrail track. Now we were buried in narrow cuttings, now gazing -upon magnificent panoramas that opened out through dense woods. There -overhung the line many tremendous boulders, on one of which, large as a -house, some wag had written in red paint, “_Va com esta_” (Take this -along with you). The vegetation presently became sodden wet; the -incessant singing of the jungle, scarcely noticed until it stopped, died -away and vast views opened out on what we had left behind. Flooded with -the rays of a full moon, the far-off range of mountains cut a jagged -line across the sky. It grew cooler every minute; the air became -clearer, and as the oppression of wilting heat wore away a drowsiness -came upon us. At Alto da Serra, some 2500 feet above but barely a mile -farther on than the station at the foot of the range, civilization began -again, with all its pleasant and unpleasant concomitants. - -Petropolis, fashionable resort of the wealthy _Cariocas_, national -legislators and foreign diplomats, lies snugly ensconced among the cool -hills, a charming assemblage of villas peering forth from tropical -gardens. The former emperor for which it is named made the town to order -by importing three thousand German and Swiss settlers in 1845, as -examples of cleanliness and industry to his own people. Formerly the -entire government came here during the summer months, but when the -mosquito and his playmate, yellow fever, were routed, most of the native -officials went back to the city, though the diplomats remain, pleasantly -cut off from the rough world of practical politics, which seems far away -indeed, instead of merely an hour and a half distant by Brazil’s best -train service. There is a suggestion of a German watering-place about -Petropolis, with its bizarre little residences, its trim streets lined -by bamboo hedges, its roses, hydrangeas and honeysuckle, its -“kiss-flowers” gathering honey from the fuchsia-trees. The Teutonic type -has persisted in spite of interbreeding and comparative isolation from -the fatherland in a strong Brazilian environment, and up to the -beginning of the war there were still German schools in Petropolis. A -spotless room in one of its quiet summer hostelries is a relief after -months of Brazilian hotel squalor and uproar; or, if one’s income is -limited, there are cheap and pleasant rooms to be had with the German -inn-keepers. - -But Petropolis is tropical enough to be unpleasantly warm on a summer -noonday, and among her honeysuckle are horrid hairy spiders as large as -belt-buckles, with perhaps a deadly bite. Like Rio, the town spreads up -many narrowing valleys, fresh green Cascatinha with its weaving-mill -beside a rivulet sliding down a sloping rock and breaking in little -cascades at the bottom, or the restful tree-lined banks of canals -meandering away through the wooded hills. Through the gap by which the -railway creeps up to the plateau may be dimly made out all the Carioca -range and, faintly, the well-known form of the Pão d’Assucar. There is a -vast panorama of Guanabara Bay and all its islands, but Rio is only -hazily suggested, and nearer views of it are much more striking. Another -world on quite another plane spreads out below, careless, happy-go-lucky -negro huts straggling up the wooded valleys as high as they can easily -climb, the soothing sound of mountain brooks, playfully taking little -rocky tumbles here and there without much hurt, joining the birds in -making a kind of sylvan music. - -Pedro II still sits out here in a little palm-topped square under the -filtered sunlight or the summer moon, his book closed over a finger, the -tails of his Prince Albert falling on either side of his armchair, his -congress gaiters fitting the ease of his posture, gazing benignly forth -from his great black shovel beard with the studious, half-dreamy look of -the man who hated action. He is by no means our preconceived notion of -an emperor, but a dreamy, easy-going, democratic aristocrat who seems -eminently in his place here in this quiet village far from the rumble of -the world and the heat and labors of the day below. Small wonder he was -the last emperor of this turbulent, pushing western hemisphere. “A great -Brazilian,” they had called him in celebrating his birthday a few days -before, “who gave happiness to his people during almost half a century.” - -“Dudú,” looking most comfortable and contented with life, was driving -about the quiet streets of Petropolis with his girl wife behind a pair -of prancing iron-gray horses and a liveried driver frozen in stone. As -in all towns where kings and presidents are regular residents, no one -paid him the slightest attention, though the same pair would no doubt at -that moment have brought the business, and perhaps the peace, of Rio to -a standstill. - -There was a nice little up-to-date cinema just outside my window that -would have been an ideal place for us to have made several hundred -dollars—if only we had come to Brazil when the world was still going -round. For the moment it was inhabited by a Portuguese barn-storming -company, and the manager had not only lost heart over the “brutal -crisis,” but had so extraordinarily good an opinion of himself and his -establishment that nothing would induce him to offer us more than forty -per cent. I would not have made a contract at that rate with St. Peter -for a series of performances on the Golden Stairs, and as the only other -cinema in town was small and unimportant, and run by an Italian too -artless to do business with to advantage, there was nothing left but to -fold up my arguments and say good-day. - -I came down to Rio to see the show come in, but got a scare instead, for -it did not appear, and we were due to open in Copacabana the following -night. They turned up that evening, however, with a tale to tell. When -they reached Ouro Fino for the Saturday engagement, they found that -bandits had torn up the railway between there and Itajubá, evidently out -of spite against the new president. “Tut” had been equal to the -occasion, however, for though they could not fulfill the Itajubá -contract—the only one we ever failed to carry out—they did not lose the -date, but played a second time in Ouro Fino to a good Sunday house. Then -they had returned to São Paulo, catching the night train and paying a -fortune of 400$ to get themselves and the outfit back to Rio in time, -though nothing like what they would have had to pay had not the -baggage-man mistaken them for “artists” and the trunks for their -wardrobe and stage costumes. Otherwise all had gone smoothly with them, -except for one flattering error on the part of a charming young society -lady of Franca. That town had been placarded, as usual, with our large -three-sheet posters of Edison, and it was natural that “Tut’s” six feet -and more of height should have drawn the attention of the susceptible -sex as he sauntered about the streets. That evening the young lady in -question was heard remarking to her escort, “Isn’t it strange that -Senhor Edison looks so old in his pictures when he is really so young -and handsome?” - -During our stay in it, the American flag was somewhat overworked in -Copacabana, there being one over our cinema door and another in a sand -lot a block away in which a battered and paintless one-ring American -circus had recently opened. Not often, I wager, have American showmen -directly competed so far from home. We soon made friends with the animal -trainer, whose ten years of knocking about Brazil had brought out into -sharper relief his native Iowa dialect and point of view. Among his -collection of moth-eaten animals in rusty old cages were two of savage -disposition. The hyena had several times bitten him, but “Frank,” the -tiger, which sprang at anyone who came within ten feet of the cage, was -the only one really to be feared. - -“Once,” said the exiled Iowan, holding up the ring finger of his left -hand, which was curled up in a half-circle, “I was doing my act at a -burg up in Minas when ‘Frank’ made a swipe at me with one paw. Lucky she -didn’t get all her claws in, or it would have been good-by hand, but she -happened to get just one claw into the inside of this finger at the -base. She pulled, and I was so scared I guess I pulled too, and she -peeled the whole inside of the finger off the bone—tendons, nerves, -veins and all. I hid that hand behind me so the audience couldn’t see -the blood, or ‘Frank’ smell it, whelted her a few, and finished the act. -I couldn’t go out, for the animals would have followed me into the -audience; I had to finish the act and let them go out the regular way, -like they’ve been trained. Then I wrapped up my hand in a towel and -hiked over to a drug store and he threw a whole bottle of iodine into -it, and then they called in one of these here native doctors and he -chopped around in it and did it up in pasteboard, which of course bent, -so that he had to chop into it every day or so and near killed me, and -finally it twisted into this shape and stayed there. And that guy had -the nerve to charge me a hundred and fifty mil! After the first dressing -I went over to a bar and had a whole glass of rye whiskey and then about -a quart of this nigger rum they call _cachaza_ on top of it—but hell, I -didn’t feel it any more’n milk, and for four nights I never got a wink -of sleep. I was afraid to drink anything for fear of making it worse, -but finally I says, ‘Oh, to hell with it! I’m going to have a sleep,’ -and I went out and got drunk—God, I never got so drunk before in my -life! And then I went home and slept a whole night and a day. But it -sure does make a man sick at his stomach to get caught by an animal.” - -“Tut” and I had taken a room—my seventh residence in Rio—out at the end -of the tunnel in Leme—so called because a rock shaped like a _leme_, or -rudder, juts out into the ocean at the end of the beach. By this time -Christmas was drawing near and shops were everywhere offering -“_brinquedos á granel_” (playthings by the bushel), and the rains had -come on in earnest. Rio was suffering so severely from the “brutal -crisis” that people in the cinema business had lost their nerve -completely, and it began to look as if the show would catch up with me -before I could make a new contract. For several days I dashed about in -pouring rain before I finally succeeded in running to earth in the bosom -of his own family—which is very bad business form in Brazil—a man with a -string of theaters in Rio, Nictheroy, and the two largest towns of Minas -Geraes. I quickly got his name signed to a sixteen-day contract and, -relieved of the fear of having the show run over me, settled down to -take life easy again. - - - - - CHAPTER XIV - WANDERING IN MINAS GERAES - - -On December 13th our alarm-clock having gone astray and being evidently -unreplaceable in Brazil, where time means so little, I sat up all night -in order to rout “Tut” out at four and send him off to the station, -following him next day up on the cool and comfortable plateau to the -second town of Minas Geraes. Juiz de Fora lies in a deep lap of wooded -hills, with a conspicuous monument and statue of “Christo Redemptor” on -a little parked hilltop high above yet close to the city, and revealing -its site from afar off. Fir trees, masses of roses of all colors, and -other flora of the temperate zone add to stretches of densely green -grass, so unlike the gravel or paved squares almost universal in South -America, in making the town a pleasant place of sojourn. The country -round about is very rolling and without a suggestion of the tropics, but -its coffee is unfortunately small, poor, and ill-tended, grown -completely over in places with weeds and creepers; and as the town -depends almost entirely on this product, it had a squeeze-penny mood -that was not natural to Brazil. Like many another Brazilian town, its -name is of simple origin. A _juiz de fora_, or “outside judge,” went -about the country on a regular circuit in colonial days, holding court -in various places, of which the present town was the most distant, not -from Rio, which had no official standing in the olden times, but from -the ancient capital of Minas Geraes, Ouro Preto. - -It was toward Ouro Preto that I continued a day or two later, pausing in -one town to make a contract with the local saloon-keeper, in another to -find a cinema about the size of a box-car tight closed and the owner off -traveling; in a third that turned out to be a mud village without -electricity, even had I been willing to risk dragging our outfit through -the atrocious streets to its toy theater. It was in the last that I -boarded the northbound train an hour before it arrived, which is not -what the Chileans call a “German tale,” but an everyday fact. For there -the government railway, which comes that far with a gauge even wider -than our own, suddenly changes to a meter in width, and I had already -grown weary of sitting in the train I was waiting for when it rolled in -and, transferring its contents to its narrower self, rambled on across -the cool plateau. - -Besides our cloth-mounted three-sheets, I had had printed several -thousand posters and window-cards, and the towns of Brazil blossomed -with Edison behind me. Then there were great bundles of _avulsos_, or -handbills, of many colors, to be strewn among the eager populace when -the show actually arrived. Except for the printer’s errors, which were -legion, these new masterly appeals were all my own handiwork, as were -the articles on the life of Edison which sprang up in the newspapers -along my route, for I had at last almost tamed the mis-jointed -Portuguese language. By the time our tour was finished Brazil would -certainly have known the story of Edison far better than he knows it -himself, had he not already been the best-known American in South -America—with the possible exception of Franklin, whom thousands took to -be his contemporary, often asking if the two great inventors sometimes -worked together and were on good terms socially, or whether they raged -with jealousy over each other’s achievements. - -There were many tunnels on the way to Ouro Preto, and much winding among -deep-green hills, the soil still reddish, but showing little -cultivation. All this region is at least 3000 feet above sea-level, -where corn feels more at home than bananas or even coffee. Herds of -cream-colored cattle of part zebu ancestry roamed the broken, grassy -countryside. It was a dull, showery day, and the wet green trees clung -to the hillsides like the plumage of birds, while everywhere the palms -stood with disheveled hair. We made several stops on the branch line -eastward from Burnier, just why I do not know, and at length halted at -an isolated building with the information that we had reached Ouro -Preto. - -On the train I had chanced to mention my business to one of several -local celebrities in heavy overcoats, who quickly shouted the -information to all within hearing, so that when I disembarked the negro -hotel runners were already calling me “Doctor Franck.” One of them piled -my baggage on his head and we set out on foot into the night, for Ouro -Preto, I quickly discovered, is so steep that vehicles have never become -acclimated there. As we panted upward past great sheer-cut bluffs, -scattered lights gradually disclosed the town, piled and tumbled far -above and below us, the round cobblestones of its precipitous streets -worn so icy smooth by many generations of bare and shod feet that my own -showed a continuous desire to lag behind me. In a hotel as old as Vasco -da Gama, and about as dilapidated, I was shown with ceremonial courtesy -into an enormous front room with a “matrimonial” bed wider than the -street outside, the springs of which I quickly discovered to be solid -planks. Recalling my courteous colored companion, I gave him five -minutes in which to find me a real bed. We wandered much longer than -that through a labyrinth of rooms and anterooms—the latter all with -narrow bedsteads, suggesting the old slave days when each traveler -brought with him a servant to sleep outside his door—before we found a -_cama de arame_, or “bed of wire,” in another vast chamber, with a -window looking out across what seemed to be a bottomless gorge to -patches of small, window-shaped lights climbing high into the sky. - -I went out for a stroll, climbing cobbled streets so sheer that a -foot-slip would have landed me in quite another part of town, passing -buildings so old and quaint and medieval that in spite of the modern -lights Edison has bequeathed the place I expected some old Portuguese -viceroy in his cloak and sword and plumed hat to step out of any dark -passageway followed by his slaves and retainers and preceded by his -link-boys. I had all but forgotten the “feel” of old South American -mountain towns, with their something peculiarly their own, and could -easily have fancied myself back in the Andes again. Indeed, I was only -beginning to realize the charm of those old Andean pueblos, barely -guessed when one is physically lost in their squalor, yet fascinating -from a distance of time and space, every twist and turn and descent and -rise of their streets a lurking mystery, like a winding mountain road, -cool and silent—especially silent, in the absence of all wheeled -traffic. - -Ouro Preto means “black gold.” The hills and young mountains lying in -tumbled heaps about the town are honeycombed with abandoned mines, as -the town itself is said to be with secret subterranean passageways. Not -even Ayacucho in the Andes is so overrun with churches. Only an accurate -man could throw a stone without hitting one, most of them of light -colored rock, beautified with age, bulking far above the few little old -houses apportioned to each, both by their size and by their places of -vantage on some eminence or mountain nose. Evidently whenever they -killed a slave or committed some particularly dastardly crime the old -Portuguese adventurers salved their consciences or quieted their -superstitions by building a church. Between them the little old houses -straggle in double rows far up every steep valley that has room for -them, here connected by very old stone bridges over narrow, yet deep, -gorge streams, with time-crumbled stone benches along them, there -refusing to follow when the cobbled street suddenly lets go and falls -headlong with many a racking twist into another abyss. - -In general, the old capital of the mining province is built along both -sides of a small swift stream, which spills down through town with a -musical sound, picking up some of its garbage on the way. Old colonial -ruins, built in the leisurely, plentiful, massive fashion of long ago, -still bear coats-of-arms and cut-stone Portuguese emblems, some -half-hidden behind masses of white roses or climbing flowers. Old -fountains of variegated colors, very broken, much weather- and -time-faded, still have tiny streams trickling forth from the stone -mouths of human heads or strange creatures unknown to natural history; -scores of quaint old balconies, mysterious corners, and queer porticos -jut out over streets or abysses. There was evidently no building plan -except that imposed by nature. Each householder built on his few feet of -space at any height and slope he chose, so that although the buildings -nearly all cling close together for mutual support, they present most -fantastic combinations, each with its red-tile roof faded from bright to -drab according to its age and situation. - -In the main praça up at the top of the town, which is rectangular and -square-cobbled and singularly quiet, is a statue of “Tiradentes” high up -on a slim granite pedestal, his hair wild, his shirt open, his wrists -weighted down with chains. This nickname of “Pull Teeth” was given a -sergeant who, way back in 1792, started the first revolution for -Brazilian independence, but who was captured, executed, and his head -hung up in an iron cage in this same praça. There is a School of Mines, -the principal if not the only one in Brazil, in an old viceregal palace -that was later the seat of the state government until that honor was -taken away from Ouro Preto. The Indians of Minas could not or would not -be enslaved, and the workmen required in the mines were brought from -Africa early and often. I do not recall a mountain town anywhere with so -large a percentage of African blood, though it is not now, of course, -pure African, for the old Portuguese settlers were not slow to dilute it -with their own, and with the exception of a very few of the proud old -families of Minas, who have overridden their environment and kept their -veins free from the taint of slaves, there are not many of full white -race. In the morning the inhabitants straggle home from the outdoor -butcher-shop, carrying strips of raw meat by a grass string run through -them; in the later afternoon the frequent clash of jogging horse-shoes -on the irregular cobblestones calls attention to some young blood come -prancing by the window of his desire, peering out from her window-ledge -over the otherwise silent and almost deserted street. - -As to my own job, I did not even have to go out to look for contracts, -for as I sat reading the newspapers and recovering from a Brazilian -lunch, there came slinking in upon me the local pharmacist and owner of -the “Cinema Brazil.” He had heard that I had come, and why, and as he -was eager to outdo his one rival in town, he—ah—er—he, too, had come. If -we played in Ouro Preto it meant four important days—Christmas, followed -by a Saturday and Sunday, and a Monday also, for the trains did not run -on that day. The only entertainment in town, my visitor rambled on, in -his eagerness to attract us, was that provided by two old Italian “women -of the life,” who offered a song and dance nightly at the other cinema. -At a town eight kilometers away there were many “Englishmen” employed in -the gold mines, who would be delighted to come in and see their -fellow-countryman Edison—what, he was not coming himself?—well then, his -invention. No doubt _Senhor Edisón_ did not think poor old Ouro Preto -worth visiting, now that it was no longer the capital, but it had many -wonders even for a great inventor, if one really knew where to look for -them. By this time I had handed him our printed contract, through which -he carefully spelled his way, while I read several columns of newspaper. -Then he brought me back to Brazil with, “Ah yes, very good, -only—er—sixty per cent. is a very large percentage and——” At which point -I broke in with “Why, I ought to charge you eighty per cent. for being -way off here on a branch line, in a town without even wheeled vehicles!” -Whereupon he shuddered and begged me to figure to myself that he had not -said a word and, reaching for the contract, he signed it on the dotted -line. - -Rain was pouring and the night was still black when I followed my -baggage down the steep cobbled road to the station. There I discovered, -in a sudden flash of genius, why all Brazilian trains start at daylight -and stop at dark; it is not because they are afraid to go home in the -dark, but so that the languid employees will not have to light the -car-lamps. Even the government night expresses rarely have more than a -firefly of a gas-lamp or a couple of flickering oil-wicks in the end of -each coach. Brazilians are not a nation of readers, and do not demand -decent lights, though there is nothing to prove they would get them if -they did. The print-loving stranger is often warned that it is dangerous -to the health to read during, or just before, or until long after meals, -which may be true, but the Brazilians themselves are living proof that -it is still worse never to read at all. In most stations there are -waiting-rooms only for women, and not a spot for the mere male to sit on -unless he boards the train itself, which is also the favorite -lounging-place of scores of the local population who have no intention -of traveling on it. Here an affectionate crowd was embracing and -fondling one another after the Brazilian fashion and gradually filling a -tightly closed car in which it was not easy to breathe. It is really -foolish, too, to ride first-class on the trains of the interior, for it -means little more than paying double price, when the single is bad -enough, for the privilege of sitting in a cane seat at one end of a car, -instead of in a wooden one at the other. However, a few kind words may -unhesitatingly be said for the railways of Brazil. One may leave all he -possesses in a train seat and not only will no one touch it, but his -fellow-travelers will stand for hours rather than disturb the smallest -parcel left to hold a place. Nor is the baggage-smasher indigenous to -Brazil. Several pieces of our outfit were delicate, yet during a year’s -travel by every known means of conveyance except aëroplane through -nearly every state of Brazil, it was never seriously injured—though on -its return to my beloved native land it was badly damaged between New -York and the Edison factory, an hour away. - -[Illustration: Diamantina spills down into the stream in which are found -some of its gold and diamonds] - -[Illustration: A hydraulic diamond-cutting establishment of Diamantina] - -[Illustration: In the diamond field of Brazil] - -[Illustration: Diamond diggers do not resemble those who wear them] - -Beyond the old town of Sabará, where the first of the gold that was to -make Minas Geraes famous and Portugal wealthy was discovered in 1698, we -turned westward and a few moments later sighted through bedraggled -palm-trees the glaring new town of Bello Horizonte. No doubt it was to -escape the labor of propelling themselves about the precipitous streets -of Ouro Preto that led the calfless legislators of Minas Geraes to -dethrone the time-honored old capital at the beginning of the present -century and move the government to a hitherto uninhabited spot, justly -called “Beautiful Horizon.” The site chosen on which to build to order -this new capital is a broad shallow lap of rolling country, a bare, -treeless landscape which abets the light-colored new buildings in -producing a constant uncomfortable glare. It is strange that they did -not choose a place with water, a lake or at least a river, which may be -found even in the lofty State of Minas. As it is, there is only an -insignificant creek creeping through town and an artificial pond in the -center of an unfinished park in which the water is so red that even the -swans paddling disconsolately about in it have a reddish hue. The -designers have all the details of a complete city in mind; the -difficulty is to carry out their well laid plans and produce one. For -Bello Horizonte is visible proof that it takes more than houses, -streets, and inhabitants to make a city. Its public buildings are large -and plentiful. Whitewashed houses with bright new red-tile roofs lie -scattered far and wide over the rolling landscape. Wide park streets -with electric tramways stretch out in every direction in a wheel-shaped -system evidently copied from Washington. But the broad avenues are still -unpaved, unpacked stretches of red mud, resembling newly plowed potato -patches, and one soon recognizes that they run nowhere, that they are an -exotic, forced growth which men are still chopping farther back into the -red flesh of the virgin, scrub-grown hills. A few have stretches of -broad cement sidewalks lined with trees, but they are trees still in -their swaddling clothes of protecting frames, or at best are half-grown -and unfamiliar with their duty of giving shade and beauty and -restfulness. Such grass as exists grows in scattered tufts over bare -earth, in no way resembling sod. Though the houses are new, many of them -are set in the beginnings of walled bush and flower gardens, with steep -outside stairways leading to the real residence in the second story and -having fanciful paintings of such scenes as Rio’s Beira Mar on the walls -under the porches. They have an alien, unsatisfying appearance which -suggests that it is better to let even towns grow up of themselves than -to force them by hothouse methods. There are, of course, some advantages -in a city, especially in a capital, built to order, but though -modernity’s gain over medievalism is in some ways shown, Bello Horizonte -lacks not only the charm of old Ouro Preto but even the air and spirit -of a city. The whole place feels like a house one has moved into while -it is still building over his head. - -While they were about it, one wonders they did not build in stone, -instead of adobe bricks and plaster. The impression that everything is -built only for a temporary halt, by people who, like Arabian nomads, -expect to move on again to-morrow, pervades all modern America, in sharp -contrast to Europe and the ancient American Indian civilizations. But at -least there are as yet no slums, unless one counts as such the large -clusters of small new houses that were almost huts scattered through the -several shallow valleys spreading out from the town. It is curious how a -city draws houses about it like a magnet even when there seems to be -nothing for the inhabitants to do but take in one another’s washing—or -do one another’s governing. Though it offers free sites to any industry -that will establish itself there, only the scream of a single small -weaving mill is heard in Bello Horizonte. The city produces nothing -except government for the state, and the man who comes into personal -contact with that soon realizes that it “costs expensive” and is none -too good governing at that. More fuss is made over the state president -than over our own national executive. Negro soldiers in khaki and bright -red caps guard his “palace” and great high-walled garden, parading back -and forth day and night before all government buildings with fixed -bayonets, not because there is any real danger—except to the unwary -pedestrian who might run into the pointed blade of some sleepy guard—but -because all Latin-America loves to make a show of deadly weapons even in -time of peace. The population had the bland, sophisticated air of people -already trained to city life elsewhere, like transplanted flora from -other gardens of varied kind and situation. Strangers attract far less -attention than in even larger interior towns, because here all are more -or less strangers and the inhabitants have not lived long enough -together to form that sort of closed corporation of old established -towns, which not only makes a new and unfamiliar face an object of -curiosity, but arouses a kind of distrust and annoyance among the native -inhabitants. - -The show reached Bello Horizonte before me and had done a good Saturday -and Sunday business, but “Tut” reported that all records for “deadheads” -were being broken. The manager was a bullet-headed mulatto—whose name, -by the way, was Americo Vespuccio—and who did not have the moral courage -needed to cope with the swarms of official beggars which infest a state -capital. When the doors opened on Monday night I was lolling incognito -nearby. The ticket-taker was a mulatto girl of about fourteen who thrust -out her hand whenever anyone walked in, taking the ticket if there -happened to be one to take, but paying no attention to the fact that as -often as not there was none. Not only were there many people with -monthly passes and permanent free tickets, but the negro management, -being afraid of anyone with authority, real or pretended, had given -everyone capable of manufacturing a shadow of excuse the conviction that -he had the right to enter without payment. In the first few minutes I -saw seventy persons enter without tickets, exclusive of the house -employees and men in uniform. Then I burst into the manager’s office and -informed him that he was going to pay us our percentage for every person -who had not, and did not thereafter, pay an admission fee. He turned an -ashy gray and begged me to take full charge at the door. I discharged -the mulatto girl on the spot, made a ticket-box of my hand-grip by -cutting a slot in it—hitherto ticket-takers had stuffed the tickets into -their pockets or any other convenient receptacle—and proceeded to shock -the good people of “Beautiful Horizon.” - -An elaborately dressed man in a frock coat, accompanied by two women -glittering with diamonds, pushed haughtily past. - -“Your ticket, senhor?” I smiled, in my most ceremonial Portuguese. - -“I never pay admission,” the man replied haughtily. - -“And why don’t you?” I retorted, which wholly unprecedented question so -dazed him that without a word he went back to the wicket and bought -three tickets. The same incident was repeated dozens of times that -evening. - -Another favorite trick was for a man to enter with one or two women and -purchase tickets only for them. - -“Where is yours, senhor?” - -“_Eu volto_” (I am coming back) was the unvarying reply, by which the -speaker meant to imply that he was merely going to escort the ladies to -their seats and come right out again, but in almost every case he -remained an hour or more until the “Kinetophone” number had been run and -came slinking out with the air of having kept eyes and ears tight closed -during the performance. - -No doubt many of the well-dressed, haughty individuals I sent to the -box-office were state senators and the like, but what of it? We were -paying heavily to support them, paying every time we moved from one town -to another, every time we gave a performance, every time we left or -entered a state, in addition to what we had paid to enter the country, -every time we drew a check, or put up a poster, or inserted an -advertisement, and even in my most charitable mood I could not see why -we should give free entertainment to any government official who was not -there in line of duty. - -During the second section a chinless, pomaded popinjay in full evening -dress, with an own-the-earth air, pushed scornfully past when I asked -for his ticket. I stepped in his way, repeated my question, and finally -laid a hand lightly on his arm, whereupon the manager, frightened to a -kind of grayish pink, came running forward to assure me “It’s all -right.” - -“But who is he?” I insisted. - -“I’ll tell you later,” whispered the trembling mulatto. - -The chinless individual, who turned out to be the _delegado_, -corresponding to our chief of police, remained only a few minutes, all -the while plainly boiling with rage. As he came out he stopped before -me—the rush having ceased I was seated—and in a voice and manner that no -doubt scared ordinary people to death, he growled: - -“Before you ever grasp anyone by the arm again you want to know who he -IS!” - -“Senhor,” I replied, without rising, which is a shocking insult even to -the most petty Brazilian official, “I want to know who everyone is, and -any man who is a cavalheiro will tell who he is under such circumstances -in any civilized country, and until I know who he is I’ll catch him by -the arm or by any other part of the anatomy that is handy.” - -He went out, fuming at the nostrils, leaving me wondering if he would -send a subordinate to place me under arrest, but abuse of authority had -become so rampant that I would have been willing to explore the interior -of a Brazilian prison to bring the matter to a head. When the -performance was ended I cornered the manager in his office and forced -him to pay us our share for every “deadhead” I had counted, and though -he and his equally dusky assistant hastened to assure me that my demands -were wholly justified and that they did not stop officials and ladies -“because they did not have the courage of Americans,” there was -something in their manner that told me they would have taken supreme -delight in knifing me in the back. That evening I turned my papers, -valuables, and revolver over to “Tut,” in order to be prepared for the -probable next move of the _delegado_. But he must have suffered a change -of heart, for thereafter even soldiers and policemen in uniform had -orders to pay admission unless they were on duty and wearing their -sidearms to prove it. Thenceforward every resident of Bello Horizonte -who entered the “Cinema Commercio” either handed in a ticket or gave -proof of his right to free admission, whether he was president, senator -or state dog-catcher. When we had broken all records for the time and -place, I ran the second section of the show myself, just to keep in -practice against the day when I must become a motion picture operator, -and went to bed leaving orders to be called at dawn. By this time “Tut” -spoke considerable Portuguese—though, having learned it mainly from -Carlos, he had many of the errors of grammar and pronunciation of -Brazil’s laboring class—so that I left on my next advance trip with less -misgiving. - -Nowadays you can go to famous old Diamantina by rail. The world is -building so many railways that there will soon be no place left for -those who prefer travel to train-riding. I had little hope that the -diamond town would prove worth the time and expense necessary to bring -the Kinetophone to it, but I had a personal desire to see it, and also, -though I could not get exact information on the subject, the map -suggested that I might be able to cross on muleback from Diamantina to -Victoria and thereby save myself a long and roundabout trip. - -The rain had let up at last, though sullenly, like a despot forced out -of power. All that day there came the frequent cry of “_chiero de panno -queimado!_” (smell of burned cloth), whereupon everyone jumped up and -shook himself—everyone, that is, except the advance-agent of the -Kinetophone, who had ridden behind Brazilian wood-burners often enough -to know how to dress for the occasion. Our “express” not only stopped -but was sidetracked at every station, and every time it gave a sign of -coming to a halt the passengers sprang up as one man, crying “_A tomar -café!_” and poured out upon the platform, to return growling if even a -dog-kennel of a station miles from nowhere was not prepared to serve -them their incessant beverage. “Tut” used to say that the Brazilians -drank so much coffee that their minds went to dregs. It is a curious -paradox, too, that the Brazilian, often an unprincipled rogue in -business, never dreams of cheating the coffee-man out of his _tostão_, -even if he has to exert himself to hunt him up and pay it before -scrambling aboard again as the warning-bell rings. - -Beyond Sete Lagoas the country began to flatten out, with patches of -corn in new clearings, then more and more heavy brush and only the -red-earth railway cutting and a wire fence on either side. Curvello, the -largest town of the day, was almost a city, but so largely made up of -negro huts that it probably would not have paid us to make it a -professional visit. The traveler never ceases to wonder how all Brazil -came to swarm so with negroes; all the ships of Christendom could not -have brought so many from Africa, and the original slaves must have -multiplied like guinea-pigs. In the afternoon I got reckless and bought -an apple, which only cost me a milreis—but then, it was a very small -apple. Far up here in the interior prices seemed to be easing off a bit, -but this was largely offset by the lack of small change. In contrast to -Rio, there was almost no silver or nickel, which made an excellent -excuse for plundering the traveler of a few _tostões_ every time he -approached a ticket-window, and forcing him to accept dirty old bills -often patched together out of six or seven pieces that were completely -illegible. - -It would have been sunset, had there been one, by the time we pulled -into Curralinho, whence a branch line carries a two-car train three -times a week to Diamantina. I believe I was the only first-class -traveler with a ticket next day, one having a kilometer-book and the -rest government passes or uniforms. There was not a woman on board, -though one man with a government pass had with him a boy of seven who, -the conductor weakly declared, should pay half fare; but he did not -insist and let the matter slide in the customary Brazilian way. No -wonder the Belgian syndicate which built this line and another starting -toward Diamantina from Victoria hovers on the verge of bankruptcy, -though my own ticket cost 14$800, plus 1$600 for the federal government -and 1$600 for the State of Minas, or $5.80 for ninety-five miles of -uncomfortable travel. - -Except in spots the country was almost _sertão_, a bushy wilderness with -here and there long piles of wood for the engines. We crossed the Rio -das Velhas, flowing northward and inland, carrying red earth in solution -and pieces it had torn away from the forests through which it had -commandeered passage. There were some cattle and here and there a patch -of bananas in a hollow with a hut or two, but the rest was a desolation -of black rock, which proved to be white inside where the railroad -builders had broken into it. Rare patches of corn were the only visible -cultivation; between scattered collections of miserable adobe huts there -appeared to be no travel; the listless part-negroes lolling their lives -contentedly away in their kennels seemed to raise nothing but children -and, not being cannibals, it was a mystery what they lived on. Slowly -and painfully we climbed to the top of a great ridge, a wild country of -barren rocks heaped up into hills that were almost mountains, drear and -treeless as the landscape of Cerro de Pasco. No wonder the men who -wandered up here seeking their fortunes thought the bright pebbles they -picked up worth keeping, if only to break the melancholy monotony. - -Beyond a miserable collection of huts where those of robust nerves ate -“breakfast,” we passed the highest railway point in Brazil, 4,600 feet -above sea-level, whence vast reaches of dreary country, broken as a -frozen sea, spread to the horizon in all directions. The last station -before Diamantina looked like a town in Judea, so ugly was the -desolation that surrounded it, and across this one gazed as vainly for -the city which the map proclaimed near at hand as one may stare for a -glimpse of La Paz from the plains of Bolivia high above it. - -Ten years before, one traveled on muleback all the way from Sabará to -reach the heart of Brazil’s diamond-bearing territory, and only this -same year had the inaugural train reached Diamantina, amid hilarious -rejoicing of its population. In the few months that had passed since, -the inhabitants had not lost the sense of wonder which the tri-weekly -arrival of the puffing monster on wheels gave them, and though it was -Christmas Day, nearly the whole town had climbed to the station to greet -us. For climb they must. A youth of decided African lineage took my bag -and we stepped over the edge of the uninhabited plateau, to find a town -heaped up directly below us, all visible roads and trails pitching -swiftly down into it. The medieval streets were rough-paved in misshapen -cobbles, with a kind of sidewalk of naturally flat stones running down -the center. The town was labyrinthian, its narrow blocks of every -possible form between the narrower streets, built to fit the lay of the -land, spilling down on the farther side into a deep valley and backed on -all sides by a rough and savage landscape of blackish hue as far as the -eye could see. It was as picturesque as Ouro Preto, which it seemed to -equal in age, though it had been somewhat less elaborately built than -the old state capital, and its churches were fewer, smaller, and more -insignificant. The fact that here also there were no vehicles may be one -of the reasons why the population seemed so healthy and active—climbing -to the station alone proved that—in spite of their decidedly -preponderating negro blood. - -The railroad had not yet brought them long enough into contact with the -outside world to spoil the simple people of Diamantina. They seemed to -live together like a great affectionate family, soft-mannered and little -given to quarreling, even the street boys treating one another like -French diplomats. No doubt it was their negro blood, perhaps also the -adventurous happy-go-lucky, take-a-chance character natural to a mining -community, that gave them their considerable gaiety. There was no -evidence of anything but kindliness and good-feeling among the barefoot -women who stopped to gossip with water-jars set jauntily on their -heads—real jars, too, for Diamantina is so far away from the world that -American oil tins have not yet come to usurp the place of picturesque -native pottery. As final high praise, my hotel host asserted that the -town is so different from the rest of Brazil that a man can occasionally -visit a family with unmarried daughters without bringing them into -disrepute among public gossips. It is, indeed, a Brazilian Utopia! - -I was Diamantina’s star guest during my stay, having the main room in -the main hotel looking out on the main praça. The latter was small and -three-cornered, paved with cobbles back in the days of Shakespeare, and -had in its center a bust of a native of Diamantina who was Minister of -Viaçao when President Peçanha was coaxed into signing the decree giving -the Belgians the concession for their railroad. But then, Brazil is the -land of busts, and the man who does not succeed in getting at least one -of himself tucked away in some praça is not much of a buster. My huge -front room, next to the homelike hotel parlor with many chairs and a -cane divan all dressed up in lace coats, was fully twenty feet square, -its immense French windows reaching to a floor made of great hand-cut -planks fastened by handmade spikes with heads an inch square—or in -diameter, according as the blacksmith happened to shape them—and so -glass-smooth and warped and twisted that in places one had to brace -one’s legs to keep from sliding downhill along it. The house seemed -older than the surrounding hills, but there is so much of the new and -crude in Brazil that the old cannot but be greatly relished. As a matter -of fact Diamantina does not deserve a public hostelry, for nearly all -its visitors have the South American habit of stopping with friends or -relatives, and for all its electric lights and spring beds, and moderate -charges, the hotel had only a couple of paying guests. - -The adventurous _bandeirantes_ of São Paulo first penetrated this region -looking for gold. A considerable amount of it was found in the muddy -stream at the foot of the present town, and early in the seventeenth -century the adventurers founded the village of Tijuca, which took its -name from a nearby swamp. In olden times gold dust and tiny nuggets were -used as money throughout the region, and there were scales in every -shop. Gold seems to be found almost anywhere in the region, and -placer-mining is the natural occupation of all its inhabitants. When -electric-light poles were put up by a syndicate at Boa Vista, in order -to give Diamantina as light by night what the company uses as power -during the day, the children carried off the earth dug up from the holes -to wash out the gold. After a heavy rain tiny particles of gold are -picked up in the gutters of Diamantina and along the edge of the little -stream below it. So here at last is a place where you can really pick up -gold in the streets, yet the people are poorer and more ragged than -those who live by planting beans. - -It was while searching for gold that the miners of Tijuca came across -many bright, half-transparent pebbles that were plainly of no use to -them, but the largest of which they gave to their children or used as -counters in their own card games. There were a bushel or more of them in -such use in the village and its vicinity when a new priest arrived from -Portugal. In his first game of cards the pious padre noticed the -peculiar poker chips that everyone produced by the handful. He let the -information leak out that he thought them very pretty, and would be -pleased to have them as keepsakes. They were quite worthless, of course, -to his new parishioners, and if his innocent sacerdotal eye was caught -by their transparent brightness, they saw no reason why they should not -humor his whim, and at the same time gain in favor with the Church, by -giving him such of the worthless little baubles as he did not win at -cards. Thus he gathered together half a bushel or more of the pebbles, -and suddenly disappeared in the general direction of Amsterdam, dropping -a hint in Rio on the way. - -Word soon reached the Portuguese crown of this new form of riches in its -overseas possessions. It turned out that the range of hills from well -south of the present town of Diamantina to far up in Bahia, a tract of -more than four hundred square leagues, was diamond-bearing land. Indeed, -if one may believe local conviction, the finest diamonds in existence -come from Minas Geraes, and the world’s most famous black diamonds from -Bahia State a bit farther north. - -Diamonds were first discovered in India and for centuries came only from -there. When they were found in Brazil, thousands of the stones were sold -as Indian diamonds not only because buyers were prejudiced, but because -the Portuguese government had forbidden private mining on penalty of -death, and the contrabandists were forced to reach their market by way -of India. The village of Tijuca became a flourishing center, far as it -was from the outside world, and for all the stern government régime set -over the region. In 1734 Portugal sent out an “Intendente Geral dos -Diamantes,” with absolute power to enforce the government monopoly. His -palace still exists in a garden near the top of the town, with the -remains of an artificial lake on which he kept a sailboat to show the -people of what came gradually to be known as Diamantina how he had -crossed the sea. The crown forbade individual mining and gave the job to -contractors, who worked six hundred slaves and paid 220–240$ yearly per -slave for the privilege, yet who made fortunes even though all large -diamonds and twenty per cent. of all finds went to the crown. Population -multiplied and Diamantina became a center of riches and luxury. Contrary -to the case in the rest of Brazil, many broken noblemen and men of -education came here to mend their fortunes, and the colony, and -eventually all the province of Minas Geraes, became a focus of -“civilization,” as that word was understood in those days,—much powdered -hair, knee-breeches, beauty patches, minuets—and swarms of miserable -slaves. It may be that the courtesy of the poor Africanized inhabitants -of to-day is but a hold-over from those times of elaborate etiquette. - -Amazing tales are still told in Diamantina of its golden days. It was -evidently the custom of the government viceroys to imprison the -contractors as soon as they got rich and “roll” them penniless. One -official is reputed to have made every guest a present of a cluster of -diamonds. The _Grupo Escolar_, or school building, across the street -from my hotel was once the residence of a great diamond buyer, and when -the building was made into a school some years ago a score or more of -skeletons were found tumbled together in the bottom of a secret shaft. -This revived the legend that the buyer had a chair set on a trapdoor, -and when a man came in with a large “parcel” of contraband diamonds he -was asked to sit down and make himself at home while the buyer looked -over the stones—and brought up at the bottom of the shaft. - -In 1771 the famous Pombal sent out the “green book,” with fifty-four -despotic articles that nearly depopulated the district, but in 1800 the -régime softened, and finally, in 1832, the government monopoly was -abolished. Since then mining has been more or less intermittent. -Diamonds reached their highest price during the war with Paraguay, at -the end of which, in 1867, the stones were found in South Africa, a blow -from which the industry in Brazil has never recovered. For while it is -claimed in Diamantina that Brazilian diamonds average much higher than -those from the Cape, the African mines now produce at least eighty per -cent. of the world’s supply and with more modern methods and widespread -propaganda completely control the market. Abolition was the final straw, -and in five years exportations of diamonds from Diamantina dropped from -2,500 to 300 annually. - -Unlike those of South Africa, the diamonds of Brazil are found on or -near the surface. In a few places quartz is broken open in the search, -but in general they are taken loose in the gravel of the alluvial -deposits by the simpler process of placer mining. The fact that enormous -tracts of territory were worked over by the Portuguese does not mean -that they took out fabulous amounts, according to modern local -authorities, because they had to feed their slaves anyway and it was to -their advantage to keep them working, even if the finds were few. -To-day, though there are some syndicates and large companies, most of -them are completely paralyzed and such work as is done is mainly by -individual natives. The company troubles seem to be due to lack of a -good mining law—natives may wash for diamonds anywhere, even on company -claims—the insecurity of titles, the prohibitive cost of transportation -for machinery, high tariffs, low rate of exchange, the constant war of -South Africans against South American diamonds, and finally the -“salting” of mines by fake promoters, coupled with carelessness of -foreign stockholders in sending out experts to examine the ground before -accepting even an honest promoter’s word for it. Thus fortunes have been -lost in the Brazilian diamond fields, notwithstanding the fact that -diamonds continue to be steadily picked up in them. - -The largest diamond ever found in Brazil was the “Star of the South,” -found at Agua Suja (Dirty Water), on the line to Catalão. This weighed -about the same as the famous Kohinoor diamond,—300 carats. The stones -are usually found in the beds of rivers, larger near the source, and -smaller farther down, for they wear off in traveling, and in sand, -earth, and common gravel, usually with gold. Rough diamonds generally -have no brilliancy, looking merely like white, half-transparent pebbles, -though any child of Diamantina is said to be able to recognize one at a -glance. There is really nothing more prosaic than diamond gathering, and -the resemblance is slight between those who hunt for and those who wear -them. None of the improved methods of South Africa have been introduced -into Brazil, not even the hand screen or the “grease board,” and the -negroes still use the _batea_, or wooden bowl in the shape of a hand -basin, in washing for both diamonds and gold. When he has chosen his -spot beside some stream the negro sets up a _baca_, a kind of topless -soapbox with one end knocked out, about six inches above the surface of -the water and fills it with gravel. Then with the _batea_ he scoops up -water and throws it with a peculiar flip on the gravel, washing it from -side to side until the loose stuff runs off and leaves only the pebbles. -These are then spread out and gone over carefully by hand, the diamonds -being readily detected by the experienced eye, particularly since, -unlike the other stones, they cannot be wet and for that reason stand -out brilliantly from the rest. In fact, in Spanish and Portuguese they -are as often called _brillantes_ as _diamantes_. With the war and the -sudden drop in the diamond market that came with it the people of -Diamantina largely left off hunting for diamonds and began the more -paying occupations of planting corn and gathering firewood. - -On the Sunday afternoon following Christmas, the rain having at last -ceased, I went out for a walk. An hour’s climb, in which I did not -suffer from heat, brought me to a cross on the culminating point of the -great mass of gray-black rock of ragged formation across the valley and -small stream in which many a diamond has been picked up and much gold -washed. Here is a full view of the town, stacked up on the green and -fertile side of the long valley and spilling like coagulated grease down -into it, scattered groups of eucalyptus trees and its general greenness -in great contrast to the rockiness of all the rest of the vast and -jagged encircling landscape. The gothic church of Coração de Jesus and -the tree-girdled seminary stand somewhat above the rest of the orderless -heap, and one realizes that the railroad does indeed come in at the top -of the town, for its station is so high that here it cannot be seen -above the edge of the plateau on which it sits. Diamantina is a great -trading post of the interior, and down in the center of town there is a -species of Arab khan, a roof on posts where shaggy sun-, rain-, and -road-marked muleteers with long, ugly _facas_ in their belts pile their -saddle-blankets and goods and cook over campfires. The old, old highway -unravels down across the broken rocky hills, descends into the valley, -stops a while at the khan, and having gathered its forces together once -more into a compact trail, marches across and out of the valley again -and away over the bleak horizon. - -It was in the middle of this public trail that I came upon two negroes -in quest of gold washed down by the recent rains. While one dug up -wooden bowls of earth and gravel, the other stood knee-deep in a muddy, -dammed-up pool and, filling his _batea_ with the earth brought by the -other and letting water into it, whirled it about until the heavy matter -went to the bottom. Then he scraped off by hand the top layer, -continuing the process until within ten minutes he had left about a -quart of heavy black earth. This he dumped with more of the same in a -white sand-nest he had made on the bank of the little stream crossing -the trail. Like most of his fellow-townsmen he was talkative and ready -to explain his affairs to a stranger. He had washed for gold after a -rain ever since he was a boy, getting from two to four milreis worth -every time, and where there is gold there are sure to be diamonds, -especially the “chapeu de palha” (“straw hat”), which he explained to be -a very flat diamond making much show with little weight. Though both he -and his companion were shoeless and had been from infancy, ragged, -illiterate and half toothless, they were far from ignorant on some -points, especially of words used in the diamond industry, which they -spoke with a curious negro mispronunciation mixed with slang. - -In riding about the vicinity on other days I came upon several gangs of -a score of negroes each, bare-legged and ragged, hoeing at an average -wage of eighty cents a day in banks of red earth through which a rainy -season stream had been turned. This they keep up as long as the rains -last, rarely seeing a diamond, which wash along through the artificial -gorge with the other gravel and come to rest on a sandy flat place -beyond. Then the men are set to “batting the _baca_,” until the sand is -washed away and the diamonds recovered by the same crude methods used in -the first days of the colony. One question almost sure to be asked by -the layman is how workmen are kept from stealing the diamonds. Theft, it -is explained, is by no means so easy to accomplish as would appear at -first glance. In the first place, it takes on the average a cartload of -sand and gravel to yield a one-quarter carat diamond. By the time the -negro has washed a load down to about two bushels an overseer has an eye -on him and watches him until the process is finished. It is rare for a -diamond to appear suddenly on the surface during the preliminary -washing, when the negro might snatch it, and even if he did he would -have a hard time selling it. If ever a native of Diamantina has stolen a -diamond, even as a boy, he is blackballed in the community for the rest -of his life. It is a long way to anywhere else, even since the advent of -the railroad, so that thieving of the town’s chief product is extremely -unusual. Men from far off up country come in with thousands of dollars’ -worth of diamonds or black carbons on a pack mule, which lags far behind -with its negro driver. Everyone along the way knows what it carries, yet -for decades no driver has run away nor anyone “framed” a holdup. - -In town, gold and precious stones are handled with a casual carelessness -only equalled by the Bank of England. A local jewelry shop, famous in -the trade the world over, looks like a miserable little tinker’s den, -where a dozen men and boys, all with more or less African blood, work at -dirty old worn and smoked benches. About them is a wilderness of junk -where cigarette butts, gold nuggets, old iron tools, gold wire, and -worthless odds and ends lie scattered and tumbled together with diamonds -of all sizes, cut and uncut, old tin tobacco-boxes containing fortunes -in diamonds and precious stones of several species wrapped in dirty bits -of paper. Gold coins of the former Empire as well as new British -sovereigns waiting to be melted up for local use can scarcely be -distinguished from the dusty rubbish on the tables; drawers filled with -the ragged money of to-day stand half-open; a tiny show-window—recently -put in as a concession to modern ideas—has a six-carat diamond stuck -against the glass with several smaller ones about it, day and night; a -can that originally held soap but now full of emeralds, amethysts, -topazes, and half a dozen other precious stones found in the region was -kicking about the floor. Yet there was no sign of lock or key, except -that used to fasten the outer door at night. The owner only came now and -then during the day, and amid this disordered jumble of wealth his dozen -workmen and boys toiled from seven in the morning until sometimes nine -at night at ludicrous wages without a loss ever having been reported. - -Down in the valley near the town there is a native diamond-cutting -establishment, a capacious old barn of a building with the immense -rough-hewn beams of olden times and two long double rows of “wheels” run -by water-power on which the stones are “cut.” Strictly speaking, a -diamond is not “cut” at all; it is ground—_lapidar_ or “stoning” they -call it in Brazil. Disks of the best grade steel, about a foot in -diameter, move round and round at a moderate rate of speed. Rough -diamonds are first chipped off by hand to the general shape desired; -then they are set into a bed of lead and solder so that one facet may be -ground down, after which they are removed at a forge, resoldered, and -ground on another facet. The “wheels” must be polished down and filed in -slight ridges every two or three weeks, a task that takes about one day, -and they are rented at 12$ a month to the individual _lapidarios_, both -men and women, largely of negro blood, who work for themselves, either -“cutting” diamonds for others or speculating with such as they can buy -themselves. A day is the average time consumed here in “cutting” a -one-carat diamond, at a cost of about 7$, the chips and diamond dust -left over bringing the ordinary income up to 65$ a week. - -Diamond buyers of all nationalities journey to Diamantina, and the town -expressed surprise and often incredulity to hear that I had not come to -purchase a few “parcels” for speculation. “Everyone” buys diamonds, yet -no one pays the state export tax on them, if one may believe local -opinion. This would have to be paid if the stones were sent out legally -by express, but when a buyer has collected a “parcel”—in Portuguese it -is _partida_—he finds some man bound for Rio and says to him, “If it -isn’t too much trouble just hand this little package to —— and Co.,” -thereby defrauding both the railroad and the politicians. The men who -deal in diamonds in the place of their origin no more wear them than do -the men who dig them. Old buyers who have handled the precious stones -all their lives are not only plainly dressed but have none of the -tendency toward personal adornment so widespread among Brazilians. Two -American diamond-men I met had huge blacksmith hands on which a ring -would have looked absurd, and the only diamonds one sees in Diamantina -are those offered for sale in “parcels” or show-windows, or those worn -by an occasional tenderfoot. - -Newcomers have sometimes been deceived by this state of affairs. A few -years ago there arrived in Diamantina a German with a conviction of his -own wisdom and superiority over common mortals, who, with an air -implying that the thought had never occurred to anyone else, let it leak -out that he was buying diamonds. An old negro wandered up to the hotel -in an aged shirt and trousers, a ragged hat, and bare feet, and -shuffling in a halting, diffident way into the German’s room, told him -that he did not know what the two diamonds he carried wrapped in a scrap -of paper were worth, but that he would sell them cheap. The German paid -him about half the market price for them and asked him if he had any -more, adding with a wink that any transactions they might make would be -kept a secret. The poor old negro said he thought he could find a few -more about his hut or in the river or among his friends, and for a month -or six weeks he continued to slouch into the hotel, until he had sold -the wise German about a pint of diamonds for a mere song of fourteen or -fifteen _contos_, say $5,000. Then the Teuton, highly pleased with -himself, packed up and took the down train from Curvello, smuggling his -untold riches out of the state without paying the export duty—and -discovered when he reached Rio that every one of the fine diamonds the -poor ignorant old negro had sold him so cheaply were what are known in -the trade as “fourths,” or worse, full of knots and gnarls as a -century-old olive tree and worth at most some 50c a carat for cutting -glass. A bit later, the poor innocent old negro having occasion to go -down to the capital and talk with the senator whose political boss he -was in Diamantina, blew into Rio in the frock-coat and patent leathers -he wears when not doing business with gullible strangers, with a real -six-carat diamond dazzling from his little finger and two or three more -shouting from his shirt front and, meeting the worldly-wise German on -the Avenida, raised his fifty-dollar imported Panama hat with true -Brazilian courtesy, and invited him to come in and have a drink for old -times’ sake. - -One evening my hospitable host of the hotel dragged me over to the -cinema he owned, where I found a crowded house come to see what to -Diamantina was a brand new romance of their own color, called “A Cabana -do Pae Thomaz,” in other words, “The Cabin of Uncle Tom.” It was all too -evident, however, that there was nothing to be gained by bringing our -show so far inland, for the negroes had little to spend and the railway -charges are naturally high to those who can find no excuse for not -paying them. Meanwhile I had opened negotiations for a journey on -horseback, or even on foot, across to the railhead of the line out of -Victoria, which would have brought me out well up the coast on my -journey north. A native _camarada_ familiar with the trail offered to -rent me a horse or a mule for the journey, with saddle and spurs, for 3$ -a day. This seemed reasonable. It would make the trip across come to -about 20$? Yes, but it takes _two_ animals. Why’s that? You must have a -guide, or at least a man to bring back the horses. Ah, then that makes -6$ a day instead of 3$? Yes—ah—and then of course you must pay the man. -How much? Oh, 3$ a day, the same as the other animals. Ah, then that -makes 9$ a day, and seven days would be.... No, say ten days. But why -ten days? Because in this season that is the least you can depend on. In -other words the trip would cost me 90$, nine times ten? No, it would be -nine times twenty, or 180$. Eh, what twenty days? Why, the man and the -horses would have to come back, wouldn’t they? _Sacramento_, I suppose -so, unless I could chloroform them when I got there. So then 180$ would -cover _all_ the expenses? All, completely all—er—that is, of course, you -would have to feed the animals and the man on the trip, and it might be -much more than ten days, and—er.... And no doubt there would be a tip to -the man and the animals, and perhaps a third horse needed when he caught -sight of my valise, and of course the government officials here and -along the way would come in for their customary graft, and there would -be the stamp-tax on each horseshoe, unless they were mule-shoes, in -which case no doubt it would be doubled, and a tax on each bray the -“burros” might emit en route, and—whereupon I gave him a warm handshake -and bade him good night, saying I would think it over and wire him from -Bagdad in 1946, and thus eventually got him out of the room. In short, I -had come to understand at last why people travel by rail in Brazil, even -though their bones are racked on the warped and twisted roadbeds, their -movie-magnate garments turned into sieves by burning cinders from the -straining locomotives, and there is a tax on every corner of a railway -ticket. - -All Diamantina was down—I mean up—to see us off, just as they are at the -same early hour three times a week. The distance-blue piles of earth lay -heaped up into considerable hills where a clearer atmosphere disclosed -wider horizons, hung on all sides with fantastic heaps of clouds, that -increased the sense of being on the top of the world. On the several -days’ trip southward I met a strange man, a _juiz de dereito_, or -district judge, from Serro back in the hills, who refused to ride on a -government pass or to accept one for his son, whom he was taking to the -medical school in Rio, declaring that there was “much abuse” in such -matters by government officials! At Burnier, where we changed to the -broad gauge, I got a berth to the capital. Though the car was the -familiar American Pullman, the slovenly government employees had -discarded most of the small conveniences. The aisle was as carpetless as -the floors of Brazil, the berth net had long since been turned into a -hammock for the brakeman’s baby, the mattress was thin and hard as a -Brazilian wooden bed, and the sleep I did not get as we creaked and -jounced through the endless low hills explained why sleeping cars and -night trains are not more popular in the mammoth republic of South -America. - -When I returned from the washroom next morning, “Tut” stood dressing -beside the opposite berth. They had played in Palmyra the evening before -and managed to pack up in time to catch the night train. Carlos had had -his hat stolen in the preceding town and “Tut” had been bitten by a dog -while walking out to pay his respects to the English-speaking miners -near Ouro Preto; otherwise things had gone well—except for one other -personal mishap to “Tut.” While buying his ticket for the sleeper he -noted that the berths were divided into “_leitos inferiores_” and -“_leitos superiores_.” Now why should he take an inferior berth when he -had been working hard, and Linton paid the bill anyway? He took a _leito -superior_. Unfortunately, in the matter of berths, the Portuguese word -_superior_ means “upper”! - -By seven the day was already brilliant and hot, for we were down off the -great plateau I was never to climb again, and the familiar suburbs of -Rio were rumbling past. I dropped off as we drew into the yards, knowing -from experience how long a process it is to get into the station, and -diving out through a hole in the railway wall, I hurried away up the Rua -Mattoso to the home of our theater contractor. He surprised me by saying -that times had grown so “brutally hard” in Rio, to say nothing of the -brutal heat of midsummer, that it would not be worth while to play there -at all, but that we could finish our sixteen days with him at his -theater in Nictheroy. - -The ferry that carried us across the bay was crowded with newspaper men -and photographers, and the gunboat _Sergipe_ lay close off the state -capital with its guns trained on the public buildings. Inquiry disclosed -the fact that there was not a new mutiny, but that a revolution was -expected in Nictheroy during the day. - -Nilo Peçanha, son of a former president of Brazil, had been elected -president of the State of Rio de Janeiro for the term to begin with the -new year; but, as so often happens in South America, the opposition -party still in power was determined to give the office to their own -defeated candidate. This was one Lieutenant Sodré, an army man of -similar caliber to the celebrated “Dudu” and having the same backing. -With the aid of the outgoing state president he had “acquired” arms and -ammunition from the federal stores in Nictheroy and was preparing to -take office by force, having picked up large numbers of _Carioca_ crooks -and gunmen and scattered them among the various cities of the state to -stifle opposition. Peçanha, on the other hand, had applied to the -Supreme Court for a habeas corpus, giving him the office that was being -stolen from him, and after considerable dodging and hesitation the -national president had decided to lend federal armed force to uphold the -Supreme Court decision in favor of Peçanha. - -Mere orders from the federal government mean little in the life of a -Brazilian state, however, and Nictheroy was seething on the brink of -anarchy when we landed. Sodré, it seemed, had had himself sworn in as -president by the state assembly early that morning and had sent word to -that effect to the president of Brazil. He could not gain admission to -the state presidential palace, but with the support of the state police -and the outgoing authorities he did take over the presidential offices. -Then suddenly, some three hours later, a cry of “Viva Peçanha!” had -resounded through the police barracks, the policemen had taken it up -and, headed by two sergeants, threatened to kill the officers unless -they joined in also, and the entire state police force on which the -rebel had depended swung over to the other side, looted the stolen -ammunition, and took to rushing about town shouting and firing in the -air. - -This was the condition in which we found the state capital. The firemen -had joined the police, and auto-trucks crammed full of excited shouting -negroes and half-negroes in uniform were rushing about town at top -speed, all but overturning at every corner. The lower classes, having -likewise filled themselves with cheap _cachaza_, had joined the general -uproar of noise, irresponsibility, and probable violence, and the -streets were swarming with _populares_ shouting “Viva Peçanha!” “Viva o -Salvador do Povo!” and similar nonsense in maudlin drunken voices, while -Sodré sent hurriedly to the national president demanding “guarantees” -for his personal safety. - -Residence in South America, however, teaches one that revolutions are by -no means so dangerous on the spot as they are in the armchairs of those -who are reading about them afar off, and we serenely continued our -preparations for the evening performance. Desultory shooting, street -brawls, and the surging of masses of drunken _populares_ continued -throughout the day and for several days thereafter, while the shouting, -shooting truckloads of police and firemen continued dizzily to round -corners, each time more nearly resembling the drunken brute into which -the tropical languor of negro militarism is apt to degenerate in times -of crisis or popular excitement. But it was, on the whole, a -good-natured rather than a blood-thirsting brute, and though what Brazil -calls “persons of most responsibility” kept out of sight, we common -mortals, including not a few women, walked about town attending to our -business as usual. Once a ragged, drunken mulatto _popular_ came into -the _leitería_ in which I was quenching my thirst with a glass of -ice-cold milk, walked bellowing and reeling past me and two men at -another table up to a little messenger-boy of fourteen, and ordered him -to shout “Viva Peçanha!” The proprietor dared not protest, for the -police were all drunk and the _povo_ more than likely to take the -ragamuffin’s part; but when the latter finally staggered out again the -shopkeeper raised his hands to heaven and demanded to know why the -fellow had picked on the boy and not, for instance, pointing at me, on -“_o senhor_ over there.” - -The “Cinema Eden” was right on the waterfront, though the only paradise -in sight was the view of Rio piled up into massive banks of white clouds -across the emerald bay and the marvelous sunset and steel-blue dusk -which spread over its unique, nature-made sky-line as we opened our -doors. The near-revolution was still surging through the streets, though -a few sober soldiers of the regiment of federal troops that had been -landed were riding about town in street-cars, with ball-loaded muskets -ready for action. Peçanha had been sworn in that afternoon, surrounded -by a swarm of other perspiring politicians in wintry frock-coats and -silk hats, but the national president had concluded to avoid any -responsibility in the matter by calling a special session of congress to -decide between the rival candidates, instead of carrying out the -decision of the Supreme Court—“which,” perorated Ruy Barboso, “is what -our constitution orders and what is practiced in the United States,” two -equally convincing final arguments. Though we were the only theater open -the house was not crowded. “Persons of most responsibility” preferred to -remain at home, and the _populares_ were plainly in most cases without -the price of admission, even had the revolution not promised a more -exciting show outside. I took charge of the door in person, not at all -certain but that the _povo_ might try to force itself in en masse. Once, -during our part of the program, a mighty explosion shook the town like -an earthquake and shooting sounded under our very windows; but as the -stampede for the door started I barricaded the immense exit and “Tut” -went on calmly running an amusing film known as “College Days,” and -before it was ended the volatile audience had quieted down again. The -explosion, it turned out, was of a great deposit of powder on one of the -many islands in the bay, nearly twenty miles away. - -Our receipts for the first section were so poor that we cut out the -second and went home for a moonlight dip in the sea just outside our -waterfront rooms in the charming residential district of Nictheroy. But -it was the last day of the year, with a crushing heat after the splendid -air of the plateau, and the soft wind that was now sweeping across the -bay drew me back for a last glimpse of Rio in the throes of New Year’s -Eve. The city lay a vast irregular heap of lights, here in dense -clusters, there strung out along the invisible lower hills, all cut -sharp off at the bottom by the endless row of them along the Beira Mar. -The Avenida was densely crowded, and getting more so. Newspapers had -erected booths covered with artificial flowers and colored lights, -several police, fire department, and military bands were scattered along -the great white avenue, and a constant, unbroken procession of -automobiles crept up one side and down the other, pretty girls perched -on the backs of the seats and on the furled covers, all filled with the -“respectable families” whose plump and physically attractive ladies are -rarely seen in the streets after dark on any other day in the year. I -was caught where the confetti fell thickest, but there was little -rowdyism and no unpleasant din, though paper ribbons spun across the -lighted sea of faces and perfumed water was squirted into them in that -good-natured and outwardly courteous way with which the Latin-American -softens the perpetration of his most hilarious, carnival-time tricks. - - - - - CHAPTER XV - NORTHWARD TO BAHIA - - -More than five months had passed since my first arrival in Rio when, in -the first days of the new year, I actually started on my homeward way -again. The train from Nictheroy northward left at dawn, after the -unfailing Brazilian habit, and I caught a last glimpse of sunrise over -Rio and its bay before they passed finally from my sight. The mountains -of the cool plateau lay blue-gray along the horizon all that day’s ride -through the singing jungle. The flat _littoral_ was considerably -inhabited, but chiefly with thatched mud-and-reed huts, contrasted only -now and then by a massive, dignified old _fazenda_-house standing, like -some poor but still proud aristocrat, on a commanding knoll above broad -reaches of flat corn, cane, or pasture lands, broken by frequent marshes -grown full of the omnipresent vegetation. At the stations negro boys -highly contented with life sold melons, bananas, mangos, red figs, the -acidulous, parrot-beaked _cajú_, and little native birds in tiny -home-made cages. The scream and groan of crude cane-carts in the fields -or along the dust-thick roads could sometimes be heard above the roar of -the train. Rain had been frequent here during the past weeks, but it had -ceased abruptly at Christmas and the implacable sun had already wiped -out all evidence of moisture. At Macahé we came down to the edge of the -sea again, stretching away emerald-blue and mirror-smooth to the end of -space, then turning inland once more across a sand-blown region, we -descended at Campos, 176 miles north of Nictheroy. - -This second city of the State of Rio de Janeiro is an old and somewhat -dilapidated town well spread out on the _campo_, or sea-flat open -country, for which it is named, with a few aged church-towers peering on -tiptoe over the broad cane-fields that surround it. Scattered imperial -palms slightly shade it, and the widest river I had so far seen in -Brazil gives it a light-craft connection with the sea. Neither its mule -cars nor its medieval “Hotel Amazonas,” with a single _banho de chuva_, -or “rain bath,” are fit subjects for unbounded praise, but at least its -chief cinema manager cut short my professional labors by signing on the -dotted line as soon as it was pointed out to him. I left the contract -and instructions to “Tut” with the hotel runner, to be handed to the -tallest man who arrived by train the next Wednesday, and fled on into -the north by the same conveyance by which I had arrived the day before. - -The difference between this British-owned line and the -government-operated “Central” was as wide as that between discipline and -license, yet even on this the ticket-offices were miserable little holes -in the wall, barely thigh-high; the sellers always opened as late, and -worked as slowly and stupidly as possible, and it was only by crouching -like an ape and fighting those struggling about the ticket-hole with -trickery, stealth, and bad manners that the traveler could get a chance -to buy the exorbitant-priced tickets and escape paying fifty per cent. -excess on the train. Kilometer-books are sold in Brazil, but they must -be taken to the ticket-window to be stamped and audited and registered -and signed each time the holder wishes to board a train, hence nothing -is to be gained by using them. The shadowy, saw-shaped range on our left -followed us all the blazing, sand-blown day, tantalizing us with -suggestions of cool upland valleys and meadows watered by clear, cold -streams. As the sun crawled round and peered in at my side of the car -the heat grew unendurable, in spite of the electric fans which recalled -the government lines by contrast, and the dust-filled air all but -refused to enter the nostrils. The insignificant stations were crowded -with the curious enjoying their chief daily diversion, but they were -silent and listless beneath the appalling heat. - -In his “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin speaks of seeing South American -ant-hills twelve feet high. I had set this down to the exuberance of -youth, but suddenly, not far north of Campos, we came upon great fields -of them, like eruptions on the face of nature, mounds eight, ten, -perhaps even twelve feet high, but here grass-grown, instead of -presenting the solid clay, cement-like surface familiar elsewhere. The -sandy condition of the soil evidently made it possible only to pile them -up in this oval form, so sharply contrasting with the usual sugar-loaf -shape of those made of clay. In mid-afternoon the flat, baking, -sea-level _littoral_ gave way to rolling, then hilly country, and we had -climbed to a height of several hundred meters when we passed from the -little State of Rio de Janeiro into the equally tiny one of Espirito -Santo, for here the great plateau of central Brazil forces its way clear -down to the edge of the sea. Time was when the State of Rio was -enormous, but bit by bit, during the eighteenth century, there was -lopped off from it the much larger states of São Paulo, Minas Geraes, -Goyaz, and finally Matto Grosso, until to-day the population within its -limits—which do not include the federal district and national capital—is -estimated at little more than one fifth that of the old mining province, -vastly less than that of São Paulo and Bahia, and with Rio Grande do Sul -and Pernambuco also outdistancing it. - -Coffee-clad hills and a reddish soil gave Espirito Santo a slight -resemblance to São Paulo, though most of it was dense-green with heavy -timber, through which a howling wind-and-rain storm came raging toward -sunset. We halted for the night in Cachoeira do Itapemirim, so called -for the _cachoeira_, or rapids over a series of rocks in the Itapemirim, -the sound of which deadened our footfalls all the way from the station -to the “Hotel Toledo” on the tiny main square. It was little more than a -barefoot village in the bush, but the show would be forced to spend a -night there—nay, two nights, for it would arrive on Saturday—and I soon -added to my collection the signature of the “Turk” who, in addition to a -little cloth-shop and billiard-and-liquor-room, owned a miniature cinema -jutting far out over the rocky river. - -Relieved of the feeling that the show was treading on my heels, I let -the morning train go on without me and settled down to make up the sleep -I was in arrears. Four or five hours slumber out of each twenty-four may -be all very well for an Edison, but commonplace mortals require more. -Not only was the hotel as quiet and bucolic as the town itself, but it -had “beds of wire”; both heat and mosquitoes were conspicuous by their -absence; the never-ceasing music of the _cachoeira_ was calming to the -nerves, and if I ever did wake up there were horses to hire for a jaunt -through the surrounding country. Moreover, the town and vicinity were -the scene of one of Brazil’s most famous novels, “Chanaan” by Graça -Aranha of the Brazilian Academy, and just then Minister to The -Hague—though the town itself was supremely ignorant of its celebrity the -world round in the dozen languages into which the tale has been -translated. Even the local editor had never heard of it, though he did -know the author, “because I am _obliged_ to know all Brazilian -diplomats.” - -The animal that was intrusted to me for a modest consideration next -afternoon could scarcely have been called a horse, though it resembled -even less any other known quadruped, as the wooden frame thinly covered -with leather and hung with two iron rings into which I could barely -insert the ends of my toes must perhaps be called a saddle for want of a -more exact term. By dint of reducing my right arm to paralysis I -succeeded in forcing the torpid brute up and down the few streets of the -village and out one of the roads that wander off as trails through the -plump, dense-wooded hills about it. But it would have been as speedy and -far more comfortable to have walked, or better still, perhaps, not to -have gone at all, for we were overtaken and imprisoned by one of those -raging storms for which this region seems famous. Immense banks of -snow-white clouds far off on the horizon completely encircled us when we -set out, yet so benign was their appearance that I scarcely noticed -them, except as a detail of the charming landscape, until suddenly they -swept in from all sides at express speed, getting blacker and ever -blacker, until the entire sky was wiped out and the sullen growls of -thunder grew to violent outbursts of anger that deafened the ears like -an artillery barrage, while the wind tore at the trees and bamboo groves -as if it would uproot not only them but the sheer stone “sugar-loaf” -near which the storm had found us. With the help of two negro boys on -muleback and the butt of my heavy native whip I urged the equine -caricature into a lame and ludicrous gallop and reached the edge of town -before I was wholly drenched, taking refuge in a half-finished building. -A negro boy sleeping on a narrow plank high above the still unboarded -floor said he was not ill; evidently he was just lying there to let the -day get by so that he could sleep through the night and then take a good -rest to-morrow. I could only get the head of the alleged horse under -shelter, but it was evident that he had stood out in many worse storms -than mere wind and rain; and there I squatted for three mortal hours, -chiding myself for not having put a bit of reading matter in my pocket. -I might have read the negro boy, I suppose, but he looked like a primer, -just such a crude and simple volume as makes up the whole human library -of Cachoeira do Itapemirim. - -Another all-day train-ride of little more than a hundred miles brought -me to Victoria, capital of the State of Holy Ghost, or, more exactly, to -a little backwoods station on the opposite side of the long narrow arm -of the sea on which the capital is situated. So placid was this, and so -cool the weather after a heavy rain, that I had to taste it as we were -being rowed across before I could believe that we were down at sea-level -again. It was an easy-going, less aggressive capital than those farther -south, and its prices were so nearly reasonable that I grew bold and -marched into the new and showy four-story “Palace Hotel” on the -waterfront. The “brutal crisis” had dealt Victoria an almost deadly -blow. There was not a show in town, except a free cinema in the liquor -emporium of the little French electric tramway company that sends its -cars wandering along the waterfront for miles in both directions. On one -of these I gradually worked my way out to the home of the “colonel” who -owned the imposing theater—and found that he had passed me on the way -in. I hurried back to town—if that verb may be used in the same sentence -with Victoria’s street-car service—and found that the “colonel” had gone -out home again. But by sternly overcoming adverse fate and the -fatalistic indifference of those accustomed to hang around the theater I -finally had him hunted up, a heavy, middle-aged, over-courteous mulatto, -as was also his manager and, for that matter, almost every conspicuous -citizen in town. Having impressed upon them the extraordinary good -fortune that was soon to descend upon Victoria, I went home to dinner, -telling them to think it over. Their theater, like two former cinemas in -town, had been closed since the first month of the war; they had so -completely lost heart that they were not even having films shipped to -them any more, and felt that it would be impossible to get up a show. I -assured them that wherever the Kinetophone landed there must be a show, -and within half an hour had them worked up to such enthusiasm that -instead of accepting my suggestion that we play Monday and Tuesday and -sail for Bahia on Wednesday, they were imploring me to book for a solid -week. - -This having been done, the manager and I made polite and diplomatic -calls on the editors of Victoria’s two pitiful little dailies of four -foolscap pages each, more than half taken up with advertising and the -rest with large-type “news” consisting mainly of birthday greetings to -“our most influential citizens.” Neither of the apathetic -pseudo-journalists caught even a hint of the news value of Edison’s part -in the affair, but they did waste many words in giving a full account of -the “delightful courtesy” which “Dr. Franck,” and the distinguished and -much-titled fellow-citizen who brought him, had shown in visiting them. - -Victoria was one of the old settlements of the Portuguese crown when -what afterward came to be known as Brazil was given out in _capitanias_, -having been founded nearly four centuries ago on the island of São -Antonio. It may have 15,000 inhabitants in all the coves and corners of -rocks among which it is scattered, but it is essentially an unimportant, -if picturesque, village. The nucleus of the town is well inland along -the narrow, river-like little roadstead, with a yellow presidential -palace and some other buildings of size, but it is made up chiefly of -one-story buildings quickly running down to huts. There are a few coffee -houses that export, and a few stores that supply the interior, but for -the most part Victoria lives on government salaries—when conditions are -such that these can be paid. How backward it is may be guessed from the -fact that negro coffee-porters have not yet been driven out by whites, -and that it is the outpost of the reign of hammocks which covers all -northern Brazil, at least half the population seeming to spend their -days swinging back and forth inside the baked mud kennels they call -home. An ancient fort in ruins and the clustered sanctuary of Nossa -Senhora da Penha in a striking site on the summit of a stone hill, with -the usual collection of wax and pictured proofs of miracles that have -been wrought here since 1769, are the main sights of interest. For the -ocean is not visible until one has walked—or, if time is no object, -taken the tramway—for miles out through little groves of plump, -rosy-cheeked mangos and along the single street from which most of -Victoria sprawls and scrambles up the rocky, half-wooded hills along her -waterway to her huts perched among huge, blackish granite rocks. Then, -when the calm, boatless sea and the labyrinthian harbor entrance bursts -forth at last from the long, narrow, yellow beach out to which the cars -eventually stagger, there is not a glimpse left of the town itself, -hidden away among its wet-green hills. - -“Tut,” Carlos, and the show arrived on time and were eventually coaxed -through the red tape that entangles any state capital and loaded into -the _canoa_, or mammoth log turned into a boat, of the German who -reigned in Victoria as the American Consul. This was gradually rowed, -not directly to the theater, but to the “American’s” wharf, where we -were forced to hire a wagon and lose an hour to cover the hundred yards -remaining. We were installed, however, in time to give the two sections -as advertised—though the managers were so skeptical of my solemn promise -that they would certainly have postponed the opening date had I not been -on the ground to forbid it—and were deluged by such a mob of -pleasure-seekers that we had to close the doors and hold hundreds of -them back until the second section. - -Next day the agent of a local steamship line came to the theater and -measured all our trunks, arranging to send the whole outfit to Bahia the -following Monday for about one-tenth what train-travel had led us to -expect. For I had come at last to a break in the railroads up the east -coast of South America and was forced to take to the sea for the first -time since Hays and I had entered the continent at Cartagena, Colombia, -two and a half years before. On Wednesday “Tut” and I took our last -Victorian stroll—the negro boys along the way halting open-mouthed and -gazing up and down him to see where he was spliced—and in the afternoon -I boarded the _Maranhão_ of the Lloyd-Brazileiro and settled down in my -cabin. I had dropped into a Brazilian novel of colonial days and -completely forgotten the life of the harbor and the little capital that -was still crawling slowly on about us, when I was suddenly astonished to -see standing before me the owner and manager of the theater. Those two -stodgy, bashful, rather artless mulattoes had hired a boat and taken the -time and trouble to come out on board to bid me the good-by, which I, in -my American incivility, had completely forgotten. One after the other -they gave me the fraternal South American embrace of a handshake and an -affectionate patting on the back with the left hand, assuring me that -the show would be run with as great care and our percentage as honestly -computed as if I were there in person, that they would see to it that my -entire “company” boarded the Monday steamer, and bade me be sure to stop -and see them if ever I came that way again. The most steel-rimmed -color-line could not but be joggled by such Brazilian amiability. - -On the second morning thereafter, with no other incident than being -halted and examined by British cruisers hidden among the Abrolhos -Islands in Brazilian waters, the _Maranhão_ slipped smoothly into the -immense Bay of All Saints, specks of white sails dotting its blue -immensity, distant land with low hills gradually spreading along all the -port horizon, and when I chanced to look up again the City of São -Salvador da Bahia was gazing down upon us from the ridge along which it -stretches for mile after hazy mile. - -“Colonel” Ruben Pinheiro Guimarães was manager of the principal -playhouse in Bahia. The ancient “São João,” imperial theater when -Portuguese viceroys ruled Brazil, still kept much of its stateliness in -spite of being rather unkempt and disreputable after more than a century -of constant use. In situation it takes second place to no other in the -world, sitting out on the nose of the upper city, where to step off its -esplanade would be to fall hundreds of feet down to the business section -below, and gazing away across the bay to the utmost limits of the ocean -horizon. Ruben, a _Paulista_ of unbroken Portuguese ancestry, had the -reputation of being somewhat related in business matters to the eel -family; but there is a certain pleasure in flirting with possible fraud, -as with any other kind of danger. It was not until eight at night, -however, that I got his name signed to a “split-even” contract for -twenty-five days, fifteen of them in the theaters of Bahia and ten in -towns about the bay. - -Unfortunately São Salvador da Bahia was not an ideal place to settle -down. For one thing, it had a new style in hotels. Elsewhere in Brazil -they had been questionable, here they were not in the least so, for not -one of them pretended to be anything but what it was,—full of frousy -females who had not even the virtue of being young or good-looking, hags -on the last rung of the ladder that leads from concubinage in Europe -through street-walking in Rio down to the gutter of pandering to the -chiefly African rouées of Bahia. Even as hotels they were the worst -imaginable, yet high-priced at that, and with adventurous women from -foreign parts assigned to every other room and constantly hanging out -the windows one had the edifying sensation of living in a brothel. - -The hotel I was finally compelled to endure looked out across the -marvelous bay, upon the “São João,” and down the wide stone-paved street -leading from the upper to the lower town. Up this snorted huge -motor-trucks loaded with meat from the abattoirs, straining automobiles, -and an unending procession of those citizens of Bahia who found it -cheaper to walk than to squander the _tostão_ it costs to be lifted from -the lower to the upper level. Great quantities of freight also ascended -or descended on foot. A trunk or two, with perhaps a valise on top, -often came noiselessly marching up the steep street on negro heads; -bedsteads, bird-cages, bureaus and all other forms of furniture, fruit -in baskets or without, bunches of bananas laid flat on a frizzled pate, -chickens with their legs tied and panting in the roasting sun, every -known and nameable article that cannot cave in an African skull moved by -what is still the cheapest form of transportation in Bahia, even in this -century of steam and electricity. - -The former capital and oldest city of Brazil takes its popular name—the -official and correct one is São Salvador—from the immense bay on which -it is situated—the bay which from anywhere in the upper town stretches -away in deepest indigo-blue, everywhere dotted with specks of white -sails, to the low ridges of hills, faint with distance, that all but -surround it. In some ways it has a finer setting than that of Rio, -though it is not so strikingly, so dramatically, beautiful, and the old -capital has the advantage over the new that almost constant trade winds -sweep across it. Bahia is built in two stories, that at sea-level being -at most a few blocks deep and often thinning down to a single row of -buildings. “O Commercio” the _Bahianos_ call this lower part, and it is -almost exclusively a business section, perhaps the only spot in South -America that resembles lower New York in being silent and uninhabited at -night, with only a few watchmen and belated pedestrians treading the -dimly gas-lighted streets. - -The upper town is reached either by a hard climb up the stone-paved -roadway, by an American elevator of sixteen-person capacity, or by a -steeply inclined cable railway with single cars. Hotels, stores, -theaters, almost everything except the wharves, wholesale business, and -the main market-place, are on the upper level. Nearly every building -dates back to colonial days and many of the old houses are in splendid -situations, perched on the edge of the ridge at the very base of which -lies the immense bay. But they are taken up almost entirely by the -descendants of slaves, with the accumulated uncleanliness of -generations, and the white minority of Bahia has been driven to the -often less attractive suburbs. The upper and main part of the town is -built chiefly on two ridges, facing the sea and the bay respectively and -in many places falling sheer into them. On their tops the ridges are -thickly inhabited, and the streets crisscross in an effort to conform to -the irregular lay of the land, but every now and then they disappear -through wooded lanes into hilly virgin forests with innumerable huge -trees,—the mammoth _aguacate_, thickly hung with alligator-pears, the -intense green dome-shaped mango, most perfect shade-tree of the tropics, -and here and there palm-trees standing haughtily above all else—for the -rolling ridges are often broken with deep valleys in which negro huts -congregate. - -It would be beneath the dignity, as well as contrary to the languid -temperament, of Bahia to take a census, but at the popular Brazilian -pastime of guessing statistics the city professes to have about one -third of a million inhabitants; there is no question that it is the -third city in size in Brazil. Of that number certainly eight out of ten -are negroes, a majority of them full-blooded, with all the traits their -ancestors brought with them from the African bush, plus the faults of -their Portuguese-Brazilian neighbors. Except for the two or three élite -sections, such as that along the summit of the second ridge, there is -scarcely a corner of Bahia in which one cannot stroll an hour or more -and never see any but a black face—with the single exception that even -in the most African quarters the shops are almost invariably kept by -Portuguese, pasty-white of complexion, whether because of the sedentary -indoor lives they lead or because of the contrast to the sea of blacks -about them. One soon comes to know every white face in Bahia, even those -with Caucasian ancestry enough to be individually distinguishable, so -frequently does one notice them in the business streets, theaters, -street-cars, and more pretentious cafés. - -More slaves were brought to the province of Bahia than to any other of -Brazil, not only because the planting of sugar and tobacco required much -labor but because this part of Portuguese America was earliest settled. -The original settlers from overseas were too proud to work; the negroes -they brought over to work for them were emancipated and also refused to -work, crowding into town to live on what they could pick up between -their incessant native dances and church festivals, so that we have the -edifying spectacle of an immense state, possessing unlimited natural -resources, virtually bankrupt. It is said that the old colonial life, -the old-time somnolence, Brazil as she was in the olden days, is still -best seen in Bahia. If so, I am glad that my Brazilian journey came at a -later date. Compared with the old capital, Rio seems little more than a -quadroon city, and few negroes among many whites is plainly better for -the negro than to be surrounded on all sides by bad examples of his own -race. - -The negroes are so numerous and so sluggish in their movements that -unless one would be jostled at every turn one can travel the streets -only by stepping out of their way. They lie on every corner and in every -gutter; they loll, blocking the streets, in every shaded spot, on every -threshold—wearing a few rags, yet often with a crude native cigar -protruding from their thick lips, irrespective of sex, for Bahia is -Brazil’s tobacco center and “fumo” is cheap—negroes, negroes everywhere, -until they swim in black specks before the eyes when one closes them. It -is another amusing example of the pseudo-civilization of South America -that in the upper town the police will stop any man in full comfortable -dress of summer who wears no coat, while negroes and even a few poor -whites parade anywhere in a ragged, unbuttoned jacket without the -suggestion of shirt or undershirt beneath it and barely enough -suggestion of trousers to save them from complete nudity. - -The negroes of Bahia speak Portuguese much as those of our southern -states do English. In their mouths _noite_ becomes “noitche,” _muito_ is -“muitcho,” _senhor_ is “’nhor,” and “’nha” may mean either _senhora_ or -_senhoras_. How much of his Latin garrulousness the negro has caught -from living with that race and how much his ancestors brought him from -the Dark Continent is an interesting question. I do not believe the -native African chatters with such a flow of words and gestures as are to -be seen in any black gathering in Bahia. The cheerfulness and hilarious -gaiety for which the race is noted stands out clearly in the general -temperament of the old capital; while the _Carioca_ is the gloomiest and -most suicidal of Brazilians, the _Bahiano_ rarely shows either tendency. - -Down in the swarming market-place in the lower town powerful negroes of -both sexes—the most splendid physical specimens in Brazil are the -blacks—lie languidly about, hoping to sell a few cents’ worth of -something,—pineapples, melons, mangos, sapotes, lemons, huge -alligator-pears at a cent each, the blushing _cajú_, the _jaca_, or -jack-fruit, which grows to watermelon size on the trunks of trees and -has a white meat so coarse that it is eaten only by negroes; bread-nuts -and bread-fruit, bananas, rosaries of what seem to be shelled but -unroasted peanuts, small oranges, green in color—for though there are -fine big seedless ones in Bahia this was not the season for them—and -every other known fruit of tropical America, except a few native only to -the Amazon region. Here one may have a _coco molle gelado_, in other -words, iced milk of green cocoanut, than which there is no better way of -quenching tropical thirst; here one may even find a man who, as a last -resort against starvation, will almost be willing to work, at least to -the extent of carrying away on his head anything less than a grand piano -or the heavier makes of automobiles. Many copper coins, virtually -unknown in the rest of Brazil, are used in the markets of -Bahia,—_vintems_ and double _vintems_, or twenty and forty-reis -pieces—and the negroes still make their computations in the old colonial -terms. In _Bahiano_ market dialect a _meia-pataca_ is 180 reis and a -_pataca_ twice that, though there are no actual coins of those -denominations. Nickel, in one hundred reis pieces and higher, is too -valuable for most negro transactions. As they say in Bahia, with a black -it is “_vintem pa’ cachaza, vintem pa’ farinha, e prompto!_” (a copper -for rum, a copper for mandioca meal, and enough!) He will not work again -until he must have more _cachaza_ and _farinha_. Whenever any real work -is required, such as the digging of sewers, paving of streets, or laying -of street car tracks, gangs of white Europeans have to be shipped in to -do it. - -[Illustration: Victoria, capital of the state of Espiritu Sancto, is a -tiny edition of picturesque Rio] - -[Illustration: Bahia from the top of the old “Theatro São João”] - -[Illustration: Beggars of Bahia, backed by some of our advertisements] - -[Illustration: A family of Bahia, and a familiar domestic chore] - -Yet sometimes it is hard to blame the negro if he just lies in the shade -and a soft breeze and gazes away at the beautiful bay, indigo-blue by -day, shimmering with moonlight by night, ever fresh with the breezes -that lightly ruffle its ocean-like bosom, as if he were making up for -the loafing denied his enslaved fathers. After all, if Nature wished man -to exert himself, why does it produce such perfect weather and cause -bananas and jack-fruit to grow of themselves? The languid -picturesqueness of Bahia is best personified in the typical _Bahiana_, -black or near-black in color, wearing many bracelets and similar -ornaments of tin and wire, sometimes gilded, her immense hips heavy with -bulky skirts only a trifle less gay in color than her waist, shawl, and -turban, placidly smoking a big native cigar and carrying on her head a -small stool or a tiny table, legs-up like a helpless turtle, with -perhaps a closed umbrella lying flat on top of that, on her way to squat -on the one and lean on or raise the other in church or market. If she -has only a single banana with her, the _Bahiana_ will carry it on her -head rather than by hand. I have seen the ancient anecdote of the -negro-girl servant given a letter to post, who put it on her head and -laid a stone on top to keep it from blowing away, duplicated in the -streets of Bahia. Racial languor, however, gives way to passionate -activity when some black troubadour takes to thrumming his guitar and -singing _modinhas_ and _chorados_. These popular ballads of Brazil, -especially of Bahia and Pernambuco, mixtures of the _moda_ and _fado_ of -Portugal and of the tribal rites of savage Africa, are childish in -thought and monotonous of rhythm, weird, languishing, half-wild songs, -often improvised by the unlettered troubadours and accompanied by -sensual dances and strange African movements of the body into which the -whole negro throng gradually merges, discarding all remnants of their -second-hand civilization. - -With such an electorate it is scarcely to be expected that Bahia should -swarm with honest politicians. Indeed, it is frankly admitted that -elections there are so corrupt that few bother to go to the polls and -take part in what the native papers refer to as “our electoral farce,” -knowing that the votes cast have nothing whatever to do with the result, -which the government in power fixes beforehand. Graft and misgovernment -are acknowledged to be worse than in Rio. Yet on the surface there is -the usual Latin-American polish. The scavengers of Bahia had not been -paid a cent in months, yet the municipality was building a “palace” in -which a single staircase cost 400,000$000! A year before my arrival a -delegation from the Boston Chamber of Commerce had landed at Bahia on a -water-edge tour of South America, were brought ashore in a magnificent -launch “at the city’s expense,” and treated with such tropical -generosity that their letters to home newspapers bubbled over with -praises of the wonderful hospitality of Bahia. Agostinho Manoel de -Jesus, owner of the launch in which they had landed, was still going -daily to the city treasury asking in vain for his money. - -Bahia was said to be the only place left in Brazil where bubonic plague -and yellow fever still persisted. It could hardly be otherwise with rats -running up and down every pipe, with every opening, corner, or slightly -out of the way place covered with accumulated filth, and with sanitary -arrangements almost everywhere in the old town quite beyond the -descriptive powers of Boccaccio. In contrast, great placards and posters -everywhere, bearing the heading “Directoria Geral de Saude Pública” -(General Directory of Public Health) strive to carry out the bluff that -the town boasts a system of sanitation. Even the highest priced hotel -would be instantly condemned in any civilized city; the conditions in -which the vast majority of the population live are beyond any -imagination. During the preceding April thirty-five members of the -foreign colony, almost one third of it and including the English pastor, -had died of yellow fever, which was expected to begin again with the -rains. Yet my hotel furnished no mosquito net and I awoke each morning -bitten in a dozen places—and any Brazilian will tell you that only white -foreigners take yellow fever. In compensation only natives, and chiefly -negroes, die of the equally prevalent bubonic plague. The federal -government offered to send to Bahia the man who disinfected Rio, but the -state government haughtily replied that they were quite capable of -cleaning up the place themselves, and meanwhile sudden death continues -to flourish. - -On my first Sunday in Bahia one of her innumerable _festas_ was at its -height, that of “Nosso Senhor do Bomfim,” a miracle-producing shrine of -great popularity among the negroes. On Saturday night the street cars in -that direction were so crowded that I could not even hang on. Bands of -negroes carrying Japanese lanterns, singing, beating drums, tamborines, -and tin cans, marched in almost constant procession past my window down -to the lower city and on out to Bomfim, a section of town three miles -away around the harbor, the electric-lighted façade of its miracle -church standing forth from the night like a monument to the ignorance, -squalor, and hunger of Bahia. From midnight on the throngs were even -thicker, frequently waking me with their maudlin din, for the festival -of Bomfim is especially an all-night affair, with much drinking and -worse. On Sunday afternoon I went out to the scene of the festivities. -There were thirty persons in the street-car, of whom two were white. On -the climb up the hill to the church the way was flanked by two unbroken -rows of beggars, lame, halt, blind, twisted, deformed, degenerate -monstrosities, idiots of all degrees and every percentage of African -blood, every imaginable horror in human form, and just plain nigger -loafers, all holding out their hands, or whatever they had left in place -of them, in constant appeal. - -The church itself was so packed that I could only enter by climbing the -stairs to a small side-gallery and look down upon an unbroken sea of -black faces, wrapt up in what sounded like a medieval Catholic service -translated into African voodooism. Among the schemes concocted by the -swarming priests of Bahia is one that shows the suggestion of -originality. At the huge church and monastery of São Antonio the -faithful can buy, at a milreis each, special stamps designed by the -priests, with which to write to St. Anthony in Heaven, and be assured of -a direct answer from him—through his priestly agents on earth, of -course—on any subject. - -“Lots of churches in Bahia,” I remarked conversationally to the white -_Bahiano_ beside whom I stood watching the riot of gambling, drinking, -and indecency about the home of “miracles.” - -“Oh, not out here,” he apologized. “Here there is only Nosso Senhor do -Bomfim, and São Antonio,” and Sao This and Sao That, naming a dozen or -more as he pointed them out roundabout. “This is only a little corner -suburb of our great city, but in Bahia itself there _are_ churches.” - -It is a popular saying in Bahia that there is one church for every day -in the year, an exaggeration probably, but there are scores of massive -old colonial ones, not to mention monasteries full of fat, loafing -monks, on all the best commanding heights and taking up perhaps half the -city’s space. While some are fallen in ruins and are melting away from -the physical impossibility of keeping up so many, even now this -ignorant, poverty-stricken city was building several more, the latest to -cost three thousand contos—though not thirty per cent of the -contributors can read. In contrast, the schools of Bahia are horrible -little dens over butcher-shops and saloons and brothels, with forty or -fifty children packed into rooms that would not be comfortable for ten, -without any arrangements whatever for their bodily requirements. Even at -that, if every school in the city were packed to suffocation from dawn -until dark, not one third the children of school age could attend them. -The public library in this capital of an enormous and potentially rich -state, in a town of one third of a million inhabitants, reported that -“632 books or works of reference were consulted during the year.” Yet -fear or superstition caused every newspaper in town to print long -editorials praising the “beautiful festa of Bomfim” and the honor it did -to “Him whom it honored,” while the drunken debauchery was still going -on. - -By the Wednesday after my arrival “Colonel” Ruben, who, whatever his -faults, knew the art of advertising, had the fronts of all street-cars -and every blank wall in town plastered with Kinetophone posters mostly -of his own concoction, announcing to his fellow-citizens that on _Quarta -Feria_—Fourth Festival, to wit: Thursday—would open the Greatest -Cinematographic Occurrence of the Ages; The Eighth Marvel! Surprising! -Stupendous!! Phenomenal!!! The Discovery of the Year. Man no longer -dies! Edison has immortalized him! And at Popular Prices!! Everyone to -the SAO JOAO!!! When a brilliant sun woke me before seven on that -epochal morning, there was no sign of a steamer in all the blue expanse -of All Saints’ Bay. I shaved and was just starting for the “rain bath,” -however, when I caught sight of one nearing harbor. I still had time to -dress, drink the thimbleful of black coffee they call a breakfast in -Brazil, and descend to the wharves before the craft tied up there, with -“Tut” and Carlos hanging over the rail. I brought them up to my hotel, -for as all those in Bahia were equally disreputable it was as well to be -together for mutual protection, but it took us until noon to unravel the -red tape necessary to get our trunks ashore, quite as if we had been -landing from a foreign country. - -For all his reputation, “Colonel” Ruben was an engaging fellow, and -though I made it plain to him that I would not trust him out of my -sight, he took it good-naturedly and assured me he welcomed all the -“fiscalization” I could give him. - -“I notice you don’t trust people to any great extent yourself,” I -smiled, thinking to let him down easy. - -“Trust!” cried Ruben, with a serio-comic gesture, “I trust my own -teeth—and they bite my tongue!” - -I took him at his word and, having designed a rubber stamp, made him -produce packets of the four kinds of tickets used, ran them through a -consecutive enumerator, and stamped them all. He who has never tried to -stamp 1500 tickets an hour by hand will not realize what a daily task I -had laid out for myself merely for the satisfaction of giving Ruben and -his satellites proper “fiscalization.” These stamped tickets I handed -each night to the ticket-seller and at least one and sometimes all three -of us stood at the door ready to protest if anyone entered without a -stamped ticket, as well as to see that all went into the locked box -beside the door-keeper. After the show all unsold tickets were turned -over to me, the treasurer gave me a copy of the official _borderaux_, or -statement of tickets sold and the amount of money taken in, I unlocked -the door-boxes and carried home their contents to check him up, and one -half the day’s receipts in ragged Brazilian cash went into my pocket -before I could be budged out of the “São João” office. - -I unmasked one trickster at the very first performance. Being still -stranger enough to most of the “São João” force to pass incognito, I -wandered up the dingy back stairs to the _gallinheiro_ (chicken roost), -as “nigger heaven” is called in Brazil, and found that the negro at the -door was accepting money in lieu of tickets. It was not that the money -was not quite as good, if anything it was a trifle less flimsy, but -somehow it could not be forced into the ticket-box at the taker’s elbow. -He resigned from Ruben’s staff less than a minute later. - -Long before the first session ended we had closed the inner doors and -the lobby was threatening to overflow. For the first time in Brazil I -had permitted other “special attractions” to be offered with our own; -that is, in addition to the ordinary films Ruben had engaged two stray -Italian females who howled through several spasms of what they and most -of the audience seemed to think was music. As they had been hired before -our contract was made, and their wages were nothing out of our pockets, -I could only reasonably demand that the Kinetophone remain the -head-liner. The blacks of Bahia, we soon discovered, have not yet -reached even the moving-picture stage of development, rum, dances, and -church festivals being their high-water mark in recreation, and not ten -per cent. of our paid audiences were negroes, in a town where fully -three fourths of the population is of that race. But our audiences were -large for all that, because the lighter minority came again and again to -see the chief novelty that had reached Bahia in several seasons. Even -this near-white class, however, was not conspicuous for its -prepossessing appearance, and the calm, steadfast, efficient face of -Edison, gazing out from our posters through these throngs of indolent, -ambitionless mortals, insignificant of physique and racially entangled, -gave a striking contrast, typical of the two continents of the New -World. - -Our first Sunday, in particular, was a busy day. It is the custom all -over Brazil for the “excellentissimas familias” to go to the “movies” on -Sunday afternoon or evening, and the habit is so fixed that they prefer -to pack in to the point of drowning in their own perspiration, even at -double prices, rather than see a better show on a week day. For managers -naturally take advantage of this fad and offer their poorest -attractions—just as Ruben withdrew his “imported artists” on this -day—knowing they will fill their houses anyway. If only we could have -taken Sunday with us, movable, transportable, and played on that day in -every town, we would have made as great a fortune as if the World War -had never cast the pall of a “brutal crisis” over Brazil. - -By one in the afternoon I was at the theater door in impresario -full-dress and managerial smile, greeting the considerable crowd that -came to the matinée, and disrupting the plans of those who had hoped to -drag five or six children by in the shadow of their skirts or trousers. -Then, with scarcely time for a meat-laden Brazilian supper in our -disreputable hotel across the street, I came back to the most crowded -theater I had seen in months. By 7:30 we had already closed the inner -doors and the élite of Bahia continued to stack up in the lobby until -that, too, had overflowed long before the first session ended. We were -compelled to send policemen in to eject the first audience, and when the -house had been emptied and the gates opened again, it flooded full from -floor to “paradise” five stories up as quickly as a lock at Panama does -with water. Even then all could not crowd in, and we herded them up once -more in preparation for a third session, which, though not beginning -until after ten, was also packed. Nothing so warms the cockles of a -manager’s heart as to watch an unbroken sea of flushed and eager faces -following his entertainment. By this time I had met most of the high -society of Bahia, all her white and near-white “best families,” with now -and then some physically very attractive girls among them, having -marched at least once past my eagle eye. That night I carried off more -money than had fallen to our lot since our first days in Rio and São -Paulo. - -Though silver was conspicuous by its scarcity in Bahia, there were other -troubles attached to the handling of money. Those familiar only with the -quick and convenient methods of American banks can have little -conception of the difficulties of banking in South America. No two banks -in any city in Brazil, for instance, would accept one another’s checks; -worse still, two branches of the same bank in neighboring cities would -not transfer funds of their depositors without all the formalities and -expense involved in such transactions between foreign countries. Where -there is no mutual confidence there can be no credit system, and instead -of giving or receiving a check, one must carry a roll of cash, like a -professional gambler or a manipulator of politicians. By the time I had -four contos laid away in a British bank, exchange had bounded skyward -again, and it would only have been to waste what little Linton was -making to buy drafts as that rate; yet the bank refused to transfer our -account to their own institution in Rio or Pernambuco, except at a high -commission. When the day came for us to move northward again I was -forced to draw out our earnings in ragged bills of tiny denominations -and carry them with me. - -Of “deadheads” and official mendicants the “São João” had its full -share. Ruben sent ten tickets a day to police headquarters, but those -who came on duty gave these tickets to friends and bootblacks and negro -relatives, and thrust their way in on the strength of their uniform or -badge. We were overrun with grafters filling seats and using up programs -for which honest people would have been willing to pay money, while a -dozen of the best boxes were permanently allocated to state and -municipal officials and powerful politicians. When I protested to -“Colonel” Ruben, I learned another interesting little fact,—he was -forced to be kind to politicians because, thanks to his political pull, -he got this great four-tier theater, built by the government in viceroy -days and now belonging to the State of Bahia, rent free! As to the -police, he confided to me that he had to be lenient with them in order -that they might not be too harsh with him when he offered shows of the -“_sem roupa_” or undress variety. - -For all the resentment of frustrated “deadheads” and the attitude of -Bahia’s newspapers, which at first gave five lines to Edison’s invention -and full pages to the religious debauch of Bomfim, the success of the -Kinetophone forced the five or six dailies to give our engagement -increasing attention. They were all rather pitiful sheets, and in a town -where at least three-fourths of the population never reads it would have -seemed highly advisable to have combined them into one good newspaper. -That of course would have been impossible, because of Latin-America’s -lack of team-work and mutual confidence, as well as the demand of each -political faction for its own organ of propaganda. One day there -appeared in the best of these sorry journals a long and learned article -by a Brazilian purist who, though flattering to the invention and the -inventor, asserted that it should be called “Cinephonio” rather than -“Kinetophone.” I was feeling in good Portuguese form by this time, and -having leisure enough to dig back through the layers of philology to -ancient Greece, I sent in an equally long and learned answer that -decidedly surprised editor, contributor, and reading public, accustomed -only to the type of American business man who is utterly ignorant of, -and wholly uninterested in, the native tongue. Comments on this -controversy and its astonishing dénouement drifted to my ears from our -throngs for more than a week afterward. - -Such experiences as this emphasized the unwisdom of the habit of many -American firms of sending the same “drummer” to cover both Brazil and -Spanish-America. Brazilians have a rivalry toward Argentinos which -amounts to hatred; they consider the Castilian tongue particularly the -language of the Argentine and at least pretend to regard it as a -corruption of their own, of which they are unreasonably proud. Hence the -traveling-man who addresses them in Spanish is more apt to arouse -resentment than commercial interest. If he cannot speak Portuguese, he -will do better to stick to English, using an interpreter when necessary, -or take a chance on his French, which most educated Brazilians -understand more or less, rather than deliberately to incense them by -using the tongue of their rivals and implying its importance over their -own. - -We had now reached a latitude where it is doubly wise for the white man -to exercise regularly, and the daily walk that had always been a custom -I now made a stern requirement. Complaints against sluggish livers were -almost universal in the small foreign colony, but I noted that they -invariably went with large liquor bills and a scorn of pedestrianism, -even in its mildest forms. Personally, though it was unquestionably hot -and perspiration flowed at the least physical exertion, I found the -climate of Bahia agreeing splendidly with me, and a few miles of brisk -walking, followed by a refreshing “rain bath,” became a pleasure to -which to look forward. “Tut” could frequently be coaxed to go with me, -but his Brazilian training made Carlos prefer to loaf about the theater -and watch the rehearsing of dancing girls, in the face of my warning -that he was now in a different land than his cool and temperate São -Paulo. There were fine points to Carlos; one often caught a suggestion -that in some such stern environment as the United States he would have -turned out a man of parts, but the error of his parents in turning south -instead of north across the Atlantic made his struggle with environment -a pitched battle, with the odds against him. - -There are endless wooded hills and valleys in Bahia, with old forts on -every projecting angle of the city, on both the bay and the ocean side, -which recall the days when São Salvador was the proud capital of Brazil, -unworried by the suspicion of a future rival. Out beyond the élite -section along the Rua Victoria, past the old church said to stand on the -very site in which the city was founded, a nose of land jutting out into -the sea and swept by unfailing breezes was shaded by an aged fort and -lighthouse that made its sloping greensward or quaint stone benches the -most ideal place in South America to spend an afternoon lolling over a -book. If one felt more energetic, there were amusing characters among -the curious wicker fish-traps down on the beach below. Often I walked -all morning long entirely within the city limits through dense -uninhabited jungle, following soft earth roads down through great -valleys with clusters of negro cabins, and shops of the equally -superstitious Portuguese with whom they trade, bearing such names as “Fé -em Deus,” “Esperanç aem Deus,” “Todo com Deus,” the householders lolling -in the shade beneath them and letting _Deus_ do the rest. Here the motto -seemed to be “God helps those who wave a flag with His name on it.” It -was almost a relief to run across such frankly cynical shop-names as “A -Protectora da Probeza” (The Protector of Poverty). - -Bahia is built on a peninsula connected with the rest of the continent -by a narrow neck of land, and out this runs its railway line, soon to -split into three branches which wander away into the interior of the -state. My random wandering brought me out across this one morning and on -along the shore of an inner arm of the bay, here endlessly lined with -negro huts. I was quenching my tropical thirst with a juicy watermelon -when a negro stopped to ask if I did not know that I would die if I ate -watermelon in the middle of the day, and soon brought a crowd of excited -blacks chattering and gesticulating about me. South America is full of -such amusing superstitions, concerning the danger of eating certain -foods at certain times, or of eating simultaneously two that do not “fit -together.” An old dugout sailed me across the breezy neck of the inner -bay from Brandão to Itapagipe, sparing me a return tramp of five miles, -for at this point the electric cars pass frequently. There is a long -beach in this middle-class suburb of Itapagipe, and a little wharf at -which crude sailing boats from about the bay unload watermelons and -mangos, bananas and big luscious pineapples, the latter selling on the -spot for a mere _tostão_, or those with empty pockets may fish slightly -damaged ones out of the water for nothing. On such excursions one must -take care not to dress too carelessly, for there are, of course, two -classes in the Philadelphia-made street-cars of Bahia and little visible -sign to distinguish them, so that on almost every tour through the -first-class car the conductor is forced to order men without coats, or -collars, or socks, or real shoes, or a proper haircut to go back into -the other. On the other hand he, too, has his rebuffs, for almost anyone -wearing a frock-coat says haughtily, “I have a pass,” though never -offering to show it, and the conductor sneaks obsequiously on. - -A favorite recreation of foreign residents and wealthy white natives of -Bahia is to visit the principal ships that anchor in the harbor. To many -this is the one touch of civilization superior to that at home, as the -trains in which the people come to sit for a few minutes are to the -inhabitants of interior villages. But most of them come for more -material purposes,—the foreign residents to imbibe “real booze” once -more, the élite among the natives to defraud the country’s revenues by -replenishing their wardrobes at the ship’s barber shop, buying boxes of -chocolate, scented soap, perfumes, lingerie, all the smaller luxuries -which can only be had at much higher price or not at all on shore, -“women of the life” on professional errands or merely to catch a breath -of their beloved Europe. There was a steam-laundry on the ships I -visited and had I thought of it in time I might have brought my soiled -“linen” on board, as did not a few residents, and had it back when the -boat returned from Buenos Aires. To entrust anything to the native -washerwomen of Brazil, particularly of Bahia, is to risk having it worn -for a week or more by the laundress’s husband or lover, and to insure -that it shall be beaten to a pulp in some mud-hole, dried among -goat-dung, and returned a fortnight or so later more torn and soiled -than when it departed. - -About a week after we opened in Bahia, Ruben drifted around to my usual -station in the course of the evening and said that he would like to -lengthen our contract from twenty-five to ninety days. I declined at -once, at least on a fifty per cent. basis. He next offered to pay the -baggage haul in addition; then he promised to defray all our traveling -expenses, and to cover all the territory from Bahia to Pernambuco. I -promised to think this over. - -Though I had not found Ruben “crooked as a bed-spring,” as some of his -former business associates described him, I knew that he had not been -designed with a T-square—and Ruben knew that I knew it. But he was a -good “mixer” and an excellent manipulator of politicians, which is a -great advantage in Brazil, and is acquired with great difficulty by a -foreigner, no matter how well he may learn the language. Besides, Ruben -had the most American ideas on advertising of any Brazilian I had ever -met and though, of course, he expected to make something out of us, it -was a question whether we would not get more ourselves while he was -making his profit than we could make alone. Sometimes a crook, well -watched, is a better business partner than an honest man, for he is -likely to take a chance and is rarely as slow to see an opportunity as -are more sincere individuals. - -I did not, however, care to spend three months in that corner of the -world. I hoped, in fact, to be well up the Amazon by that time, and -after sleeping on it I agreed with the “colonel” on a sixty-day contract -at the terms he had offered. By this time my practice in Portuguese made -it easy to draw up an elaborate document of twelve articles that even a -corporation lawyer would have had difficulty in evading. In effect, it -made Ruben our advance agent, with the privilege of paying himself, and -left me merely my managerial duties. Indeed, this document and what had -led up to it so took the “colonel’s” eye that next day he informed me he -needed a man of my “pulse,” or American energy, and that as soon as I -got the Kinetophone back to the United States I must return and become -manager of the big new theater he was soon going to build on the -triangular vacant lot near the “São João”! - -“Muito obrigado,” I replied, that being Brazilian for “much obliged.” - -We were to play in Bahia and about the bay until carnival time, come -back to the “São João” for those festive days, and then turn northward. -On the morning of January 26 we tore down the show and loaded it into -the special baggage-tramcar Ruben had furnished, moving under guidance -of his part-Indian mulatto sub-manager out to the suburb of Rio -Vermelho. This was a sea-beach village of mainly well-to-do white -residents—though no one seemed to bathe, at least in the sea, in -Bahia—three miles from the center of town through densely wooded valleys -of mango and alligator-pear, jack-fruit and bread-fruit trees, all -heavily loaded with their products. We played to packed houses, with few -“deadheads,” for here Ruben had little fear either of politicians or -police. The cinema of A Barra, another seaside suburb to which we moved -three days later, was an outdoor place of sandy bottom, a sheet-iron -wall, and only a suggestion of roof, always comfortable with the trade -wind sweeping through it. There I could go to the show and look at the -brilliant moon at the same time, and our film-men could be heard talking -and singing blocks away. - -Having performed the extraordinary feat of sleeping seventeen -consecutive nights in the same bed, I decided that I needed a change of -scene. Up at the head of the bay was a town called Santo Amaro da -Purificação, where Ruben had planned to take us; but a religious -festival having broken out there, he changed his mind, saying that -negroes celebrating church _festas_ do not spend money on cinemas. I -went over to see whether he was right, and incidentally to revel in the -“purification” attached to the town’s name. - -One of the little steamers of the “Navegação Bahiana” that sail the bay, -leaving three times a week for most of the towns around it, departed at -high tide with a considerable crowd bound for the _festa_. It was hot -under the lee of the land, but once out on the blue water nothing could -have been more pleasant, at least in so far as weather was concerned. We -stopped at three towns on as many islands and passed many smaller ones -along the base of the bay shore, almost everywhere piled up in -hundred-foot cliffs. The soil, even on the smallest islands, was of that -deep-red color common to much of Brazil, and royal palms lifted their -proud heads over a reed-and-mud negro hut on many a little island. We -picked up _festa_-dressed passengers at several villages. Perhaps one -out of twenty of my fellow-travelers showed no traces of negro ancestry. -Bad teeth were universal among them, more unsightly still in the case of -those with a smile like a flash of a brass-shop window, who could afford -the ministrations of the wandering “dentists” that inflict interior -Brazil. - -By and by the water turned from the dense clear-blue of the bay to a -grayish color. Several large time-blackened churches appeared on -commanding, breezy noses of land, with a few poor houses and miserable -huts tucked away in the hollows beneath them. We entered a small river -that wound in S-shape through a sort of marsh, passing a three-story -agricultural school that loomed up through the palm-tree jungle in -apparently utter isolation, and at sunset tied up at the end of a long -causeway across a swamp, where a dozen quaint little mule-cars were -waiting for us. The fare on these for a two-mile ride was a milreis, -which was bad enough, but the driver, singling me out as the only -foreigner and person of wealth among the _festa_-bound horde, and no -doubt short of cash for his own celebration, demanded that I pay double -fare, and was invited to go to the devil for his pains. - -He was going there anyway, it turned out, for if the manager of the more -populous afterworld does not own Santo Amaro da Purificação it would be -hard to get anyone else to claim it. A long, thin, one-story town, -stretching out for a mile or more through low, soggy land, it is -inhabited almost entirely by animal-like blacks festooned in dirty rags. -Groups of loafing negroes filled every doorway, covered every shady -spot, occupied the narrow remnants of dilapidated sidewalks, doing -nothing for a living, not even taking in one another’s washing, and -living happily ever after for all that. A cross between a ditch and a -river flows—or rather, lies—through the length of the town, and in this -stagnant sewage the inhabitants not only attempt to swim when the whim -comes upon them, but dip up water for cooking purposes. To drink it -would evidently kill even a Brazilian negro, so in various parts of the -town there are public spigots shut in by iron fences, with an elaborate -“office” and a turnstile that can be passed only by paying a _vintem_ -for a can of water. Along the noisome canal are a few distilleries, -dirty as the rest of the town, and a bit of sugar-cane is grown in the -vicinity, but on its edges Saint Amaro of the Purification breaks at -once into green rolling campo, which the swarming inhabitants are too -indolent to cultivate. Two automobiles had come to show off at the -_festa_, and were so rare a sight that whenever they appeared, jouncing -and bumping down one of the so-called streets, with a dozen of the town -notables clinging wide-eyed to the seats, all the children and most of -the adults took to pursuing them with shouts of “Oo ah-oo-tah-mave!” - -The festival really did not begin until next day, but as often happens -in Latin-America, the people could not wait and were already celebrating -the _véspera_. About the _matrix_, or main church, surged immense -throngs of leprous, unwashed negroes, hilarious with the -drunken-religious orgy. Native rum flowed everywhere. There were -forty-two gambling tables running full blast, with crowds of children -from six to sixty—if anyone ever lives to that age in Santo -Amaro—throwing their money upon them, many so poor that they had only -coppers to hazard. Any negro boy who could get a table, mark a square of -cloth or cardboard with numbers or colors, and produce a tin can and -three dice or any kind of home-made roulette wheel, became forthwith the -proprietor of a gambling establishment. The town was lighted by -gas—except that most of this was now used to illuminate an “AVE MARIA” -in letters ten feet high on the façade of the church. Under this a band -blew itself almost brown in the face in honor of the tin Virgin inside -the musty old church, before which throngs of gaudily but raggedly -dressed negroes were bowing down, crossing themselves on the face, -mouth, navel, and finally the body, and displaying curious intermixtures -of Catholicism and African fetish worship. - -All night long the hubbub lasted. My unknown Brazilian roommate in the -“Pensão Universal,” a human sty which had recently opened as a public -hostelry and would no doubt close again after the festival, had usurped -the bed by piling his junk upon it, and left me a crippled canvas cot. I -was awakened frequently by the cold coming up through this, though by no -means so often as by the amorous negro swains and wenches retiring from -the exciting festivities to adjoining rooms. - -High noon found me struggling to get a railway-ticket back to Bahia. It -was no easy feat. Eventually we had to break into the inner office and -corner the befuddled agent, who replied to our excited demands with a -tropically phlegmatic, “But there is no hurry; the train will not -_really_ leave at twelve.” Subsequent events proved that he was a better -prophet than the printed time-table. We finally dragged away about two, -on a railroad built in 1881 and still retaining the same roadbed, -rolling-stock, swell-headed old engines and point of view, and rambled -along most of the afternoon, until we came to a derailed train and were -told to get out and walk. Luckily we were only a few miles from Agoa -Cumprida (Long Water), where this branch line is joined by one from up -the coast—and on the whole it might be a good thing to make travelers by -rail get off every little while and walk a few miles. As the first long -cove of the beautiful bay came into view I dropped off and was sailed -across the neck of water in one of the ferry dugouts to Itapagipe, where -one engagement at the “Theatro Popular” was proving popular indeed. - -Three days later all of us, including Ruben in person, took a side-wheel -steamer across the bay to São Felix, planning to spend a week away from -the city. Across the deck from me sat a white woman with three chain -bracelets, one wrist watch, seven very large rings on four fingers of -the left hand, six more on the four fingers of the right hand, a gold -watch-chain some two yards long about her neck, enormous showy earrings, -a gold locket and pendant, and various other gaudy odds and ends. This -paragon of taste, it turned out, was one of our party. She was from -Montevideo and Ruben had brought her along to do a Spanish dance _sem -roupa_—no wonder she needed to be covered with jewelry—for the benefit -of the _matutos_, or “country gawks,” of the interior. - -A couple of hours carried us across the main bay and we entered a narrow -inlet which soon swelled into another and smaller bay that gradually -narrowed down until we found ourselves in an immense river, the -Paraguassú, with low bushy sides and water well up to the branches of -the few trees at high tide. Villages, towns, and single old -_fazenda_-houses under their majestic royal palms appeared here and -there, at some of which we tied up. Others sent on board or took ashore -two or three of the plantation family in flimsy dugout logs paddled by -more or less naked negroes. Most of the towns had names ending in “gipe” -and lived on their exports of _fumo_ and _charutos_ (tobacco and -cigars), that weed, as well as fruit and cacao, growing abundantly back -in what looked like rather a barren and bushy land. The river narrowed, -winding through low hills, and at sunset we sighted the twin towns of -São Felix and Cachoeira, on opposite sides of the stream and connected -by a long railway-and-foot-bridge, at the foot of a series of rapids -over black jagged rocks that halt navigation and give the latter town -its name. - -As usual bedlam broke loose between the chaotic-minded passengers and -the aggressive boatmen, _carregadores_, and touts fighting for business. -Though there was an abundance of men in ragged, baggy uniforms, no one -seemed to have any authority. One evil-eyed, half-baked looking fellow -who drew a razor in the midst of the turmoil turned out to be the -hotel-keeper who had been told to prepare rooms for “the entire -Kinetophone company,” and who did not propose to be outwitted by a -rival. We let them fight it out, put our light baggage into a ferry -“canoe” with Carlos and the undress “artist,” and sent them across the -river—our theater being in São Felix and the boat-landing in Cachoeira. -Then we walked a mile or more along the rough-and-tumble stone streets -of what appeared by the weak gas-lamps to be a town transported bodily -from the heart of the Andes, paid sixty reis at the bridge turnstile, -and brought up at the tiny “Cinema São Felix.” There Ruben and the -Italian owner broke into such garrulous greetings that it was after -eight before we finally dragged our guide and mentor away to the “hotel” -of the belligerent seeker-after-guests, who was now grieving over the -unexpected scantiness of our “company.” - -Of the pseudo-meal foisted upon us after two hours of shouting, -swearing, and insisting, I will say nothing, and even less of the -boiler-factory din that seethed through the tiny pens divided by thin -wooden partitions reaching only halfway to the un-ceiled roof, except to -remark that, as soon as the show was installed next morning, “Tut” and I -might have been seen moving across the river to the “Hotel das Naçoes” -in Cachoeira. This second city of the State of Bahia—equal in size to -Texas—was only a languid backward village, without electric-lights, -without even a wheeled vehicle, unless one counts the tri-weekly -side-wheel steamer or the little railway that rattles up to Feira do -Sant’ Anna and straggles 165 miles west into the interior of the state. -There are several moderately large tobacco and cigar warehouses, but -almost the only sign of industry in either of the twin towns was our -advertising,—a deluge of posters and handbills, and a parade of -_taboletas_, or large movable street-signs, accompanied by negro boys -beating cymbals, drums, and tin pans. We charged double prices, because -the theater was too small to make anything less worthwhile—and we played -to 128 paying clients and a score of “deadheads”! - -Next day the Italian cinema-man begged us with tears in his voice to cut -the entrance fee in two, and as some such drastic action seemed -necessary to save us from bankruptcy, I agreed—and that night we had 89 -paid admissions! These interior towns are so sunk in sloth that they -seem to resent any attempt to shake them out of the somnolence of their -ancestors, out of that apathetic indifference to the advances of -civilization which makes them scorn even the few opportunities of a -life-time to see something new and important, to get some hint of the -world’s progress. Only the barbaric recreation of drunken church -festivals appeals to them. - -I took advantage of the Sunday train to visit Feira do Sant’ Anna, -thirty miles up-country. This line was built back in the seventies, yet -the names of Hugh Wilson and other Americans still appear on various -bridges and viaducts. The train climbed for half an hour, and still we -could look down upon the twin towns close below, but once up on top of -the flat, rather dry and sandy, plateau it raced along at decent -Brazilian speed. The slender branches of the mandioca were numerous, and -here I saw my first tobacco-fields in Brazil. At one station a mile from -the town it served saddle-horses were waiting for the men and enormous, -bungling, two-wheeled mule-carts with wicker armchairs in them for the -women. It would have been dreadful if one of the white-collar class had -been forced to walk that mile along the smooth, dry, cool summer road. -For it was pleasant and breezy up here, though the elevation was not -great; even at summer midday one could walk comfortably in the sun -bareheaded—provided one could walk anywhere comfortably. My preconceived -notions of this region proved entirely false. I had expected dense -jungle and forest, and humid, leaden heat; on the contrary, it was not -only dry and cool, but almost bare of vegetation. - -Feira do Sant’ Anna, so named for the great cattle-fairs that were held -here on St. Ann’s day, is less than a century old, a one-story town -sitting out unsheltered on a dry, sandy, plain. Two streets wider than -Broadway cross at right angles in the center of town, and are fully -paved with cobblestones and lined with small bushy shade trees. On -Monday market-days these are thronged with countrymen and women from a -hundred miles around. To-day a cockfight under a big tree on the -outskirts seemed to be the only activity. Two roosters without -artificial spurs, but with bloody heads and necks, entirely featherless -in spots, pecked at each other eternally, while bullet-headed negroes -and mulattoes stood around them betting—if they still had any -coppers—one owner or the other occasionally picking up his bird, -spraying a mouthful of rum-and-water on its head and neck, and setting -them at it again, until one fell from utter exhaustion and the other, -wabbling drunkenly on his bloody feet, uttered a feeble crow of victory. -Wells with good American force-pumps marked the town a rare one for -interior South America, where the inhabitants generally drink from some -nearby creek or mud-hole; but drought had left little at the bottoms -even of the wells, and this scant supply negro boys were delivering to -various parts of town in casks on mule or donkey-back, a blue enameled -government license on the forehead of each four-footed animal. - -[Illustration: The site on which Bahia was founded] - -[Illustration: Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a -steam-laundry of Bahia] - -[Illustration: Taking a jack-fruit to market] - -When we got back to Bahia on February 10 a brand new hotel had been -opened on the space left between Ruben’s present theater and the -invisible one I had the opportunity of some day managing. It was a -five-story, flat-iron _placete_ on the height of the city, the highest -building in Bahia, or, indeed, in the state, and was the wonder of the -region. The only elevator in the paunch of South America, except the -outdoor one between the lower and higher city, ran all the way up it, -but when “Tut” and I entered, it refused at first to work, whereupon I -stepped out again to get something I had forgotten. - -“Oh, don’t be afraid!” cried the servant, himself ashy with fear, who -was attempting to manipulate it, “it won’t fall.” - -On the fifth floor, spoken of with a catch of the breath in Bahia, we -had a pleasant little room with a vast outlook over city and ocean—and -as it was starting in to acquire a reputation, the place was strictly a -hotel and not a brothel. Materially it was a great relief from what we -had been enduring for weeks past, and the unwonted sensation of living -in well-nigh civilized surroundings again was welcome, but a hotel, -after all, takes its tone from its guests and servants, and these being -_Bahianos_, it was doubtful whether so expensive an establishment would -be able to keep its head above water. Speaking of water, the -shower-baths were extra, as usual in Brazil, but when I confided to the -manager that I would move out again next day, he hastened to assure me -that no one would notice when I bathed. - -Street-cars and walls were again flaunting Kinetophone advertisements -inviting everyone to come and see the “marvel of the age.” But it was -“reheated soup” in Bahia now, and out at Itapagipe, where we had played -three nights to crowded houses only a week before, the Latin enthusiasm -had effervesced and we had only a straggling audience. If only we had -had some new numbers, say a couple of Caruso! The second night was -worse, with our share only 36$, and the owner refused to give a show at -all on the next and last night, saying the few days before carnival were -the worst in the year in the theatrical business, as everyone with a -_tostão_ was keeping it to buy masks, confetti, and scented water. - -Carnival costumes and the silly soprano speech that goes with them were -already beginning to appear in the streets, and by noon on Sunday -negroes and half-negroes in fantastic make-up were everywhere. Most of -the “São João” employees were drunk or excited or parading the streets -by the time we opened for the matinée, and as I could watch the door as -well from there, I sat down behind the wicket and became ticket-seller. -Few ticket-offices in the world can compare with that of the old “São -João” in situation, under the deep colonial porch, open to all the trade -winds of the blue Atlantic, golden-bathed by day and silver-lighted by -night, lying a few hundred feet below and stretching away unbrokenly to -the coast of Africa. - -Masked figures came, asking for tickets in the falsetto they hoped would -disguise their voices, as well as the usual haughty, tar-brushed class -in the full dress of public appearance. I quickly acquired the -professional ticket-seller’s “snappy” language and could toss out a -handful of change or a concise bit of information quite as scornfully as -the most experienced station-agent in my native land. Not a great many -spectators entered that afternoon, however, for which I did not blame -them. Why pay to go inside a musty old theater when the brilliant summer -day outside is full of free entertainments? Only two weeks before there -had been a similar celebration, but there is a constant string of this -expensive tomfoolery the year round in Bahia. The amount spent on -trolley-car and automobile floats alone would have built a good -school-house, to say nothing of the bands of music, costumes, and -playthings. Scores of automobiles filled with fantastically garbed men -and girls crawled through the streets, while thousands afoot were -arrayed in wild and generally ugly and orderless fantasy, with masks or -head-pieces equal to Bottom the Weaver. It was evident that the paraders -were mainly from the lower classes and had little originality of ideas -in designing costumes. Nearly everyone’s slight sense of humor prompted -him to pose as the opposite of what he was in real life; every negro who -could afford it wore a rosy-cheeked mask and white gloves; many of the -few whites had blacked up or donned negro masks, and perhaps half the -men were made up as women, while there was a perfect rage, particularly -among the part-negro girls, to appear in male attire, their hips -bursting through their otherwise loosely flapping nether garments. -“Ladies of the life” took advantage of the spirit of the day and sat -bare-legged in their balconies over the main streets, the police, of -course, never interfering, since correction or suppression are unusual -and unpopular in South America. We cancelled the third “section” that -night and joined the throng parading the streets amid cloud-bursts of -confetti, rivers of scented water, and maudlin uproar, and after looking -in at a popular ball that had many suggestions of a witch dance in the -heart of Africa I went home for my last night’s sleep in São Salvador da -Bahia. - - - - - CHAPTER XVI - EASTERNMOST AMERICA - - -The new contract with “Colonel” Ruben permitted me to absent myself from -the show and travel when and where I saw fit, he to pay my -transportation only by the most direct routes between the towns in which -the Kinetophone appeared. My faith in Ruben was always limited and my -preference for land over sea travel notorious, hence I decided to strike -off up-country a few days before the date set for us to sail for Maceió, -not only to indulge my incurable wanderlust but to prepare for any -sudden collapse of our sixty-day contract. - -“Chemins de Fer Fédéraux de l’Est Bréslienne” seemed as top-heavy a name -for the narrow grass-grown track up the coast as the mammoth stacks made -the little old locomotives. Its tiny cars were designed for the use of -women rather than men, for the seats, instead of facing the open windows -and the world outside, stared into mirrors set in the car walls. We -ground away along the water, past Bomfim, topped by its white “miracle” -church, past Itapagipe beyond the widening water with its little sailing -dugout ferries, crept timidly across the long and aged wooden trestle -over this innermost arm of the bay, and at length lost Bahia to view -just a month from the moment I had first set eyes upon it. - -There were a dozen stops at languid little cocoanut villages along the -fringe of the inner bay before the water gave way to dry and bushy -pasture-land at Agoa Cumprida. Most of the passengers changed there for -Santo Amaro, and for the rest of the journey we had more room than -company, which is usually an advantage in Brazil. Heaps of charcoal, -burned from the scrub trees that abound in this fairly fertile but dry -and little cultivated region, lay at most of the stations, at all of -which throngs of men, women, and boys strove to sell dusty fruit and -home-made cakes to the apathetic passengers. The dust lay thick upon us -also when we drew up at noon in Alagoinhas, eighty miles north. That -day’s train was bound up-country to Joazeiro on the São Francisco river, -and it would be twenty-four hours before I could continue along the -coast. - -[Illustration: The favorite Sunday diversion of rural northern Brazil] - -[Illustration: The waterworks in a Brazilian city of some 15,000 -inhabitants] - -[Illustration: A Brazilian laundry] - -[Illustration: Brazilian milkmen announcing their arrival] - -Some chap with a tendency for exaggeration has said that the night has a -thousand eyes; but that is nothing compared to almost any interior -village of South America when a white stranger comes strolling through -it. To walk the length of a street of Alagoinhas was like trying to -stare down some mammoth, bovine, fixedly gaping face, until a sensitive -man could scarcely have refrained from screaming, “For Heaven’s sake go -and do something, or at least draw in your stupid faces!” Spattered over -a lap of broken country and half-hidden in cocoanut and palm groves, it -would be difficult to decide how many of the 15,000 inhabitants it -claims actually dwell in it, were it not their unfailing custom to line -up to be counted. There was not a street in town, which is well inland -and at a slight elevation, but merely wide sloughs of sand between the -monotonous rows of houses; yet I was astonished to find two large and -well-kept cinemas. This, it turned out, was due to a local feud. Two -brothers who owned the “Cinema Popular” had been bosom friends of the -richest man in town, until they, too, bought an automobile. This so -enraged the rich man that he attempted to get even by building another -“movie” house in the hope of putting the brothers out of business. So -far he had not succeeded, and was all the less likely to do so after I -had signed a contract with the brothers for five nights at the -“Popular.” Ruben might take the show to Maceió and Pernambuco as he had -promised, but I did not propose to be caught napping, and if he did, the -Alagoinhas contract would be good in June or July when the Kinetophone -returned without me. - -Another car so loose-jointed that the walls constantly creaked and -swayed toiled all the afternoon and into the night to carry a scattering -of passengers to Barracão, another name for Nowhere. It consisted merely -of several huts and a tile-roofed building in which all passengers by -rail from Bahia to Aracajú, or vice versa, must spend the night. The -engine, whistling up about a cord of wood, awakened us long before -daylight and at least an hour earlier than was necessary, for I was -already sitting in our six o’clock train when the other pulled out -Bahia-ward at five. The same seat, the same conductor, and the same -swaying walls as the day before made one feel like a trans-Siberian -traveler, though the 278 miles the train worries through in two days is -scarcely a Siberian distance. The salt-tainted breath of the Atlantic -slashed us now and then in the faces as we rumbled along, for we were -not far inland now. It was gently rolling country, of gray rather than -red soil, producing next to nothing, with here and there some bananas -and mandioca, and long unbroken stretches of scrub jungle. The _tucú_, a -grape-like fruit growing on a palm tree and so thick of skin and large -of stone that there is only a bit of sweetish dampness between them, was -sold at the rare stations. - -Soon we crossed an iron bridge and what might have been a river had it -tried harder, into the State of Sergipe, the smallest of Brazil. This -and the little larger State of Alagoas are sliced out of the respective -states of Bahia and Pernambuco down near the mouth of the São Francisco, -which divides them. It is not apparent why they need be separate -states—but then, a foreigner ignorant of local conditions no doubt -wonders in looking at a map of our own country why a little nubbin of -land down at the end of Connecticut must have its own name, capital, and -government, or why both those bits of territory should not join -Massachusetts. The state lines of Brazil follow largely the old colonial -divisions, some natural but more of them artificial, set by the Pope or -the King of Portugal. Of the twenty Brazilian states, nine or ten have -aboriginal Indian names. It is another evidence of the higher value of -time to the American that we have an abbreviation for each of our -states, while the Brazilian has none. North and South American -incompatability of temperament is perhaps nowhere more definitely -demonstrated than in the attitude of the two races toward time. Brevity, -conciseness, and promptitude rank almost as bad manners among -Latin-Americans, whose editorial writers often break forth in -dissertations on “punctuality, that virtue of kings and bad custom of -Anglo-Saxons. Enthusiasts for liberty, we cannot admit that a man shall -be the slave of his watch. Life proves that punctuality is an excellent -virtue for a machine, but a grave defect for a man.” - -In the blazing afternoon we came down off the interior plateau, ever -lower to the northward, here reminiscent of southern Texas or northern -Mexico in its aridity, its scattered, thorny, scrub plant life, its -occasional adobe huts, to a flat sea-level _littoral_ that was almost -entirely a dreary waste of snow-white sand, rarely punctuated with -cactus and a few other waterless bushes. Aracajú, capital of the State -of Sergipe, is set in this nearly desert landscape. The large room with -a mosquito-net canopied bed in which I was soon installed in the “Hotel -International” was the best the town had to offer befriended strangers. -Like all the rest of Aracajú, it was on the ground floor, looking out on -a quiet garden of deep sand, and was as airy as the exhaust from a -hot-air furnace. I had already taken it when my eye fell upon a notice -to the effect that for lack of water guests would not be allowed to -bathe for three days. By shouting until the whole hotel force was -gathered about me, and offering to make them all candidates for hospital -treatment, I was conducted, as a special favor to another of those -half-mad “gringos,” into a special “rain bath” for ladies, and freed -myself at last from the soil of Bahia. Then, having induced the landlord -to change the wooden-floored bed for one “of wire,” though he could not -understand why anyone should consider this an improvement, I relaxed and -sallied forth to see what Aracajú had to offer. - -Sergipe, it seems, was a part of Bahia until nearly the end of the -colonial period, when it proclaimed itself a sovereign state with the -capital at São Cristovam, a straggling town some twenty miles back along -the railway by which I had come. But that was a league from a harbor, -and the government at length moved to an Indian village on the edge of -this cucumber-shaped bay. _Ara_ is a Tupi Indian word for plenty, and -_cajú_ is the Brazilian name for a fruit that thrives in such -semi-desert regions as the _littoral_ of Sergipe. This is shaped like a -small plump pear, with a smooth silky skin of saffron or brilliant red -color, which grows upside down on a tree not unlike the apple in -appearance, and is particularly conspicuous for the fact that the seed, -shaped like a parrot’s beak, gray in color, and containing a nut that is -delicious when roasted, grows entirely outside the fruit itself, -protruding from its larger end. The meat is white, exceedingly acid, and -sure death alike to thirst and the dye-stuff of garments. There were -barely a dozen Indian fishermen’s huts at Aracajú when it became the -capital in 1855; hence it has an appearance of newness rather than age, -and only two churches—quite sufficient, to be sure, but a great contrast -to Bahia. There is nothing particularly individual about the place, its -“palaces,” houses, or people, who are sufficient for all the Lord meant -them to be in this world and very few of whom are going to the next, if -I may judge by the size of the congregation and the priestly remarks -thereon at early mass the morning after my arrival. - -The predominating type of _aracajuano_ is the gray or brown _mestiço_, -and a mixed race is rarely prepossessing in appearance. There are few -full negroes, even fewer pure whites, but every known mixture of the -two, no small number of _mamelucos_, or crosses between Indians and -Europeans, and too many _bodes_ (literally male goats) as the offspring -of Indian and negro are clandestinely called. The cucumber-shaped bay is -really the River Sery-gipe, a name said to mean the abode of a kind of -shrimp which abounds here, and has a troublesome moving sandbar at its -mouth, with less than four meters depth at low tide, making Aracajú the -only Brazilian coast capital which transatlantic steamers cannot enter. -One may see the waves breaking on this bar from almost any point in -town, but the open sea is in view only from the top of the cathedral or -the crest of the highest sand-dunes. Half the coast of Sergipe is made -up of this snow-white sand, in dunes that move with the wind, immense -heaps of the purest white sand covering whole blocks and rising a -hundred feet or more high within two minutes’ stroll of the main hotel. -All but a very few of the streets are ankle-deep in sand, as are the -palm-trees. These few are paved with large flat rocks fitted together in -all manner of irregular patterns. The “bonds” were still operated by -mule-power. There is a pleasing central _praça_, facing the waterfront -and backed by a little garden with a vista of the cathedral through -royal palms, pleasing perhaps because its bit of green lawn is in such -welcome contrast to the glaring sandy brightness elsewhere, but marred -by the statue of some local hero who, according to this monument, -stepped out of somewhere wearing a frock-coat and waving a most properly -creased soft felt hat, crying, “I am going to die for my country!” If he -could see it now he might regret his heroism. - -In full sunlight at midday I could have used my umbrella to advantage as -a parasol, if some miserable son of a Brazilian had not stolen it in -Victoria. But he who never walks in tropical sunshine will never enjoy -to the full sitting in the shade, and at least the nights were cool and -breezy. The only thing to grow profane over was that the steamer which -was to carry me to Maceió had not even left Bahia, “because everybody -there is busy with the carnival.” This meant at least three days -squatting among the sand heaps, and perhaps not reaching Maceió until -after the show did, since that was to travel by direct steamer. Worse -still, I had read all the Brazilian novels in my bag, and Aracajú was -not the kind of place to support a bookstore. There was nothing left but -walking, and that soon palls in a sun-glazed town closely surrounded on -all sides by shoe-filling sand-dunes. - -This dreary and unproductive soil stretches from five to ten miles -inland for the whole length of the state, with a broad strip of stony, -rolling, clay soil back of that, on which sugar and cotton, tobacco and -_farinha_ are produced in moderate quantity, while the western half of -the state is _sertão_, in which graze scattered herds of cattle. There -is a large weaving-mill in the capital, said to be the best in Brazil, -but still capable of improvement. During my strolls I came upon the -slaughter-house one afternoon and found scores of children showing great -glee at the struggles of the cattle as the blood poured from their -throats until they dropped in their own gore. Such was evidently the -chief education to be had by youthful Aracajú. Here, as in the other -tobacco producing state, Bahia, most of the negro women smoked pipes. -The lazy scrape of _tamancos_ was suggestive not only of the indolence -but of the moral looseness of the place. Though one might have had the -companionship of comely mulatto and quadroon girls for less than the -asking, I sought in vain for a person of even the rudiments of -intelligence with whom to pass the time, and was forced to take refuge -in the state public library instead. Even this was no monument of -learning, though several _sergipanos_ have won Brazilian fame as men of -letters. The building itself lacked nothing in elaborateness, but the -books were those least needed and only half a dozen youths drifted in -daily to read the newspapers and the silly “comic” weeklies from Rio. -Here, however, I learned that “there are two kinds of climate in the -State of Sergipe—hot and humid on the coast and hot and dry in the -interior,” and that the bronze gentleman in the frock-coat and Parisian -hat in the main praça was a “politician, a poet, and a great orator” who -tried to start a revolution here in 1906 and was quite naturally shot -full of holes by federal soldiers. No one can blame him, however, for -wanting to start something in Aracajú; his foolishness lay in the fact -that he seemed to think it was possible. - -A two-line cable or two a week, usually on trivial matters and more -likely than not denied a few days later, constituted Sergipe’s -connection with the outside world. No doubt I needed the experience to -realize how dreary life is in these miserable little capitals when one -cannot hurry on as soon as the first interest and novelty has worn off. -The total lack of inspiration, of good example, of anything approaching -an ideal, could not but have killed any originality or ambition, even -had one of these half-breed youths been born with one or the other. -There was no goal in life. Even I felt that in my few days there; how -must it have been with a person born there and suspecting no other life -on the globe? A man may advance under his own gasoline, but unless he -has someone to crank him up he is very apt to die about where he began. -Few of us are equipped with self-starters. - -Such reflections as these made me wonder sometimes whether the moving -picture, for all its imperfections and dangers and false view of life, -for all the peculiar inanity and childishness inherent in its dramas, is -not doing as much as anything to give the masses of South America, -particularly of the interior, at least a knowledge of better personal -habits, even if not higher aspirations. Much as this remarkable -invention has been prostituted by cheap mortals, it is an incredible -boon to communities so far from civilization that they never get more of -the great outside world than the films bring them. If you lived in some -sleepy little village in a remote corner of South America, far from -theaters or any other living form of life and thought, you would find -the daily round exceedingly dull, you would passionately crave some -variety, some entertainment, even mildly intellectual, or not at all so, -something to take you for an hour out of the dreary village routine of a -life-time and bring you in touch, if ever so slightly and momentarily, -with the great moving outside world. Thus you would welcome with -considerable enthusiasm even a bad “movie”—unless generations of this -life had so sunk you in sloth that you resented any attempt to drag you -out of it. - -But though the “Cinema Rio Branco,” otherwise the state-owned “Theatro -Carlos Gomes,” in the next block was free to me, I found that at best a -stupid way for a man from the outside world to spend his time. Some of -that on my hands I had whiled away by booking the Kinetophone for three -to seven days on its return trip to Rio, we—or rather, they, for by that -time I should be far distant—to wire the manager at least five days -before their arrival. Thus I proposed to make a string of contracts for -“Tut’s” return trip, and leave my duty doubly done when I doffed my -movie-magnate hat up on the Amazon. - -One morning I was rowed across the river, or harbor, in a dugout and -tramped for hours in the sand-carpeted forest of cocoanut-palms on the -Ilha dos Coqueiros. It was market-day in the town, and boatloads of the -nuts were coming across to compete with other native products from -farther up the river. The wind was sighing through the cocoanut fronds, -and I discovered that there are windfalls among cocoanuts also, for -there were so many large green ones under the trees that I had only to -stop and drink as often as I got thirsty. Numbers of them rot around the -edge of the stem and fall, and if they are not soon picked up, the decay -penetrates the shell and the nut spills its milk in the sand, leaving -only the husk to be used as fuel or roofing. Even here one was reminded -of the human race. The high trees of aristocratic arrogance ordinarily -had only half a dozen nuts, while the sturdy, ugly, short and squatty -ones bore from fifty to a hundred in tight clusters at the hub from -which the leaves radiate in all directions. A group of inhabitants -scattered along the near side of the island lived in cocoanut -husk-and-leaf huts and produced, besides their staple, which grows -itself, mandioca, melons, and children, all equally weedy and -ill-tended. Everyone above the age of ten or twelve seemed to have his -dugout log, a paddle, a square sail, and a trailing-board, all guarded -in his hut when not in use, and a bright-eyed bronze boy of part Indian -ancestry sailed me back across the harbor in a snapping sea breeze. - -The dugouts and fishermen’s sailboats that always stretch along the -waterfront of Aracajú had been augmented by a steamer, the long-awaited -_Ilheos_ of the “Companhia Bahiana de Navegação,” which had at last -drifted over the sandbar at the harbor’s mouth. I hastened to the -company’s office, only to be struck in the eye by a sign headed “23 á 6 -horas,” in other words, it being then Saturday, the _Ilheos_ would not -sail until _Tuesday_ morning! By that time the Kinetophone would long -since have left Maceió, even if good “Colonel” Ruben did not run away -with the whole concern during my prolonged absence. If only the sea had -frozen over I could have walked it in far less time than there was still -to wait, for it was only 105 miles to Maceió. But it would have been -many times that in this sand, and there was no other way of covering the -only break in railway travel—except the one between Victoria and -Bahia—along the whole eastern coast of South America. - -The trouble was, it turned out, that Aracajú had next day to inaugurate -a new bishop, the first “son of Sergipe” ever to rise to that honor, and -of course Monday would be needed to recover from the celebration. The -archbishop of Bahia, the bishop of Maceió, and a swarm of lesser wearers -of the black robe had come to add dignity to the occasion, and, when I -came to think of it, of course it was they who were holding up the -steamer. Eight on Sunday morning found me at the _egreja matrix_, or -mother church, mingling with many pious negroes ready to give the new -bishop a proper send-off. But the edifice was already filled to about -seven times its capacity with people chiefly of color, and I withdrew -hastily to windward and a park bench. By Monday afternoon recovery from -the inauguration set in, and I ventured to buy my steamer-ticket, took -my last wade in the sands of Aracajú, and went on board for the night. -The bishop of Alagoas had the next cabin to my own and we slept with our -heads against opposite sides of the same half-inch partition. But I -suppose it was because I had no little purple dunce-cap to wear over my -bald spot that the dusky ladies of Aracajú did not come, glistening with -jewels embedded in their well-fed forms, to kiss _me_ good-night—on the -hand. - -We began to move at four in the morning, and I went out to watch by the -light of half a moon and the Southern Cross our exit from one of the -most difficult ports in South America. Barely had we crossed the bar -when our sea-going tug began to rock like a canoe, and not only the -bishop but even as old a seadog as I took no interest in the ten o’clock -“breakfast.” The _Ilheos_ claimed to have twin screws, but they must -have been turning in opposite directions, for we made far less speed -than the coast swells that rolled us about like an empty bottle. The -shore was made up almost entirely of dreary wastes of white sand, -sometimes in broad flat stretches, sometimes drifted up into dunes. At -times a suggestion of forest appeared far back of this, but there were -few if any signs of habitation. - -About noon the water about us turned from deep blue to a muddy red, a -great streak of which thrust itself out into the ocean from the outlet -of the River São Francisco. We turned into this across a broad sandbar -and found it a mile or more wide, though frequently split up by islands, -long, flat, and green. This river, largest between the Plata and the -Amazon, rises far to the south, near the old capital of Minas Geraes, -and has about the same volume of water as the Hudson. Thatched villages -and small cities line its banks for hundreds of miles and side-wheel -river steamers mount it in two sections, to Pirapora, in Minas Geraes, -terminus of the “Central Railway of Brazil.” We stopped at several -villages near the mouth, then pushed on inland. The rolling had ceased -and the bishop was out now parading the deck behind a big black cigar. -The shores were sandy and nearly flat, with palm-trees, some sugar-cane, -and a considerable population of more or less negroes. At length the -town of Villa Nova, two centuries old for all its name, appeared on the -nose of a bluff, and beyond, on the right-hand or Alagoas bank, the city -of Penedo, not unlike a smaller Bahia in situation, with several bulking -old churches and here and there a majestic imperial palm-tree rising -above all else. - -We dropped anchor before Villa Nova, with its several textile mills, and -were soon completely hemmed in by cargo barges, though not before I had -slipped across to Penedo, from which we were to sail at four in the -morning. Considering the time it had taken to get there, it was hard to -believe that this was only forty-five miles north of Aracajú! Before the -town lay one of the side-wheel river steamers, and many “chatties,” -barges, and sailboats, not to mention countless dugout canoes, which ply -the lower São Francisco to the falls of Paulo Affonso, two hundred miles -up and “greater than Niagara,” according to my fellow-passengers. Here -and there groups of women were dipping up water and washing garments, in -the same spots. All the dwellers along its shore drink the muddy São -Francisco, _nature_, or at best filtered through a porous stone. No one -is ever seen swimming in these parts, either in river or sea. - -[Illustration: The mailboat leaves Aracajú for the towns across the bay] - -[Illustration: Another Brazilian milkman] - -[Illustration: Carnival costumes representing “A Crise,” or hard times] - -[Illustration: A Brazilian piano van needs neither axle-grease nor -gasoline] - -I was surprised to find a large number of white people in Penedo, though -mulattoes were in the majority. There was some Indian blood, shown -chiefly in high cheek-bones and wide faces, and as usual there was a big -jail full of happy singing negroes. Full-white brats rolling stark naked -in the mud suggested one of the unfortunate effects of living in a -mainly negro country. Some streets climbed laboriously past overgrown -old churches with Portuguese crowns cut in stone on them, past -projecting balconies that carried the mind back to viceregal days, to -the grass-grown central praça high up on the ridge, overlooking a long -stretch of the red-brown river. It was the affair of a moment to -convince the owner of the “Theatro Sete de Setembro,” alias “Cinema -Ideal,” that the Kinetophone should halt here for three days on its -return trip. He was the big man of the town, with a dozen separate -enterprises, and when a score of persons crowded around us in his -drugstore to listen to our conversation and read over his shoulder -whatever I showed him, we agreed to leave the signing of the contract -for the next day on board the _Ilheos_, on which he, too, was to take -passage. - -Anarchy reigned about the decks all night, sailors, stokers, and -visiting parties from shore keeping up a constant hubbub until we got -under way about dawn. A couple of hours sleep as we descended the river -were cut short as we struck the open sea, for though this looked calm -and smooth as a frog pond, the _Ilheos_ rolled like a log and soon took -on the aspect of a phantom ship, with everyone lying like dead wherever -misfortune overtook them. The dreary sandy coast was sometimes broken by -spurs of the low, flat, wooded plateau that stretches all along this -region farther inland. At two in the afternoon we sighted Maceió and its -port of Jaraguá, a smaller city far out on a point of land, with a reef -protecting a scallop in the coast but no real harbor. In one of the -score of sailboats that rushed out to meet us I was astonished to see -Carlos and later “Tut,” whom I supposed already in Pernambuco. They had -lost Wednesday and Thursday of the week before in getting here, had -played four days to tolerable business, and had lost the night just past -in waiting for the boat they now expected to take at any moment. - -I took “Tut’s” room at the “Hotel Petropolis,” a massive, one-story -building on a sort of terrace that caught a hit of breeze and on the -sides of which were painted letters several feet high announcing it the -“Only Place in Maceió without Mosquitoes.” It had little of anything -else, for that matter, except good mosquito-nets over the beds to keep -out the mosquitoes it did not have. By dark the “Lloyd-Brazileiro” -steamer _Bahia_ arrived, and “Tut” and Carlos and Ruben’s mulatto -sub-manager sailed away, while I went over to the theater in which they -had played and contracted not only for three days on their return trip, -but for five days in Parahyba, capital of the state north of Pernambuco. -How hard Maceió had been hit by the prevailing hard times was suggested -on every hand, not only in out-of-works and light cinema receipts, but -by such posted information as: - - NOTICE - - On this date our telephone was disconnected from the respective - Company until our further orders, in view of the brutal crisis which - at the present time atrophies everything and everyone. - - Maceió, January 1, 1915. João Ramos e Cia. - -The capital of Alagoas, however, proved to be more of a city than it -looks from a distance. Most of it lies in a pocket between the sea and a -ridge, a large, almost land-locked bay running far in behind it. Mainly -three-story buildings lined the well-paved streets in the business -section, and new American street-cars of the electric “Companhia -Alagoana de Trilhos Urbanos” covered several pleasant suburbs. No -sooner, however, does one return to a region of railways and street cars -than missing arms and legs begin to appear. The people of Maceió were -visibly of higher class than those of the State of Bahia, though by no -means beyond possible improvement. Even the outskirt huts were -whitewashed and often noticeably clean, and women and children, and even -men, in many cases wore spotless white garments. Heaps of cotton bales -at the railway station and on the wharves reminded one of our own South, -but though there was ample evidence of African ancestry, there were -almost no full-blooded negroes among the population. The percentage of -white and near-white inhabitants was striking after Bahia; but here, -too, were the familiar north-Brazil concomitants of huge churches and -tiny one-room schools. Mangos and bread-fruit dropped in the central -praça, amid the myriad remains of tropical bugs lured to death by its -blazing electric-lights. - -My only personal acquaintance with the élite of Maceió was due to -professional duties. When the show arrived, “Tut” had discovered that -the local electricity was of a freak type,—100 volts and 100 cycles, -whatever that means—a sort of non-union electricity evidently, for all -our phonograph motors refused to work with it. The English engineer at -the power-house figured out on paper that all would be well, but as the -“juice” is not turned on in Maceió until 6 P. M., his error was -discovered only when the audience was storming the doors on the opening -night. While the manager strove to keep the house amused with ordinary -films, “Tut” and Carlos raced about town and at last found in a café a -little electric fan. They borrowed the motor that operated it, but this -had to be cleaned and oiled before it would take up its new task, so -that it was nine o’clock before our part of the show was given; and as -Maceió usually goes to bed by eight, Ruben had to give back much of the -money, and the bungled _estrea_ injured business during the rest of our -stay. It turned out that the café and the fan belonged, sub rosa, to one -Dr. Armando Vedigal, a well-to-do lawyer and member of one of Maceió’s -“best families.” True to his race, as well as to his calling, this -gentleman, finding he had someone in a tight place, proceeded to squeeze -him. He demanded 100$ for the use of the motor for four nights, of at -most thirty minutes each. The whole fan costs six to eight dollars new -in the United States, and perhaps 35$ in Brazil; and as its perfection -was mainly due to Edison, it amounted almost to renting an apparatus for -two hours’ use to the inventor thereof at three times its original cost. - -“Tut” had left the payment to me. Unfortunately I could not ignore it, -as I should have preferred, because the lawyer was a political power and -would have made it unpleasant for the owner of the theater unless his -“rake-off” was forthcoming, so the only American thing to do was to pay -what he demanded. I determined, however, to have at least the -satisfaction of expressing our gratitude to the fellow in person, and -after considerable insisting I was shown the way to his house. It was an -ostentatious one enclosed in a large private garden in the best part of -town and filled with those things into which persons of wealth and -“social standing” the world round turn the proceeds of such clever -“strokes of business.” The great man received me with a dignity -befitting his lofty station, and invited me into his chair-forested -parlor. He had the dainty aristocratic fingers, hands, and form of those -who, for generations back, have taken good care not to let their muscles -develop, lest someone suspect them of having once earned a dollar by -vulgar work, and he was dressed in the very proper heavy, black, full -frock-coat dress of his class, even on the equator. - -I began by expressing our thanks for the use of the motor, to which he -instantly replied, “Ah, to be sure, I was _so_ delighted to be able to -serve you, and—and——” - -He was plainly waiting for me to encourage him with, “Yes, that was _so_ -kind of you” and a gentle pat on the shoulder, instead of the swift kick -farther down which he so richly deserved. I bowed, and took to -expressing in the most polished Portuguese I could summon my admiration -for a man who had the nerve to demand several times the price of a -machine for such a brief use of it. I had intended to work him up slowly -to the point where my remarks would feel like the threshing of nettles -on a bare skin, but the men of northern Brazil are dynamic with pride -and quick to flare up at any suggested slight, so that I had barely -reached the word _roubar_ (rob), first of a long and culminative list -with a sting, when he bounded into the air and asked if I really knew -the meaning of that word in Portuguese. I assured him that I did, and -the action, too, in any land or clime, whereupon he demanded in a -neighbor-waking voice whether I had come to call him a thief in his own -house. When I informed him that I had come for that express purpose, he -bellowed, “_Rua!_ Off with you! Out of my sight,” at the same time -hastening to pick my hat off the rack and hand it to me. I was going -anyway, now that he had caught my hint, but I did not propose to let his -wrath hasten matters. As I stepped leisurely out upon the veranda he -slammed the door and informed me in the bellow of a mad bull that he -would “pay me back”—not the 100$ unfortunately—“the first time he met me -on the street—to-morrow!” - -“Why not to-day?” I queried, for it was barely dusk and there were -street-cars, if it was beneath his dignity to walk. - -This redoubled his fury. “_Era uma fita_”—it was a regular movie, as the -Brazilians say, to see him giving an impersonation of a fire-eater for -the benefit of his wife and children, and shouting. “Let me at him! Let -me eat him!” while his wife and three small sons clung to his arms, -legs, and other appendages, screaming the Brazilian form of, “Don’t kill -him, Pa! Oh, don’t shoot him, for my sake!” He allowed the pistol he had -caught up to be wrested from his hand, but the howls and screams of the -whole family could still be heard when I turned the next corner—and I -was not running at that. - -[Illustration: Ladies of Pernambuco] - -[Illustration: A minstrel of Pernambuco—and a Portuguese shopkeeper] - -[Illustration: Advertising the Kinetophone in Pernambuco, with a monk -and a dancing-girl. “Tut” on the extreme left, Carlos behind the -drummer] - -It was playing with fire, of course, not because these hot-headed -northerners are particularly brave, but because of the disadvantage -which a stranger and a foreigner would have in any contest with a -powerful local politician. Had he shot me, it would probably not have -been difficult for him to “fix it” to escape punishment, whereas the -reverse would almost certainly have meant many years in an unpleasant -climate. I was too exasperated to consider these things at the time, -however, and having returned to the mosquito-less hotel and strapped on -my revolver, I spent the evening hanging about the cinema, the town -billiard-room, and the other nightly gathering-places where a -“gentleman” with such a debt might come to pay it; but the lawyer’s -strength must have been unequal to that of his frenzied wife and -children, for I saw no more of him during my stay in Maceió. - -The “G.W.B.R.,” or Great Western of Brazil Railway, is English, which -accounts for its being so called, though it runs from Maceió to Natal -through the easternmost part of the four easternmost states in the -western hemisphere. On the first day of the month in which I arrived -daily service had been inaugurated between Maceió and Pernambuco, but -lack of coal was making it impossible to keep this up and the line was -soon to go back to the old schedule of three trains a week. In other -words, I had accidentally chosen just the time to spare myself another -day in the capital of Alagoas. The train that left at dawn on the -225-mile run was long and heavy, with all reasonable comforts and many -minor evidences of English management, among them the habit of being on -time. This line is a part of the 786 miles leased for sixty years to the -British corporation by the government, and the contract reads that no -rental shall be paid for it until the gross income for all of them -exceeds 6,200$ per kilometer, after which ten per cent. of the receipts -shall be paid into the public treasury. The result is a problem similar -to that on the line from São Paulo to Santos. One million pounds -sterling was spent to improve the leased lines, but even that would not -have been enough had the company not been so fortunate, as the chairman -of the stockholders in London told them, as to have had a partial -failure of crops along their lines that year and to have been thereby -saved from contributing £36,000 to the government! The largest expense -of the company is for coal and its largest income from the hauling of -sugar, with second-class passengers next, according to an item in the -official report headed “Passenger and Live Stock Transportation.” No -doubt it would be hard to separate the two in Brazil. - -The line to Pernambuco ran well inland through a dry and dusty but -fertile land, varying from rolling to big rounded hills, among which the -train wandered back and forth seeking an outlet. In places it was -somewhat forested, or seemed recently to have been cleared; but most of -it was thickly inhabited, compared with almost any other part of Brazil. -Big _engenhos_, or sugar mills, often punctuated the landscape with -tall, smoke-belching stacks; immense fields of sugar cane were -everywhere being harvested, and though it was February, workmen were -hoeing with big clumsy _enxadas_ cane-sprouts in the same plots in which -mature cane was being cut. Most of the canes came from the fields tied -in two bundles on the backs of horses, to be dumped in heaps at the -stations and then carefully corded on the railway cars. At least half -the stations had a long train of red and yellow cane loaded or loading -on the sidetrack, and our way was frequently blocked by similar trains -bound for Recife. These and the many large _engenhos_, the little -private railways on the _fazendas_, with their screeching English or -Belgian dwarf locomotives, and the evidence of movement and industry -everywhere, gave one the feeling of having once more reached a land of -ambition. Pernambuco is Brazil’s greatest sugar-producing state. Thanks -to this fact and to an unusually honest government, it enjoys a -prosperity second only to that of São Paulo, and possibly of Rio Grande -do Sul, in the entire republic. Cotton and mandioca also are important -crops, often growing together, and bales of the former lay piled up at -many stations. Everything, the cane-fields, the sugar-mills, the large -old plantation-houses in choice locations and guarded by half a dozen -majestic royal palms, even the swarms of beggars at the stations—gave -the impression of an old and long-established community. - -It was a constant surprise to find it cooler up on this slight plateau -than in the sugar-fields of Tucumán, twenty-five degrees nearer the -South Pole, and I never could reconcile myself to the total absence of -jungle. Both these conditions were evidently due to the same cause,—the -constant strong trade winds that sweep across all this paunch of South -America and blow the rains, without which jungle cannot grow even on the -equator, farther inland. Water was so scarce that there were only -shallow mud-holes for the rare cattle, and all the region appeared -sorely in need of irrigation. As in Egypt, the dry soil or the glaring -sun seemed to produce blindness, and there were many sightless wretches -among the beggars that swarmed every station. Indeed, the sugar-cane, -the cotton, the lack of moisture in air and soil, the very _engenhos_, -carried the mind back to the land of the Nile. Mendicants in the last -stages of every loathsome disease thrust their ailments, their frightful -faces, their leprous finger-stumps upon one wherever the train halted. -All the people of this region,—beggars, bootblacks, or politicians—have -the habit of touching, patting, pawing one over to attract attention, -and it was only by constant vigilance that I could keep myself free from -often noisome personal contacts. Then, in that liberty-is-license South -American way, swarms of ragged urchins and shiftless men poured into the -cars at every station, fingering the spout of the empty water-can, -squatting in the vacant seats, thrusting their attentions upon the -passengers, stark naked children, with navels protruding several inches -from their rounded stomachs, scampered in and out of every opening, no -attempt whatever being made by trainmen or station police to reduce this -annoying anarchy. Many beggars and tramps used a sugar-cane as a -staff—perhaps as a sort of last straw against starvation. - -I do not believe in charity, or at least in promiscuous giving, but the -Brazilian does, and every one of the beggars who flock about the -stations throughout northern Brazil seems to get something for his -trouble. Some of them were frankly Africans, but there were others whose -negro blood showed only in their love of sucking a sugar-cane, the most -work for the least gain of any labor on earth. Even the prosperous -cities are not free from this eleemosynary multitude. When the -archbishop of Pernambuco returned to his palace after the inauguration -of the “son of Sergipe,” he found 235 beggars waiting at his door. The -Brazilian no doubt feels that to give alms through an institution would -be to pay most of it into the capacious pockets of its managers or -sponsors, whereas if he gives himself, he knows that the gift actually -reaches the needy person—if, indeed, he is needy. Also, he is more apt -than not to be superstitious and to fancy that if he does not give, his -own affairs will not prosper; most of all, he is constantly at his old -pastime of “fazendo fita”—showing off. Hence impudent, able-bodied -beggars are a pest to society and to the travelers’ peace throughout the -country, particularly in the blazing north. - -A brilliant moon waiting at the edge of the stage to do its turn even -before that of the unclouded sun was finished, gave us a continuous -performance, with the lighting never dimmed. As we neared Recife there -was less cultivation, and beyond Cabo White flat sand and miserable huts -took the place of the rolling, fertile, well-housed country—though even -here there was not the squalor of Bahia. A desert of sand, an almost -unpeopled wilderness had surrounded us for some time before the low -lights of Recife began to spring up across the level moon-bathed -landscape, and the sandy and swampy land of the Brazilian _littoral_ -continued until our train rumbled out upon the very beach of the -moon-silvered Atlantic. - -It was already 7:40, and there was no time to be lost if I was to take -up my professional duties that evening. About noon we had met the -up-train with the day’s newspapers and I had caught up with the world -and its doings again. Pernambuco has the best journals north of Rio, one -of which claims to be the oldest in Latin-America, and I had been -delighted to find in several of the most important dailies half-page -Kinetophone advertisements, and in all of them articles to the effect -that “Edison’s new marvel” had opened the night before with all three -sessions crowded to capacity by delighted audiences. But newspaper -stories and facts often have little in common. I sprang into the first -automobile to offer its services and, after a jouncing over cobblestones -that felt like being tossed in a blanket, was set down at the “Hotel -Recife.” This was said to be the best in town—which was certainly -slanderous language toward the others. Razor and shower-bath having -transformed me from a dust-bin discard to the personification of Beau -Brummel on a tropical excursion, I raced away to the “Theatro Moderno.” -There I was agreeably surprised. Ruben met me with the fraternal embrace -at the door of a large new theater, perhaps the most sumptuous in which -we had played in Brazil; the receipts the night before had been the best -in weeks, and crowds were even then clamoring for admission. The -sugar-prosperity of Pernambuco, abetted rather than injured by the World -War, combined with plentiful advertising in newspaper displays and -articles, in posters and handbills, and by the gyrations through the -streets of two _bonecos_, or dolls, ten feet high, had done the trick. -The fact that the _bonecos_ represented a friar and a dancing-girl -respectively, and that their public promenading was accompanied by -antics which a more circumspect people would have considered highly -indecent, seemed to have been an advantage rather than otherwise in -Pernambuco. - -“Tut” had found the hotels so uninviting that he was sleeping in his -hammock on the stage of the theater. Our first move, therefore, was to -investigate what all foreign residents assured us was the best -stopping-place in Recife,—a _pensão_ kept by a European woman known as -the “Baroness.” It was out in the suburb of Magdalena, twenty minutes by -electric tramway from the center of town—except that passengers lost -more time than that in walking across a condemned bridge which would not -carry the cars. The _pension_ consisted of several buildings, one large -and pretentious, the rest simple and of one story, scattered about a big -enclosed yard shaded by many magnificent tropical trees and looking out -behind on one of the many arms of the sea which divide Recife into -separate sections. We took a large room together, opening directly on -the garden, with a mammoth tree over our very door. There were some -drawbacks—no electric lights, for instance, that improvement not yet -having reached Pernambuco in public form, though a few places had a -private plant. Also the “garden” was deep in sand, for lawns are unknown -in this part of the world. But a high fence, as well as dogs and -servants, made it possible to leave our doors wide open night and day to -the ever-cooling trade wind, and there was a quiet homelikeness as well -as cleanliness about the place that made us feel as if we had suddenly -left dirty, noisy, quarrelsome Brazil behind. - -The “Baroness” had the advantage of good servants from German steamers -interned in Pernambuco, the nearest port of refuge for many of those in -the South Atlantic when the war broke out. In fact, all Pernambuco was -fortunate in having about five hundred men of similar antecedents to -serve it that winter. The excellent band of the _Cap Vilano_, for -instance, made not only the most energetic but the best music in North -Brazil at the “Café Chic,” just around the corner from our theater—at -the equivalent of a dollar a night to each of the musicians. The war had -brought Recife other things. Its sugar and cotton having kept it from -succumbing to the “brutal crisis” that flagellated the rest of Brazil, -it had the reputation of being the best-to-do city in the country. -Consequently, adventuresses of all nationalities had come up in droves -from dead Rio and impoverished São Paulo, and Recife had more high class -members of the profession that needs no training than most cities of -five times its population. - -Though we often hear of it, there is really no city of Pernambuco. What -we call by that name is properly designated by one almost unknown to -foreigners. Pernambuco is an old Indian word that is only correctly -applied to the entire state, but it has long been the custom not only of -seafaring men and all foreigners, but of the Brazilians themselves not -resident within the state, to call its capital Pernambuco. Its real name -is Recife, and the story of its founding is not without interest. In -1531 Pedro Lopez Pereira established on the only hill in this vicinity a -town which was called Olinda, and which in time became a very -aristocratic center. But though it had a beautiful site on the open -ocean, Olinda had no port, and boats could only land behind the -_recife_, or reef, some miles farther south. On Christmas day of 1598 -Jeronymo de Albuquerque formally gave the name Recife to the cluster of -trading posts that had grown up there, and built the fortress by which -the city is still, at least in theory, defended. The settlers at the -“Reef” were almost entirely Portuguese merchants, whom the aristocrats -of the proud residential town of Olinda called “mascates”—peddlers or -hawkers. The rivalry and ill-feeling between the two towns grew apace. -The colonial nobility of Olinda, resenting any interference from their -lowborn neighbors, wished to form an independent republic on the style -of Venice, and the quarrel finally developed into what is known in -Brazilian history as the “War of the Mascates.” Naturally the -“peddlers,” having nearly all the material advantages, had the best of -it; new authorities arriving from Portugal ended the struggle, and -Recife became the city, port, and capital of the region, leaving Olinda, -small and isolated on its hill, still proud of its aristocratic origin, -but a mere suburb of the modern city. - -Unlike Bahia, Recife had no ridge to build on; hence it is deadly flat, -with only Olinda five miles to the northwest rising above the -featureless landscape, though far behind the city one may make out the -wooded hills that merge gradually into the flat-topped _chapadas_ of the -_sertão_ of the interior. It stands on the sandy beach of a lagoon delta -where two rivers, neither of them of much importance, meet, and the -compact old town, with the wharves, banks, and most of the business -houses, is really on an island, protected now not only by the natural -reef, but by a long breakwater behind which ships anchor. There is no -bay; hence steamers which do not enter the inner port must in rough -weather land their passengers in a “chair” running on a cable from the -breakwater. Many a traveler to South America remembers nothing of -Pernambuco except that hair-raising landing. - -As Bahia is a city of hills and wooded ridges, so Pernambuco is one of -waterways and bridges. The so-called River Capibaribe runs, or at least -ebbs and flows, through town, and there are a score of natural canals, -estuaries, and mud sloughs filling and emptying with each tide, while -hundreds of dwellers in thatched huts of the suburbs have the advantages -of Venice in so far as a chance to pole themselves about on their rude -rafts goes. Marshy salt water comes in and around the city at every -tide, and the rivers, coves, or quagmires to be crossed in a journey -through it are numerous—doubly so since several of its many bridges have -been condemned for vehicular traffic. Palm trees, chiefly of the -cocoanut family, grow everywhere, and between its waterways the city of -bridges is noted for its dry and sandy soil; hence one can scarcely -stray from the paved streets without wading either in water, mud, or -sand. - -Properly speaking, Recife is the older section of the town, out near the -reef, and given over mainly to business. The modern city covers several -times more territory than that, including country-like outskirts of such -suggestive names as Capunga, Afflictos, and Sertãozinho among its -suburbs. There is Afogados (Drowned Man) out past the Five Points -station on the beach, a big suburb of mud and thatched huts among swamp -bushes and a network of tidewater, with lanes of mud that snap like the -cracking of a Sicilian whip when the tide is out and the tropical sun -blazing down upon them. In other directions, still within the city -limits, are miles of old estates and aged plantation-houses living out -their dotage under magnificent royal palms. To get about this broken up -city there were big new English and American street-cars, so new that -passengers were not yet permitted to put their feet on the seats. It was -less than a year since the old mule-cars for which Pernambuco was long -famous, had been superseded—in the outskirt of Torre they might still be -seen—and ragamuffins who had never heard the word “bond” in its ordinary -significance made frequent use of it in its Brazilian sense. The new -company was pushing its lines in every direction and already the tramway -was advertising itself as ready to furnish electric-light to business -houses along its lines. Thus, though one had the sense of treading on -the heels of modernity in Pernambuco, in all northern Brazil, the -pre-invention age always succeeded in eluding one and escaping just over -the edge of the horizon. - -Besides its brand new electric street-car system and the three lines of -the “Great Western” leaving it in as many directions, Recife has five -amusing little railroads, “toy locomotives hitched to a string of -baby-carriages,” as “Tut” called them, which do a volume of noisy, -dirty, dusty business to the north and northeast of the city. For many -years these ancient contrivances of an English company were the only -urban traffic in and about Recife. One crowds into a tenement-house of a -station, wages pitched battle about a knee-high hole in the wall to buy -a ticket, enters an ancient closed wooden box on wheels suggestive of -what trains must have been in the days of Charlemagne, amalgamates with -variegated Brazilians on a hard, misshapen wooden seat, and waits. When -one has waited long enough to run down to “B.A.” and back, there come -ten or twelve ear-splitting screeches and back-breaking jolts, and the -train is off for some other “station” fifty yards away, with a deluge of -smoke, soot, and cinders which penetrate to the utmost recesses of one’s -person. For a long hour the contrivance screams its sooty way through -endless dusty streets in which the irreconcilable tropical sunlight of -February strikes one full in the face like the fist of an enemy, and at -the end of that time the weary traveler may descend five or even six, -miles away, at Olinda, or at some of the plantation-town suburbs shaded -by many trees, yet dreary with their sand in place of grass. There are -two such lines to Olinda, out past Santo Amaro with its British cemetery -and across a broad swamp by a causeway; but the company claims that the -concession is no longer worth the holding since the coming of electric -competition. No doubt _Pernambucanos_ considered these medieval trains a -wonderful innovation and convenience when they first appeared, but it is -more pleasant now to depend on electricity—or to walk. - -I waded for miles barefoot along the beach to Olinda one day. Palm-trees -edged the curve of the shore with their inimitable plumage, streaking -the staring white sunlight with slender shadows. Thatched huts along the -beach, with all the Atlantic and its breezes spread out before them, -suggested where many a well-to-do family of Recife spends its summers. -An old wreck here and there protruded from the surface of the sea, -relics of some collision with the easternmost point of the New World. -Olinda piled high on its hill amid palm-trees and many huge old -churches, takes on the air of both, of age and reverence and the regal -dignity of the royal palm. Its many old buildings are clustered rather -closely together; it seems still to scorn business as thoroughly as in -the olden days, and to spend most of its time gazing across the swampy -flatlands at its materialistic rival, or out upon the blue sea which is -so rarely seen from Recife. - -The city we call Pernambuco claims 200,000 inhabitants, and of these -perhaps one in three could pass as white. Even in the huts lining the -water or mud labyrinths of the outskirts whites are numerous, though -often as trashy as the negroes. It is surprising that as one nears the -equator in Brazil the proportion of Caucasian blood increases, but it is -easily explained. All that part of South America which thrusts itself -halfway across the sea to Africa had many slaves, but Bahia not only -grew a crop which required more labor, but, its port being then the -national capital, it had the advantage of fame, as well as its great bay -as a safe landing-place. The result is that while Bahia is a negro town, -Pernambuco is a city of mulattoes, with a mixture of types that can only -be differentiated by the rich color-terminology of Brazil. On the whole, -the _Recifense_ is a more pleasant individual than the blacker, more -slovenly, more impudent _Bahiano_. Like most of the people of North -Brazil, he talks in a kind of singsong, ending almost every sentence -with _não_ (no) or _ouvioú?_ (did you hear?). There are few really -masculine voices in Brazil, and the persistent cackle of poor, cracked -trebles, chattering constantly at high speed about nothing, eventually -gets on the nerves, unless one has been spared that troublesome -equipment. The chief business of the city is still that of the -“mascates,” in a larger sense,—the exporting of sugar and cotton and the -importing of things needed by the growers of sugar and cotton, with the -usual large proportion of the benefits sticking to the fingers of the -fortunately placed middlemen. _Carregadores de assucar_, or sugar -porters, wearing a sort of football head-mask over their hats, are among -the most familiar sights of the old city, and the pungent odor of crude -sugar strikes one in the face everywhere in the wharf and warehouse -section. The sugar comes from the _engenhos_ in crude, dark-brown form; -the tropical heat causes it to ooze out until not only the bags but the -half-naked negroes who handle them are dripping and smeared with -molasses from top to bottom. When the rotting bag bursts entirely the -contents is spread out in the sun and barefoot negroes are sent to wade -ankle-deep back and forth in it, until it is dry enough to be shoveled -up again. - -There are not so many churches per capita in Recife as in Bahia, but -they are by no means scarce, while the schools are if anything -worse,—miserable little one-den huts hanging on the edges of mud-holes -or salt-water marshes, according to the state of the tide. The president -of Pernambuco asserted in his annual message that the state schools -could not afford to import from the United States the school furniture -needed, because of the high tax imposed upon it by the federal -government! Of higher institutions, of course, there is no such scarcity -as in the elemental grades. The Gymnasio Pernambucano, or High School of -Pernambuco, where are promulgated the bachelor degrees that make men -“doctors,” and not much else, is a large conspicuous building next that -of the state congress—and it had 69 pupils. Of the Faculdade de Dereito, -or Law School, similar remarks may be made. In the old business section -of Recife especially the condition of streets and buildings left much to -be desired, but under the energetic and honest new president promising -progress was already beginning to be made. - -On Saturday night our share of the receipts had been more than a conto -and toward midnight on Sunday I carried home a roll of ragged Brazilian -bills large enough to choke a rain-pipe. I was somewhat surprised, -therefore, that the “bust-up” came as early as the following Wednesday. -I knew it would come sooner or later, but I had expected to be able to -stave it off a week or more longer. When “Colonel” Ruben turned up that -night, we had already been reduced to “reheated soup.” This, coupled -with the fact that he had loudly and widely advertised “Six Days Only!” -and had now decided to stay five more, had greatly reduced our -audiences. Ruben took one look at the house during the first section, -suddenly decided that he had received a cable from his wife requiring -his immediate return to Bahia, and disappeared in that direction so -swiftly that I have never seen him since. Up to the last he had insisted -daily, if not hourly, that I must return when my contract with Linton -expired and become manager of his theater-to-be. He departed owing me a -paltry 83$ as our share of that evening’s receipts, but he left on my -hands not only the “Theatro Moderno” until the following Sunday at a -rental of 300$ daily, two dusky young gentlemen whom he had brought with -him from Bahia as his assistants, and the unpaid bills for several -half-page advertisements in the local papers, but so many other -creditors that he saw fit to embark at daylight from an unusual place. - -Still, this was little compared with what he might have done, and -probably we had made more money with his experienced assistance than we -should have made alone. I, too, might have run away, had I cared to -leave Americans in general and Edison in particular in such repute as -Ruben enjoys to this day in Pernambuco. Instead, I spent a breathless -Thursday preparing to meet the new conditions that had been forced upon -us. We were certain to lose money that night and the next, but by -special advertising and improved programs I hoped to make it up on -Saturday and Sunday. We still had the two _calungos_, or ten-foot monk -and dancing-girl figures on men’s legs, for though one of Ruben’s -creditors had attached these, he allowed us to use them until our -departure. I sent them out with drums and handbills, not only through -the town, but to all its suburbs and outskirts, including even -aristocratic Olinda. In short, for the first time I was a full-fledged -theatrical manager, renting, advertising, managing, auditing, running -the whole show—even mechanically, too, for that night “Tut” got a touch -of some tropical ill and had to be sent home—and, unfortunately, paying -the bills. For in spite of all our efforts Saturday night left us with -the balance slightly on the side of expenditures. I had already begun, -however, to prepare the territory ahead. J. A. Vinhães, Junior, a -_Carioca_ engaged in the film-furnishing business in North Brazil, had -offered to take over Ruben’s contract and extend it to the Amazon. He -was an unusually honest-looking, energetic young man, good company and -experienced, as well as widely known in “movie” circles, and before the -week was ended he had sailed away toward Pará, and possibly Manaos, as -our self-paid advance agent. - -My troubles apparently ended, “Tut” and I were sitting at “breakfast” -Sunday morning in proper best-boarding-house-in-town style when the -waiter suddenly handed me several letters from Linton, bearing neither -stamps nor signs of post-office handling. They had been written on board -ship on the way north from Buenos Aires, and announced that, the -Kinetophone having ended its labors in the Argentine, Linton was on his -way home, as soon as he could find a wife he had left in Rio, with the -two Spanish-speaking outfits. With the letters he forwarded some new -posters and Turco Morandi, formerly manager of one of the largest -theaters in “B.A.,” lately advance agent for the Argentine Kinetophone, -and noted for his double-width, steel-riveted honesty. It was he who had -brought the letters to Pernambuco, and about noon he appeared in person, -dressed in the latest Jockey Club style, and announced himself as the -new manager of the Kinetophone in Brazil. - -There was nothing niggardly about Linton. My six months being up, he -offered to let me turn over the job at once, take the first boat either -to Manaos or to the United States at his expense, draw my salary up to -the time the show started south again, collect traveling expenses from -Manaos back to the mouth of the Amazon, and promised to pay me later -whatever might be due on my commission basis. “Tut” was to get a -percentage of the receipts for taking charge of the show, and to make -such use of Morandi, to whom Linton had already advanced a considerable -sum, as he saw fit. When they ran out of audiences in the North, the -three were to take the show back down the coast, playing in the smaller -towns until Linton himself returned to pick them up. - -Had there been any evidence that my labors had been unsatisfactory, I -should have vanished forthwith. But the letters expressed satisfaction, -and Linton was not a man to indulge in flattery. Moreover, I wished to -see the rest of Brazil, and I did not want to see it as a foot-loose -tourist. I much preferred to go on to Manaos as manager of the -Kinetophone, with all the prestige thereunto appertaining, to be forced -to mix with all kinds of people, to be mistaken now and then for Edison -himself. Besides, I could not take advantage of Linton’s extraordinary -generosity. Instead of needing another man we could easily have gotten -along with one less, for “Tut,” who was some little inventor himself, -had improved upon Edison by wiring the phonograph in such a way that it -could be touched off from the booth, and any fool could be taught in a -few minutes to put on and take off the records. Then there was Vinhães, -already on his way. If Morandi had arrived a few days earlier, I might -have sent him on ahead instead, or left him with the show and played -advance agent myself. Worst of all, however, Linton, as almost any -American would have done under the circumstances, had chosen the worst -possible man to send to Brazil. Morandi not only spoke Spanish, but was -an _argentino_, and if there is one thing Brazilians resent more than -being spoken to in Castilian it is to hear it spoken with the accent of -their greatest national rivals. In the end I coaxed the fashionable -newcomer to go away somewhere and lose himself, while I spent what I had -looked forward to as a pleasant Sunday afternoon wondering who I could -get to drown him. - -For the first time in Brazil I had to cut out the Sunday matinée and -announced an evening performance given over entirely to the -Kinetophone—six numbers in each section, with a ten-minute interval in -which to change audiences. This meant double labor for “Tut” and Carlos, -but it would save us 50$ for the rent of ordinary films, 10$ for a -native operator, and should prove a great drawing card. It did. -Unfortunately I had set the opening at the early hour of six, and the -coming of Morandi caused both “Tut” and me to forget the change. -Accustomed to arrive at the theater at 6:30 and have half an hour of -ordinary films before our turn came, we sauntered down town as usual, -and, as we stepped off the street-car, what should greet our astonished -ears but the notes of one of our numbers known as the “Musical -Blacksmiths.” It was like hearing one’s own voice issuing from the lips -of a stranger. Never in all Brazil had a Kinetophone number been given -without either “Tut” or myself in attendance. We dashed into the -theater—and found Carlos calmly running the show! The audience had taken -to stamping and giving other evidences of impatience, and the plucky -_Paulista_, having taught a native how to put on the records, had -started the performance. I raised his salary forthwith. - -In our three sections that night we took in considerably more than a -million, recouping all our losses, and it was a double pleasure not to -have to split the receipts with Ruben. But there was that dashed -_argentino_ to spoil the effect of our efforts. Luckily, he was already -complaining of the “insupportable” heat and complete loss of appetite, -while kind, if unknown, friends had filled him full of tales of yellow -fever and the plague, so that he had come to me almost with tears in his -eyes and called my attention to the wife and five children he had left -in Buenos Aires. It took us the better part of Monday and Tuesday, and -cost nearly half a million reis to pay his debts, release him from the -slimy tentacles of the customhouse, and set him on his way with a ticket -to Rio, but the relief was worth the exertion. - -By this time we had moved over to the “Polytheama,” an open-air theater -in which I had arranged to play three nights at popular prices. I took -advantage of this breathing-spell to run out into the interior of the -state, not to the end of the line, for that would have meant two days -absence and missing a performance, but as far as Bezerros, where the -daily train meets itself coming back. The branch runs due west from -Recife, and by starting at seven and getting back at five, with constant -traveling, I covered 72 miles and return! - -Jaboatão on its knoll was buzzing with energy where the shops of the -combined railways had concentrated. Hills shrouded in blue veils began -to appear as soon as we had crossed the sandy coast strip. Farther -inland it grew rolling, everywhere dreary, dry, and bushy, with many -tunnels and long iron viaducts. Cotton was growing here and there in the -arid soil, but it was scant and small, with one bush where in our -southern states there would have been eight or ten. This region of rare -reed-and-mud huts bore slight resemblance to that along the line from -Maceió northward, with its endless trains of cane, its crowded -population, and mammoth old fazenda houses. Negro blood was noticeably -less as we left the coast, for slaves were imported chiefly by -sugar-planters and were not needed, nor, indeed, useful, in the grazing -regions. There were said to be many cattle in the state, but they must -have been farther inland, where there was still something to drink. -Passengers had to carry water with them, for neither trains nor stations -furnished it. Yet only two years before this region had complained of -heavy rains! Even the dining-car service of the lines to the north and -south of Recife was lacking, because some petty politician of the -interior had a contract with the government to furnish passengers an -alleged meal at one of the stations, and the English who have taken the -line over are compelled, during the sixty years of their lease, to stop -every train there for twenty minutes. - -At the “Polytheama” that night we had a remarkably good audience, many -evidently having put off coming, Brazilian fashion, until the last -performance. When we had torn down the show and packed up, “Tut” went -home and Carlos to wherever he slept, and after a shower-bath under a -spigot, I swung “Tut’s” hammock between two pillars of the open-air -theater. This was to be almost my first actual traveling with the show, -and it was time I tried out what my companions had been enduring for -months. It is many years since I have waked with that curious sensation -of wondering where I am, so that I had no difficulty in orienting myself -when there came a beating on the cinema door at daybreak. One of the -carters I had hired to take our stuff to the station had arrived with -one of those tiny, ancient, two-wheeled carts of North Brazil in which -the misplacing of a bag of flour suspends the horse in the air. His -companion did not turn up until an hour later, after the other had -dragged all the trunks to the door, and it was perilously near -train-time when I at last sent them hurrying across the cobblestones to -the Brum station way over in old Recife. By the time the usual hubbub -and quarreling, grafting and exorbitant charges, coaxing and assisting -the insufficient and lazy railway employees to get our outfit on board -was ended, I was congratulating myself on my foresight in having -arranged for another man to pay our traveling expenses. There was 12$500 -duty to pay for taking our trunks out of the state, a similar amount for -importing them into the next state north, express charges about equal to -first-class tickets for each trunk, and while the fares were not -high—five dollars for nearly three hundred miles—the twenty per cent. -surcharges of the federal and state governments respectively on the -tickets made the final total a considerable sum. - - - - - 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. - - - - - CHAPTER XVIII - TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON - - -When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the -same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not -sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orleans in quest of adventure, and -before another chance came he met an old Spanish wanderer who advised -him by all means to remain in the United States. It would probably be -difficult to write on one page what humanity owes that unknown Spaniard. -Later, when his inventions had begun to make him world famous, the -former trainboy sent a man to search all the Amazon region for materials -to be used in his experiments—and it was our privilege to take the -finished product back to the land which the inventor himself had never -reached in person. - -The _Brasil_ is one of the three smaller and older boats of the -government line—which is the reason we had much more space in our two -staterooms and considerably better attendance, for these boats are not -popular with “deadhead” politicians and their families. The cabin -passenger list was made up of the usual conglomeration of every human -color, nationality, social and moral standing, from priests to several -of the most repulsive old adventuresses—treated outwardly with complete -equality even by mothers of corruptible daughters—from clean-cut young -Englishmen to licentious, shifty-eyed Brazilian mulattoes. But the real -sight was the steerage quarters on the three decks in the nose of the -ship. Here men, women, and children—the thirty-four latest refugees from -the interior among them—bound for the rubber-fields were so packed -together that individual movement was impossible. Such a network of -hammocks—above, across, under, over one another, the bottom of one -sleeper resting on the belly of his neighbor below, scantily clad women -crisscrossing men who had discarded all but a single short garment—as -one could not have believed possible filled all the space, disputing it -with the animals and fowls the ship carried as food. Sheep and pigs -wandered among the no less frankly natural passengers; six zebu bulls on -their way to improve the native stock at the mouth of the Amazon -occupied stalls in the midst of the turmoil. One venturesome fellow had -as a last resort hung his hammock from the roof above these animals, so -that whenever one of them moved he was lifted hammock and all. There was -a very exact description of the scene in the _Cearense_ novel “O -Paroara” with which I was whiling away my time, and as that was -published sixteen years before, conditions have evidently long been the -same. - -Early in the afternoon of the second day we picked up a pilot along the -sandy coast and went over a sandbar into the wide bay of Tutoya, port of -the State of Piauhy, only a little point of which touches the sea. I had -at one time planned to go up the Parnahyba River to Therezina, the -capital, but inquiry proved that this would not be financially -advantageous, so that I contented myself with this brief glimpse of the -state. Many _Piauhyenses_ came on board from the _montarias_, or -ludicrous native rowboats in which they were transferred from the -_giaolas_ (literally “bird-cage,” but “river steamer” in Amazonian -parlance) that were waiting to carry passengers back up the river, and -we had at least a vicarious acquaintance with them. - -When I awoke at dawn we were already close to the winking lighthouse -known among British mariners as “Maranham,” and soon afterward there -appeared a town rather prettily situated on a low ridge. We anchored far -out, and it was more than an hour before sailboats brought the -authorities to examine us, but that was a small matter to a man with a -deck-chair and a passable novel. In fact, there was no hurry about going -ashore, for five days would probably suffice to exploit the interest of -São Luiz in the Kinetophone, and the rest of the State of Maranhão was -virtually inaccessible. More than that, when the local manager came on -board through the dingy gray water to pay us his respects he reminded me -that this was Wednesday of Holy Week and that it would be foolish to -spoil the effect of our _estrea_ by attempting to compete with the -priests before Saturday. - -In 1612 a Frenchman named La Ravadière founded on an island near the -mouth of the Amazon a city which he called Saint Louis in honor of King -Louis XIII. Two years later the Portuguese drove out the French and the -city became the capital of the province of Maranhão—aboriginal name of -the Amazon—which then included all northern Brazil from Ceará to the -Andes. The island, which is small, is known as Ilha de São Luiz, and the -city is officially São Luiz do Maranhão, though, like most capitals -along this coast, it is better known to the outside world by the name of -the state. Its harbor is shallow, with much tide, so that when one -lands, by launch, rowboat, and finally a negro’s shoulders, the whole -raging sea seems beneath one, and six hours later the place is a -sand-field, with steamers sitting high and dry and barefoot crab-hunters -wandering about on it, as if someone had pulled the cork out of the -bottom of the ocean. - -A huge old fort and stone wall face the harbor, and from the -landing-place a stone-paved street lined by carefully trimmed, -haycock-shaped trees slants swiftly up to the venerable cathedral and -the main square, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above. Situated on a -low, but narrow and broken, ridge, its streets stumble rather steeply up -and down in places, and the town is so compact that, once ended, these -passageways break off instantly into dense-green and almost trackless -jungle, except the single Rua Grande, which goes on across the island. -Perhaps it is due to its situation that São Luiz is cooler than its two -degrees from the equator would suggest, though here the constant trade -winds die down, thereby saving the region from the glaring aridity which -characterizes all that part of the continent to the eastward. In fact, -somewhere between Ceará and Maranhão is the dividing line between that -scantily wooded semi-desert and the humid, dense jungle of the Amazon -basin. In many ways São Luiz is the most pleasant little capital along -the coast of North Brazil, and not the least of its charms is the -pleasure of again seeing grass and trees in all the green profusion of -tropical lands. Here one begins to feel that equatorial humidity which -leaves even the clothing damp and sticky; by night strange creatures -singing in the prolific vegetation mark São Luiz as the beginning of the -great Amazonia. - -[Illustration: Rural policeman of Ceará, in the heavy leather hats of -the region] - -[Illustration: From town to port in São Luis de Maranhão—and a street -car] - -[Illustration: A street of São Luis de Maranhão] - -In Brazil it is the custom to interview newspapers rather than to wait -to be interviewed, and immediately upon landing the local manager hired -an automobile in which all of us engaged in the “necessary courtesy” of -calling upon all the editors. Some of them were men of real culture and -widely informed, their full Caucasian complexions burned that coppery -red of those who have lived for generations near the equator. Even the -local cinema manager, who had never been off the little island of São -Luiz, spoke faultless French and would not have been out of place in the -best society of old Europe. A few, on the other hand, had traveled -rather widely, and these were even more inclined than the others to be -dogmatic in their editorial wisdom. One vivacious young editor of rather -forceful and unusually attractive face for Brazil, who looked like a -white man browned up for a minstrel show, who might have been a strong -character and a pleasant, handsome fellow had not some wanton ancestor -casually added a bit of negro blood to his veins and given him the -egotistical volubility, the instability, and the surliness of the -_mestiço_, had no sooner been presented to us than he began talking like -a whirlwind about the United States, neither desiring nor expecting to -have his opinions in any way questioned, his attitude that of a judge -who means to be kindly but who regards his judgments as final. In answer -to one question which I managed to thrust between his closely cemented -words he casually remarked that, though he knew most of Brazil and had -been several times to Europe, he had never visited the United States, -adding in his turbulent flow of speech that he had fear rather than a -desire to do so “because there life is so intense.” In the next sentence -he was assuring, and convincing, his native hearers that the “Collosus -of the North” was purely scientific and commercial, without the -slightest conception of or interest in anything artistic—and then -suddenly he broke forth upon the negro question. - -Next to Bahia. Maranhão has the greatest percentage of African blood of -all the states of Brazil; hence this was a natural topic. It usually is -between educated Brazilians and traveling Americans. The editor’s -opinions on the subject were those of many of his class, long since -familiar to us. There were 900,000 negroes in Brazil, he dogmatized, in -other words about three per cent. of the population(!), who were rapidly -being absorbed and would soon disappear, whereas in the United States -twelve per cent. of the population were negroes, who, being forced to -resist the attitude of the whites, would remain a race apart and a -constant and growing menace. In two or three centuries, he prophesied, -there would be only negroes left in the United States, because they -“reproduce like flies and lie in the shade and live to be a hundred, -while the white men are wearing themselves out by their absurdly intense -living.” _Ergo_, Brazil had been far more fortunate and wise in her -handling of the negro problem than her great neighbor of the North. - -It was the same old argument, the rock on which the bulk of Brazilian -and American opinion on this subject always splits. In Brazil the negro -is physically stronger and better fitted to the climate than the whites; -in the United States, as a whole, the reverse is the case. This, and -certain other differences overlooked by most Brazilians, keep the -argument from becoming clean-cut. Yet is the negro, or at least the -part-negro, the best type that can permanently prosper under Brazilian -conditions? No one of tropical experience and an open mind believes that -the white race, pure and unadulterated, can maintain its high standing -for generations in equatorial regions without frequent reinforcements -either by training in, or immigration from, the temperate zones. Can -some such standard be maintained by mixing it with those to whom the -tropics are a natural habitat? Is it better to “wash out the black” -through many generations of lowering the whites, to breed a new type, a -kind of human mule, to fit the climate and conditions, or to keep the -two races strictly, even forcibly, separated? The first is the -Brazilian, the second the American point of view, and the gulf between -them is not easily bridged. - -That night we gave a special performance for the press, which was -attended by about forty representatives of São Luiz’ four daily -journals. This and the ceremonial visits were probably worth the -trouble, for the papers next day were equally enthusiastic about the -Kinetophone and its “highly cultured” sponsors, whose names, titles, and -previous condition of servitude they gave in full down to the latest -count of Carlos’ children. Indeed, we became the subject of the chief -editorials, even in the face of religious competition. The most famous -living wielder of a quill in Maranhão took us amiably to task for using -the full name of the inventor on our advertising matter, contending—in -his paper’s two most prominent columns—that it was an indignity to style -“Thomaz A. Edison, like any commonplace mortal, a man whose Godlike -gifts to the world had made him to all mankind for all time the one and -only EDISON.” Naturally such publicity hurt our feelings. - -But the result of all this could not be known for three days, Thursday -and Friday being so holy that even churches could not ring their -bells—for which we gave fervent thanks, well knowing that the respite -would be soundly broken on Easter Sunday. The “only one” in town was the -“Hotel Central,” a big colonial two-story building directly across from -the cathedral, and the French proprietor set a table and attended to -business like a Frenchman, instead of being off down the street -gossiping. “Tut” and I had a suite of two rooms shut off from most of -the uproar of the rest of the house, our living-room immense, with three -balconied double windows larger than doors looking down upon the -tree-lined promenade and a part of the sea—when the tide was in. Our -huge four-poster bed, as well as the smaller one we took turns in -occupying, was carefully mosquito-netted, for only white foreigners are -said to be subject to yellow fever. There were hammock-hooks, never -lacking in North Brazil, in all the walls. Of the mahogany tables, -marble-topped bureaus, full-length pier glass in which to admire -ourselves, the big cane settee, the comfortable roomy cane -rocking-chairs, and the score of minor convenient articles of furniture -I will say no more, lest there be a sudden exodus to São Luiz do -Maranhão. To be sure, the shower-bath now and then ran dry, but there -were really only two drawbacks to the “Hotel Central,”—its kerosene -lamps and its “artistas.” Evidently there was no escaping these -self-styled “actresses” who distribute themselves throughout the hotels -of North Brazil, though the old Frenchman assured us that he had always -refused to take them in until the war-bred crisis made their admission -“necessary.” - -Being so old a city, São Luiz has a finished aspect quite different from -many others of more recent origin. It is completely paved in square -cobblestones, with very much arched roadways, and all its narrow -sidewalks of flat stones, polished by many generations of feet, are so -slanting that one must take care if he would not, as I all but did more -than once, spill himself wrong end up in the middle of the street. We -had at last outstripped civilization, in its more modern manifestations. -All the way up the coast each state capital had put in electric -street-cars and similar contrivances within a year or so—that is, long -since I had entered South America. Here we had beaten invention to it, -and there was genuine pleasure in seeing drowsy old easy-going mule-cars -again—though we never bothered to wait for them. São Luiz, too, still -lights itself with matches, though that does not mean, as it would -almost certainly in the Andes, that reading is considered bad form. In -fact, it is called the Athens of Brazil, and quite justly, for all the -rest of the country has scarcely produced as excellent a list of -literary men. Graça Aranha, Coelho Netto, the three Azevedo brothers, -João Lisboa, the historian, Manuel Mendes, who turned Virgil and Homer -into widely famed Portuguese verse, Teixeira Mendes, head of Brazilian -Positivists, and Gonsalves Dias, the national poet, are but a few of the -famous sons of Maranhão. Of them all, the most beloved, not merely in -São Luiz but in all Brazil, is Dias, born of a Portuguese shopkeeper of -the interior and his negro slave, and done to death by sharks when the -frail craft on which he was returning from Europe with an incurable -ailment came to grief within sight of the lighthouse on his native -shores. Those who are familiar enough with both tongues to be able to -form a judgment, and who have no national prejudices to overcome, assert -that as a poet the impulsive, licentious Brazilian mulatto was several -rungs higher up the ladder than our own Longfellow. There is a Praça -Gonsalves Dias in São Luiz, and in the center of it, at the top of a -tall column high up among his beloved palm-trees and the singing -_sabiás_ he immortalized in his best known poem, is the poet’s statue, -non-committal as to complexion in its white stone (or plaster) and -giving him the appearance of a wavy-haired Shakespeare. Not far from -this statue, overtopping everything else and giving an aëroplane view of -all the city, is an old shot-tower, of the kind used in former days for -the making of bullets with the aid of gravitation. Dogs are -distressingly numerous, and the charcoal over which the _Maranhenses_ -cook in little braziers is carried about town and sold in small baskets -hanging six or eight high at either end of bamboo poles. It is a busy -town every five days, when a steamer comes from Pará or the south; -otherwise it drifts along at a contented, mule-tram pace. - -On Thursday evening we stepped across to the cathedral and saw the -ceremony of the “Washing of the Feet.” The bishop, in full purple and -attended by a throng of assistants and acolytes, without music and with -very little light as a sign of mourning, marched along a raised bench -where twelve beggars had taken seats hours before. Several of them were -blind and all of them diseased, and they had been dressed in white -cotton gowns which partly concealed their natural rags. The bishop -placed a silver basin under a foot of each in turn, spilled three drops -of water on it, dabbed them with a napkin, then stooped and kissed the -unsterilized extremity almost fervently, though with something in his -intelligent, clean-cut face which suggested that he did not particularly -enjoy this part of his ecclesiastical duties. Each beggar was given a -loaf of French bread, a copper coin worth nearly a cent, and what looked -like a folded nightshirt, to all of which he clung with both hands as if -expecting the densely packed throng of the faithful, virtually all of -whom could point back to African ancestry, to snatch the gifts away from -him. That night the same class engaged in the annual “hanging of Judas,” -and when morning dawned effigies of the traitor of Gethsemane, in most -fanciful and multicolored garments, swung by the neck from a score of -improvised gibbets. - -One of the best known residents of Maranhão is a hardy American who came -down twenty years before to set up in Caixas the first cotton-mill in -North Brazil—though cotton had been grown there for more than a century. -There he married, became a power in the cattle and mining industries, -and established a line of river-steamers to that principal town of the -interior. Brazil, as he put it, is an easy country in which to make a -living, but a hard one in which to make a fortune. Once real wealth -begins to show its face, the native politicians see to it that it does -not become too swollen. Cattle are the principal product of the state, -but a sack of salt costing two or three milreis in São Luiz to begin -with, reached the incredible price of 24$ in the interior. All Brazil, -in his opinion, would prove fitted for the white man, once the more -temperate south was filled up; but as yet only the two hundredth part of -the republic was under cultivation. - -We opened on Saturday night after the longest period of idleness since -the Kinetophone had made its bow to Brazil. It was perhaps the -combination of good advertising, after-Lent reaction, and the fact that -São Luiz gets few good entertainments that brought greater crowds than -we could accommodate. Our performance, too, pleased more than usual -there, thanks among other things to excellent acoustic properties and to -a few lines in our introductory number from “O Canto do Sabiá,” best -known poem of Gonsalves Dias. The result was that as often as we chose -to open it we filled the house so tightly that I could barely squeeze in -myself. Unfortunately the remodeled shop held only four hundred, but on -the other hand it was the best managed theater we had seen in Brazil, -with “deadheads” almost unknown and the smallest child paying admission. -On Sunday we gave a matinée and three evening performances, packing the -place so full that we had to call upon the police to restrain those who -could not legally be admitted. We took up the tickets inside, as in a -street-car, and needed no door-keepers during the performance, for no -man, with or without a ticket, could have forced his way into that -sardine-box. The street outside was blocked with those waiting to get -into the next _sessão_, the sidewalks lined with chairs filled with -fancily dressed women of the “best families.” That day’s income was -larger than we had had since our first Sunday in Pernambuco, and a -cablegram carried the news of our popularity to the newspapers of Pará. - -There is only one place to take a walk of any length in São Luiz. The -Rua Grande turns into a passable road and goes on across the island, but -all other streets soon end in swamp or jungle. I tramped out of town one -morning and returned that afternoon, having covered fifteen of the -twenty miles of island road and return. It was a joy to walk on real -earth again after months of wading in sand, and to be surrounded on -either hand by a great green wall, instead of a glaring half-desert. On -the other hand, the dull skies of the Amazon region were already getting -on my nerves, as they do on those who abandon the almost unbroken blue -sky and sunshine of the eastern coast. Yet on the whole Brazil has a -remarkably even climate for so enormous a stretch of territory, and it -was not much warmer here than in Santa Anna on the Uruguayan border. -Life out of doors in the tropics is a serious thing, however, and here -was the real, humid, densely jungled tropics of the imagination at last. -Bamboos waved their titanic plumes above me; a tree ablaze with scarlet -blossoms flashed forth from the dense verdure; the _fructa-pão_, which -furnishes its vegetable bread to the poorer classes all the way from -Bahia northward, here produced far more abundantly than man required. -Palms ranged from those of fern-like delicacy to the _coco-babassú_, -shaped like a gigantic feather-duster stood on end and producing a bunch -six feet long of red nuts as large as our walnuts. These contain a -kernel of cocoanut meat rich in oil, which was just beginning to be -exported to Europe, and unlimited quantities of which could be had for -the picking and cracking. Butterflies celebrating their nuptials -enlivened the landscape with the flutter of their iridescent -multicolored wings; here and there the _sabiá_, first cousin to our -northern robin, sang his familiar song; once or twice I fancied I heard -the _mãe da lua_ (mother of the moon), the nightingale of Brazil. - -Anil was the largest of several small towns along the way, with a -mule-car running the length of it on what used to be a little railroad. -A railway also runs across the island, or at least the rusty rails do, -hoping some day to reach the mainland by a bridge and continue to -Caixas, whence a line already operates to Therezina, capital of the next -state east. Several genuine tropical downpours forced me to seek such -shelter as was available, and the day was done before I returned to São -Luiz. There are many delightful things in the tropics, but none of them -equal the soft dusk of evening. Like most fine things, it is short and -fleeting, no two minutes alike, and barely a few moments seemed to pass -between the last livid rays of the sun, as it veiled itself behind the -light band of clouds along the horizon, and the falling of moonlight in -flecks of silver through the limply drooping fronds of the palm-trees, -stencilled in silhouette against the iridescent sky of a tropical night. -It was almost a full year since my last real walk, but no one in São -Luiz felt more contented with life than I that evening. Yet my tramp was -the only topic of conversation at the cinema, and a newspaper referred -editorially next day to the “incredible energy and endurance of our -distinguished North American visitor,” who could cover thirty miles of -Amazonian ground on his own feet in a single day! - -It might have been better for Carlos, too, if he had combatted the -climate of the torrid North with pedestrianism. For some time he had -been losing his _Paulista_ energy, and with it his interest in life. On -the morning after my walk I met him strolling languidly along the main -street, looking more disconsolate and colorless than I had ever seen him -before; but those are common symptoms in the tropics and I thought -little more about it until he failed to join us at dinner that evening. -We found him in bed in his room across the hall, with a raging fever. -The best recommended physician of São Luiz having arrived, I hurried -away to the theater, where both Carlos’ work and my own awaited me. - -That night he was neither able to talk nor, apparently, to recognize me. -The native leech had diagnosed his ailment all the way from malaria to -bubonic plague, and had finally settled upon intestinal grippe. Whatever -it was, Carlos was a sick man, and when morning came without any sign of -improvement, I set about arranging to get him into a hospital. There -were two in São Luiz,—the “Beneficencia Portugueza” and the “Santa Casa -da Misericordia.” For several reasons I chose the second. By this time -the invalid could scarcely raise his head, or express himself, except by -monosyllabic gurgles and the rolling of his bloodshot eyes; yet it was a -labor of hours to coax any of his fellow-countrymen to help untangle the -red tape that blocked his immediate entrance to the hospital. A colonel -connected with the cinema at length agreed to go with me to the doctor -whose duty it was to issue tickets of admission, but he insisted on -having an automobile at 10$ an hour with which to cover the four short -blocks of stone-paved street. When the doctor and the colonel had run -through all the gamut of Latin-American salutations, down to the fourth -generation and the family cat, a great many questions were asked me -before Carlos was finally accepted as a patient, as if it were an -extraordinary favor, though the “Santa Casa” was in theory open to all. -Then, a bit of rain coming up, the colonel began talking politics and -remained for more than an hour, through three more showers. When we -finally entered our waiting automobile it was out of gasoline! I raced -back to the hotel, impressed two carriers and a hammock into service, -and got our ailing companion at last into the hands of the nuns just at -nightfall. - -As the time was drawing near when we must move on, I appointed the most -responsible man in town unofficial guardian for Carlos and turned over -to him, against ample receipts, his back pay, his salary to the end of -the month, and his fare back to Rio. This should have sufficed amply to -pay his hospital bills and carry him home with something to spare, and I -had no authority to give him more. Next morning we discovered that -Carlos had taken with him our duplicate set of keys, and “Tut” went up -to the hospital to get them. The nun-nurse had them in safe-keeping and -would not turn them over without Carlos’ permission. He could not talk, -but after staring at “Tut” for a long time he faintly nodded. After -still longer effort they succeeded in getting, in faintly whispered -monosyllables, the address of his family in São Paulo. As “Tut” was -leaving, a doctor bustled cheerily into the ward and casually informed -him that Carlos had yellow fever. - -The indifferent way in which São Luiz took such things gave one a creepy -feeling that life was held cheaply in those parts. When Carlos’ -condition was mentioned to patrons of the cinema that evening they said, -between yawns, “Ja estã liquidado—Oh, he is finished all right,” and -went in to weep at some silly film drama and to giggle at Kinetophone -humor. I insisted on remaining optimistic. Had we not heard a hundred -times that native Brazilians never die of yellow fever, that its -fatalities are confined to white foreigners? In other words, while “Tut” -and I were constant prospective candidates for an Amazonian cemetery, a -man born in São Paulo, accustomed all his life to Brazilian conditions, -should be in no great danger. I was still telling myself these things -when word reached us that Carlos was dead. - -By this time we were already on our way to Pará, for ten-day steamers -and theatrical engagements wait for no man. When three men have lived -more closely together than brothers for more than half a year the loss -of one of them is an astonishingly heavy subtraction, one which we felt -all the way from the longer time it took the two of us to tear down the -show and send it on board the _Ceará_, to all those little daily -reminders of the loss of a familiar companion. Of course, when we came -to think it over, natives do die of yellow fever; but as those living in -the regions where it flourishes have either died of it, or recovered -from it, in childhood, the survivors are immune and the effect is as if -the disease were fatal only to Caucasian visitors. Besides, Carlos, born -of Italian parents on the cool Brazilian plateau more than twenty -degrees to the south, was virtually a foreigner up here on the steaming -equator. The period of incubation being longer than the time we had -spent in São Luiz, it was probably the mosquitoes of Ceará that had been -his undoing. - -We refitted the phonograph with “Tut’s” automatic starting device, which -had fallen into disrepair, so that North Brazil might continue to be -amused as long as one of us survived. For our troupe, at least, would -perform while anyone remained to turn the crank. There were frail young -ladies in it, and very few who were acclimated to tropical travel; yet -they appeared night after night without changing a hair, doing exactly -as good work as when they left New York, playing fully as well to a -scattering audience on a sweltering afternoon as to a packed house on a -cool evening, never disturbing us with a display of mood or temperament, -never showing the slightest impairment from the climate, the soggy -Brazilian food, the thousand little tropical and Latin-American -annoyances, and never dying of yellow fever. More than once I woke up -dreaming that they were subject to all the ills of living men and women, -or sweated through a nightmare of trying to transport them all in a -small boat, or house them all in a ten-room hotel already half occupied -by persons with whom respectable Americans should not come in contact. - -A broad light streak on the ocean ahead announced our approach to the -mouth of the Amazon, the “river-sea,” as the Brazilians often call it, -discoloring the deep-blue Atlantic as far as the eye could reach. Later -the water turned a muddy brown and we began to see the smoke from the -Pará power-house across the flat featureless landscape. Monotonous dense -greenery soon surrounded us, flat, impenetrable forests spreading from -the very edge of the river to infinity on either hand. Everywhere the -vast stream was dotted with sailboats, their lateen sails all dyed some -single bright color,—blue, saffron, red, faded pink. Then flat wooded -islands scattered all about appeared, and finally an opening in the flat -landscape disclosed the low City of Pará, still so far away as to be -almost indistinguishable, and before we could steam up to it swift -tropical darkness had fallen. - -We dropped anchor for the night before its long row of lights, the -passengers whiling away the evening with music and dancing, no one -apparently sorry to save a hotel-bill out in the cool breezes of the -quiet river. We were so close to the town that we could hear the night -life under the trees in the central praça and see the electric -street-cars go frequently slipping past. It may have been the sight of -the cathedral, bulking forth out of the night above the rest of the -city, that turned the group of Brazilian men gathered on the after -saloon deck to a discussion of religion—though it was not a particularly -religious discussion. In fact, the crux of every one of a score of -anecdotes was the grafting of priests, and the men one and all agreed -that the ecclesiastics were even more diligent and clever at it than -politicians; but they all took care that the women on board should hear -none of their stories. - -A steward called us at daybreak, escaping before I could get hold of the -revolver in the bottom of my valise. A fog half concealed the city, -gradually disclosing, as the equatorial sun burned it away, long rows of -docks and warehouses, the “new” town floor-flat, with a water-tower -standing above the rest, and a fish-market swarming with sailboats and -clamoring people, the old city rising slightly on a knoll topped by the -cathedral. It was more than two hours later that the port doctor came on -board to examine us. As I replied “All right” to the steward who came to -tell me to report, and continued reading in my steamer-chair without -hearing from him again, I fancy it must have been a thorough -examination. The sunshine was falling in streams of molten lead when we -finally hoisted our mud-hook and pulled up to a dock—for the first time -since we had landed in Bahia. A large crowd, astonishingly European in -origin, was gathered along the quay, giving little or no attention to -the heavy showers that every now and then broke forth from a half -cloudless sky. - -Vinhães was on hand, with a dozen newspapers containing large -Kinetophone displays, and together we went down into the hubbub of the -hold, through the chaotic network of third-class hammocks, to fight to -have our baggage landed in time for an evening performance. A few ports -back our phonograph had nearly been put out of business by a careless -drayman, and since then I had been taking no chances, though I had to -dog the steps of two negroes, ordered to carry it by the handles, to -keep them from putting it on their heads. In up-to-date Pará, however, -we had only to have it placed in a large and luxurious taxicab and drive -away with it to the “Bar Paraense.” This half-open theater out in the -Nazareth section of town was somewhat more distant from the center than -we should have preferred; but it was the best Vinhães had been able to -get. The labor of setting up emphasized the loss of Carlos, especially -as this was one of those big ramshackle buildings we now and then came -across where it took a score of pulleys to carry our synchronizing cord -from the booth to the phonograph. But at least we returned to -comfortable quarters when our labors were over. The “Café da Paz” was as -well run under its Swiss maître d’hôtel as a high-class European -hostelry with several tropical improvements, and as it was owned by the -same cultured and upright copper-tinted gentleman who had a half -interest in the “Bar Paraense,” the cost of our excellent accommodation -was less than we had paid in some unspeakable hovels. To be sure, hard -times had given several rapid young ladies admission even here, but they -were not on our airy third story, with its huge blind-shaded windows and -its view of all Pará. In the halcyon days of rubber, ended barely two -years before, the “Café da Paz” was the best hotel in North Brazil, -where a small room alone cost more than we were paying now for full -accommodation and where one paid 2$ for a place at table and at least as -much for each dish ordered. - -“Tut” and I had come on the same ticket from Maranhão. In the list of -passengers published in that evening’s papers we appeared as “Wayne -Tuthill and 1 child.” At dinner we were handed an order from the -sanitary department of the State of Pará, commanding “Wayne Tuthill e -Harrey” to appear at the yellow fever section for examination. It was -evident from the document that only one person was meant by this -Latin-American style of double-barreled name; but out of some mixture of -curiosity and honesty I took it upon myself next morning to point out -the error. For my pains I, too, was commanded to appear at three every -afternoon for the next thirteen days, under penalty of fine and -imprisonment. I protested that I could not regulate my life in any such -bourgeois fashion, and being taken before the head doctor, I informed -him that it was my habit and intention to wander about the state during -my stay in Pará. So effective was my command of Brazilian super-courtesy -by this time that he replied in the same vein, saying all foreigners -coming from either Ceará or Manaos, where yellow fever had broken out, -were put under observation, but that in my case it would be sufficient -if I would report at any time between seven and five on those days when -I happened to be in town. - -Strictly speaking, there is no city of Pará, nor is it on the Amazon. In -1615 Castello Branco left Maranhão and founded on the spot where the old -castle of Pará now stands a village at the junction of the Guajará and -Guamá rivers. Both of these are a part of the Amazon system, but they -are separated from the mouth of the river proper by the enormous island -of Marajó, considerably larger than the Republic of Portugal. The -Tupinamba Indians who inhabited the spot were friendly to the newcomers, -and as he had left Maranhão on Christmas Day, Branco named the town -Nossa Senhora de Belém (Our Lady of Bethlehem); and Belém the capital of -the state of Pará is officially and locally to this day. Just two -centuries later “Grão Pará” definitely separated from the _capitania_ of -Maranhão and became a province, a province of slight importance then, in -spite of its enormous size and unlimited tropical forests. In 1852 a -_Paraense_ sent the first steamer up the Amazon, but it was not until -1867 that the world’s greatest river was opened to foreign navigation. -Ten years later the most famous drought in the history of Ceará sent -thousands of _Cearenses_ to open up the great rubber-fields of Grão-Pará -and Amazonas, from which the great riches of Belém and Manaos resulted. - -Pará is distinctly a maritime city, though it is ninety miles from the -ocean. With the exception of a short government line to Bragança on the -coast to the west, constructed in 1877, one cannot go anywhere from it -except by boat. It is almost less a Brazilian than a European city, with -little brotherhood for the rest of the republic. In the newspapers of -Pará “America” means New York, which can be reached from there in two or -three days less time than are required for a journey to Rio. It was not -until we had met some fellow-countrymen who had been treading Broadway -ten days before, long after the returning senator of Pará who landed -with us had sailed from the national capital, that we realized why the -eyes of Pará are fixed on the north and east rather than upon the great -country to the south to which it governmentally belongs. - -Pará is an exotic growth, a bit of Parisian civilization isolated in an -enormous wilderness, which encroaches so constantly upon it that the -European air of the center of town quickly disappears in grass-grown -alleyways of swamp and jungle. The heavy rains cause this grass to grow -with tropical luxuriance and rapidity, so that there are many wide -streets laid out between unbroken rows of buildings that are nothing but -deep green lawns with a cow-path or two straggling along them. Densest -jungle may be found a short stroll from the central praça, and wild -Indians, living as they did centuries ago, are only a few hours distant. -It is an unfinished city of pompous, got-rich-quick fronts and ragged -rears, with only the old town on its knoll, and the few principal -streets of the new town paved in stone blocks. The rest is much as -nature left it, and while one may find almost anything in this little -culture-importing heart of the city which can be had in the centers of -civilization, a short walk brings one to isolated houses on stilts and -uninhabited clearings through the jungle in which men, driving carts -drawn by one bull, wade to their thighs cutting and loading grass. -Scarcely a rifle-shot from shops offering the latest Parisian creations -one must depend, even for life, on the strength and agility of primitive -man. - -Pará has been called the “City of Trees.” Corinthian columns of royal -palms wave their elegant heads in every direction, mammoth tropical -growths of which we of the North do not even know the name shade the -squares and praças; the important streets and avenues are lined with -shade trees, in nearly every case the mango, with whitened trunks as a -protection against tropical plagues and trimmed to a few main branches, -instead of being left to its natural appearance of a deep-green -haystack. There is a wealth of tropical vegetation in parks and gardens, -terminating with the Bosque Rodrigues Alves in the outskirts, a sample -of the real Amazonia, dense wild forest where humidity and semi-darkness -reign and great trees stand on tiptoe straining their necks in the -struggle for air and light above the solid roof of vegetation. Yet the -considerable market gardens on the edges of town, tended by Portuguese -and other white laborers, show what European immigration can and might -do against this prolific militancy of unbridled nature. - -In contrast to the surrounding primeval wilderness, there is a -suggestion of the _vieux port_ of Marseilles in the Ver-o-peso -(See-the-weight), the old rectangular landing-place, so named because in -the time of the monarchy fish brought to town were weighed there and -assessed a government tax. It is still the chief port for small vessels, -and may be found almost any morning packed with sailing ships, their -many colored sails giving the scene an effectiveness usually lacking in -the monotonously green aspect of equatorial Brazil. These gather from -all directions, bringing the products of the adjacent mainland, the -Island of Marajó opposite, and of the waters between, and carrying back -to the towns and hamlets scattered along either side of this false mouth -of the Amazon the products of civilization, ranging from French perfume -to manufactured ice. Along the quay of the Ver-o-peso and for some -distance back is the public market, filled with many Amazonian products -unknown in northern climes. First and foremost is the _pirarucú_, a fat, -reddish-brown fish sometimes called the “cod of the Amazon,” so huge -that each scale is nearly two inches across, less often eaten fresh than -salted and boxed in great slabs and shipped to every community along the -river. _Pirarucú_ is the beef of the Amazonian regions, as _farinha_ is -its bread. Turtle flesh is also in great favor, and butter made from the -turtle eggs is the most common in the Pará market. Oil of _capivara_, or -river-hog, of tapir, and even of alligator furnish the _Paraenses_ their -emulsions. The state taxes every fisherman, and the federal government -takes its toll of every turtle, _pirarucú_, or bottle of oil he brings -in. _Castanhas_, or chestnuts, as what we call the “Brazil nut” is known -at home, are to be found in great heaps; these and cacao constitute the -principal products of Grão Pará, with one world-famous exception. There -are scores of such local commodities as _cheiro de mulata_, which might -be translated as “scent of mulatto-girl,” ground up bark sold in little -packages and sprinkled in the frizzled tresses of the purchasers, both -as a perfume and to bring good luck. Of native fruits wholly unknown in -the temperate zones there are no end,—the _mamão_, better known by the -Spanish-American name of _papaya_; the _graviola_, with big green scales -and a cream-like interior similar to the _chirimoya_ of Andean valleys; -the _cupuassú_, with an apple taste; the _barcury_, _maracajú_, -_mangaba_, _muruxy_, _taxperebá_, and many others, less often used as -table fruits than as flavoring to sorbets or ice cream, or what a local -café-keeper stronger on mixing than on spelling advertises as -“cookstails.” The _maxixe_, by the way, which has reached the North in -the form of a Brazilian rag-time dance elaborated from Portuguese and -African originals by the negroes of Pernambuco and Bahia, is in its -legitimate sense an Amazonian pepper. Above all, there is the _assahy_, -the small fruit of a palm-tree not unlike the date in appearance, from -which a non-alcoholic _refresco_ is made, reddish in color and drunk -with _farinha_. This is so great a favorite among _Paraenses_ that they -have a saying: - - _Quem vai para Pará para;_ Whoever goes to Pará stops; - _Quem toma assahy fica._ Whoever drinks _assahy_ remains. - -Rubber, the second national industry of Brazil, is of course the life of -Pará, which is the reason the city had lost most of its old-time energy. -Not only was the rubber market in a chaotic state on account of the -World War, but the Amazon was just beginning to feel seriously the -competition of the planted rubber-fields of Ceylon, where, in contrast -to the high prices of Amazonia, the cost of living is perhaps the lowest -in the world. Warehouses that two years before could not hold the rubber -that poured in upon them now had a few dozen of the big balls scattered -about their huge floors. There they were being cut up—giving them a -striking resemblance to dried meat—to make sure the rubber-gatherer had -not included a few stones or a low-grade near-rubber called _caucho_ and -packed in heavy boxes of native wood for export. All Amazonia, from the -laborers who tap the trees to the speculators and explorers and their -long train of hangers-on, was feeling the change acutely. - -Vinhães never recovered from his astonishment at the difference between -this Pará and the one he had known on previous trips. In the good old -days of only a few months back Pará was sure it would soon outstrip -Paris, so that it had many public and private buildings out of all -keeping with its present condition, sumptuous three-story structures -marked “Municipal School” on the outside that were mere dusty ruins -within, pretentious mansions sitting out wet and lonely, knee-deep in -grass, on an imaginary avenue. Then throngs of humanity, all leaving -money behind them, poured in and out of the gateway to the Amazon. -To-day, with her chief commerce languishing in the throes of death, Pará -was provincial again—a stranger attracted attention and everyone knew -everyone else. Even now there were few beggars, thanks, perhaps, both to -habit and to the scarcity of negro blood, but in the days of prosperity, -we were assured, almost any barefoot Portuguese _carregador_ had a conto -or two in his pocket. The “Theatro da Paz,” built in the time of the -monarchy more than thirty years before, and the most sumptuous in Brazil -until the municipal theaters of Rio and São Paulo were constructed, had -not been opened in months. On its façade still hung the remnants of -advertising of one of the favorite entertainments of the old -money-flowing days: - - _Theatro Da Paz - Setembro, 1912_ - A Grande Revista Paraense - BORRACHO FALSA - (false rubber) - -It had indeed played them false. - -A negro is almost conspicuous in Pará, and it is a question whether -there are not more _caboclos_, that is, Indian mixtures, than mulattoes. -Not merely did the exploiting of the Amazonian region begin late in the -life of the monarchy, but the northern part of Brazil freed its slaves -before the national decree of emancipation was promulgated. The city -itself rivals the southernmost states as a European Brazil. White men, -from English merchants to barefoot Portuguese laborers, their olive -skins seeming strangely pale in the blazing sunshine, make up almost a -majority of the population. It is a dressy, formal community for all -that, and notwithstanding the heat of a sea-level city on the equator. -Politicians in wintry garb, their high silk hats tilted against the sun -ever so slightly, an umbrella grasped in their sweat-dripping hands, may -be seen making their way to the palace, on the roof-tree of which -vultures are languidly preening themselves. Now and then these -overdressed gentlemen cast a wise but circumspect eye upon the -_mameluco_ and mulatto women passing with bundles on their heads, moving -their hips slightly yet conspicuously, filling the air with their -personal odor mingled with that of the _cheiro de mulata_ sprinkled in -their hair, their thin low waists showing coppery or brown skins that -are more suggestive than nudity. On Sunday afternoons an automobile -parade speeds up and down the Estrada de Nazareth, the men stiffly -correct in attire down to wintry woolen spats, the women—but these are -most apt to be European adventuresses who have seen better and younger -days, who spend their evenings on the stage of the “Moulin Rouge,” but -who now sit in pompous bourgeois correctness in their open taxis, ever -buoyed up by the hope of attracting the husband of some bejeweled -resident along this finest of Pará’s avenues, a hope in which they are -frequently not disappointed. It is characteristic of the Brazilian point -of view that not only do the legitimate ladies of these sumptuous -residences lean on their powdered elbows at the windows studying in -detail their possible rivals, but that they see nothing amiss in joining -the procession, so long as they have a close male relative along to -protect them from scandalous tongues. - -There is an old bullring in Pará, but it has long been used only as a -school. The two churches in Brazil at all worth seeing are the -Candalaria of Rio and the Sé, or cathedral, of Belém. The latter is -imposing in structure and situation and has several artistic pictures. -Catholicism, however, by no means has everything its own way in the -metropolis of the Amazon. For one thing, there are said to be eight -Masonic lodges, with a membership of nearly eighty per cent. of the male -population. Electricity and gasoline have almost entirely taken the -place of the screaming ox-carts so familiar there not many years ago. -The “Pará Electric Railways and Lighting Company” had already given the -city good British service for six years. The cars, unlike those in the -rest of Brazil, have a center aisle, probably because the incessant -rains would make the crawling under side-curtains an unendurable -nuisance. If anything, the division into classes is more marked than in -Rio itself. The man with a missing sock or collar pays almost the same -fare as his fully dressed fellow and rides in exactly the same kind of -car, except that on the outside it is branded with the word “Segunda.” A -famous American ornithologist, who knows more of the interior of Brazil -and its bird life than all Brazil’s thirty millions, had been standing -on a corner signaling in vain to car after car to carry him and a -suitcase full of feathered trophies out to the Museo Goeldi when it -became my pleasure to explain to him the Brazilian system of “baggage” -street-cars. - -[Illustration: My baggage on its way to the hotel in Natal. At every -station of northern Brazil may be seen happy-go-lucky negroes with -nothing on their mind but a couple of trunks] - -[Illustration: Dolce fare niente between shows in Pará] - -[Illustration: The cathedral of Pará] - -[Illustration: Pará has been called the “City of Beautiful Trees”] - -Among many forms of “_fazendo fita_,” it is the custom among the élite -of Brazil for the man whom the conductor reaches first to pay the fares -of all his friends ahead or behind him in a street-car. It is what the -French call a _beau geste_, but there are times when it has its -drawbacks, especially in times of “brutal crises” and a slump in the -rubber market. I rode out one day on the longest street-car line in -Pará, past the dense Bosque screaming with parrakeet's and flickering -with _beija-flores_, not to mention the large insane asylum and -poorhouse, to visit the Liceo of Souza. With me were the professors of -botany, horticulture, and agriculture from that institution. On the way -I pointed out a magnificent tree which is certain to attract the -attention of any foreigner making that journey, and asked to what -species it belonged. The three professors looked at one another with -puzzled faces, introduced a new topic of conversation in the hope that I -might forget my curiosity, and finding me not to be put off so easily, -one of them replied, with the air of a sage handing out a gem of wisdom, -“E-e uma arvore silvestre—it is a _wild_ tree!” No doubt they thought I -took it for a hothouse plant. But it was an episode of my return trip, -alone with the professor of botany, which made the journey worth while. -As we rumbled along, halting frequently to pick up passengers, I noted -that he grew more and more gloomy and taciturn. Not until the conductor -arrived from the rear, however, and my companion handed him the -equivalent of more than half a dollar in fares, did I suspect the cause -of his sadness. The fare-collector, it seemed, though the matter was not -mentioned by word of mouth, had put off collection so long that more -than a dozen of the professor’s friends and acquaintances had boarded -the car, and then the stupid fellow had begun his duties with the back -seats, where the professor had fancied himself safe. The result was that -common courtesy required him to pay the fares of nearly everyone in the -car—and Brazilian professors are little less generously supplied with -this world’s goods than their fellows elsewhere. One by one, as the -conductor reached them and refused their proffered coin with a word of -explanation, the men ahead turned around and thanked their benefactor -with as elaborate a bow as the backs of street-car seats permit, to each -of which my companion replied with a sweeping gesture of the right hand -suggesting intense pleasure and unlimited largess. But the street-cars -of Pará, as in most of Brazil, run on the European zone system, and -there were four or five separate sections to be paid before we reached -the center of the city. We were just starting from the second -junction-point when the professor suddenly clutched at me and dived off -the car. I might have been puzzled, had I not noted the extreme yet -casual care with which he examined the next car for possible -acquaintances before we boarded it—well up toward the front. - -“You should never divide an ox-hide until you kill the ox,” say the -_caboclos_ of Brazil. Vinhães and I had fully expected to make a small -fortune in Pará, but we had reckoned without two serious drawbacks,—the -“rubber crisis” and the climate. Rain, rivers, and trade winds unite to -make the city cooler than its situation warrants. Death by sunstroke is -unknown—in all Brazil, for that matter—and by night it was at times -almost uncomfortably cold. But the rain which had treated us so kindly -for months broke all known records during our engagement in Belém. It -was during a raging downpour that the copper-tinted half-owner of the -“Bar Paraense” and I drove about in a luxurious taxicab paying our “duty -calls” on the editors of the six or eight local newspapers, and it was -in a continuation of the same deluge that we opened that evening, taking -in more than a conto merely because ours was a novelty for which we -could charge double admission. We remained cheerful, however, because -everyone assured us that every three days of rain were sure to be -followed by three dry days. For that matter, it was asserted that the -daily shower came always at a fixed hour in the afternoon, so exactly -that people made their appointments “before or after the rain,” without -troubling to refer to the clock. All this may be true, but if so, ours -was an off year. If there was any one thing we could not be certain of, -it was whether or not we could venture out at any hour of the day or -night without risking a drenching; and of the twelve nights we played in -Pará it rained continuously and in veritable cataracts exactly a dozen. - -Luckily, all _Paraenses_ are not afraid of water or we should have been -forced to close our doors. The people themselves at length admitted that -they had never seen it rain so incessantly. No wonder _paroaras_ find -the contrast between the low, heavy skies of Amazonia and the lofty, -brilliant ones of Ceará so saddening; even we, from the often wintry -North, found the constant downpour, broken only by momentary splotches -of steaming sunshine, getting on our nerves. The trees of the praças and -avenues seemed to scrape with their upper branches the swollen black -clouds which marched slowly over us in closed squadrons day after day. - -Nowhere in Brazil did the iniquitous “deadhead” flourish so abundantly -as in Pará. Two boxes and a row of orchestra seats of the “Bar Paraense” -belonged to the brewery which furnished the liquid refreshments; similar -accommodations were reserved permanently for the families of the -_empreza_, or management: as many belonged to the chief of police—though -he always assigned his rights to friends, and forced his way in with as -many as he chose to bring with him; every “authority,” municipal, state, -and federal, from the president to the most lowly clerk, was accustomed -to walk in without being challenged; the six moth-eaten little -newspapers were given a dozen seats a night, and these having been sold -or given away, any loafer or boy who chose to state that he was a -newspaper-man must be let in, under penalty of possible scurrilous -attacks in the next edition; scores of unkempt part-negroes appeared -nightly with a card stating they were detectives; insolent half-African -policemen in uniform not only forced their way in, but habitually -dragged a turmoil of friends or progeny with them; it had long been the -custom to count the average Brazilian family of parents and six children -as three adults, though each child expected to occupy a full seat; the -“artists,” “advertisers on the curtain,” “electrical inspectors,” -“volunteer firemen,” and what not who expected to get in on one excuse -or another were without number. Every _Paraense_ of any African ancestry -seemed to be on the police force, even the chief being distinctly -tar-brushed, and to have no other duty than to attend Kinetophone -performances. More than once I counted forty policemen in uniform in an -audience of less than ten times that number, not to mention more -“authorities” and other forms of grafters than I could estimate. Truly, -a government is often a useless as well as an expensive luxury. Though -policemen and higher officials always swarmed, we never got a suggestion -of assistance from them. One night a crowd of ridiculously garbed -students who were celebrating the reopening of the academy after the six -months’ annual vacation forced their way in some forty strong, yet not -one of the hundred official “deadheads” in the house raised a whisper. -On another occasion I had the doors closed during our part of the -entertainment in order that the audience should not be disturbed by -late-comers. In the middle of a number the chief of police arrived and -demanded that he and a group of friends be admitted at once, on penalty -of everyone of us being placed under arrest. There was the same staid -attitude on the part of the grafting politicians from the palace and the -_urubús_ that lazily preen their feathers on the roof of it after a -rain—scenting from afar any chance of gorging themselves and circling -around it in their black carrion-crowlike garb, pretending whenever they -are observed that they do not wish to feed and strolling nonchalantly -off, only to hurry back as soon as they are free from observation. - -A long article appeared in the chief Pará newspaper one morning -“proving” that a Brazilian youth invented the Kinetophone in 1908! I -should have wired Edison; he would have been astonished. I was not, -however, for I had read even more amazing things in Brazil. According to -the “Dictionary of Famous Brazilians,” a _Paraense_ invented both the -balloon and the flying-machine—that is, he got as far as Paris on a -government subvention to “perfect his great invention” and had a bully -time among the _grisettes_, though he never rose bodily above the -ground. The same work of many volumes, as well as the “History of -Parahyba” taught in the schools of that state, is authority for the -statement that the typewriter was invented by a _Parahybano_ priest -named Francisco João de Azevedo. As he was already editing the first -newspaper of North Brazil in 1826, the typewriter must be an older -machine than we suspect. “Blessed be he who bloweth his own horn, lest -it be not blown,” said Mark Twain. Nearly every state of Brazil gets out -an elaborate volume, resembling our high school or college annuals, -praising itself to the skies and including pictures not only of its many -more or less imaginary industries, but portraits of all its “influential -citizens”—who can afford it. - -The “Estrada de Ferro de Bragança” operates a 16-mile commuters’ branch -out along the shore of the river-mouth to Pinheiro, as well as a main -line of more than a hundred miles to the town for which it is named. -Though it is state property, the federal government imposes a federal -tax of twenty per cent. on its tickets, and, being Brazilian, its daily -train starts at the crack of dawn. This was the old overland route from -São Luiz to its offspring, Pará, yet the train made rare and short -stops, for there was little but endless bush and genuine tropical jungle -during the whole nine hours’ run. Here and there were patches of corn, -but the scattered inhabitants along the way were mainly engaged in the -production of children. The latter were habitually stark naked; the -women dressed in two thin cotton garments covering them from neck to -bare heels; men naked to the waist lounged in huts that were mere stick -skeletons smeared with mud, sometimes slipping on a jacket, without -buttoning it, when they came outside. Personally, I prefer the frank -loin-cloth of the East Indian. - -In Bragança itself, as along the way, the scarcity of African, and the -prevalence of Caucasian, blood was surprising, with Indian mixtures in -considerable evidence. The _vigario_, or parish priest, with whom I had -some conversation on this and kindred subjects, asserted that the -_caboclo_, or part-Indian native, was in general lazier and more -worthless than the negro mixtures; but this I had found by no means the -usual Brazilian opinion. Everything is relative, and this native of -sleepy Parahyba considered the people of Amazonia “incredibly indolent.” -Bragança boasts as well as shows its age, having won the title of -_villa_ a century ago. There are electric-lights, but most of the -streets are grass-grown and the jungle jostles the town on every side. -It was once called Souza de Caeté, from the river in which it washes its -clothes and along which fishermen and crabmen, carrying baskets full of -squirming _carangreijos_, plod in barefoot contentment. - -A hovel, masquerading as the “Pensão da Mulata,” had all its rooms -occupied—several times each, in fact—but was sure it could accommodate -me, for what was the hanging of one more hammock? The place was too -mulatto-ish even for my adventurous taste, however, and by appealing to -the station agent I was taken to a shop kept by a Gallego and his -Andalucian wife, who furnished food and hammock-hooks to “persons of a -certain class,” into which I evidently fell, for I got a room in which -only a bed was lacking and was served a tolerable supper. My hosts did -not run a _hotel_, they explained, because to do so they would have to -hang out a sign and pay a heavy government license and tax. With only -the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock to cover me, I slept little from -midnight on because of the cold, abetted by frequent deluges. The -Gallego had given many solemn promises to wake me, but had shown no -signs of carrying them out up to the time I was dressed and ready to -push off. A fine pickle I should have been in had I missed the only -train for four days. My bill having been paid the night before, I -stepped noiselessly out the window and let them sleep on, hurrying -through the fading light and the swampy streets to the station. At least -there was the satisfaction of knowing that I would never have to catch -another Brazilian train. That night, after a mere thirty-five hours’ -absence, I found my shoes, valise, even the band of my hat covered with -green mold in my airy room at the “Café da Paz.” - -The end of my engagement with the Kinetophone was nearer than I had -expected. After several communications to the man who held the -theatrical monopoly of Manaos, Vinhães had at last received a cable in -code which we deciphered as “Nous réfusons toute proposition.” Very -Parisian, of course, and definite in any language. The fact was, -according to every test we could give by absent treatment, that Manaos -was deader than Pará. The latter has at least its shipping and its -supplying of the interior, but the exotic city of the Amazonian -wilderness depends for its existence almost solely on rubber. - -The rivalry between the two cities of the Amazon has always been acute, -and Pará was chuckling with tales of its rival’s come-down in the world. -Manaos, the _Paraenses_ asserted, always copied their improvements, and -would ruin itself rather than admit it was not Pará’s equal. When Pará -formed a zoo, Manaos immediately followed suit. Then rubber fell and the -zoo-keeper came to the state minister in charge and said, “_S’nho’, -falta comida pa’ os bichos_.” “No food for the animals, eh? Well, I tell -you what you do. Listen”—but the story is worth the telling only in the -language of the scornful, sarcastic _Paraenses_—“_Olhe, vocé mata tal -bicho e da á comer aos outros, ouvioú_.” “_Sim, s’nho’_,” replied the -zoo-keeper, and he went away and killed such and such an animal and fed -it to the others, even as he had been ordered. A day or two later he -came back with the same story, and went home to apply the same solution. -This was repeated for weeks, until only the jaguar was left. The -minister stared at the zoo-keeper for a long time when he came to report -this state of affairs, and scratched his head in perplexity. Then, a -brilliant idea suddenly striking him, he cried: “_Olhe, então vocé solta -o tal onça!_” Whereupon the keeper bowed his head and went back to turn -the jaguar loose, even as the minister had commanded, and thus ended the -Manaos zoo. That of Pará was bidding fair to suffer a like, if more -humane fate, for all the facetiousness of the _Paraenses_ at the expense -of their poverty-stricken brethren up the river. Two years now the -ragged, barefoot employees of the Pará zoo had been mainly dependent -upon the charity of the Austrian women in charge of it, and there was -even then a man sitting across the table from us who had come down to -carry the most valuable of its birds and mammals back to the Bronx. - -April 21st, national holiday of Brazil in honor of the drawing and -quartering of Tiradentes, is now doubly famous as the exact date on -which I last ran a Kinetophone show. I have said that it rained every -night during our Pará engagement, but that afternoon the sun beat down -with equatorial fury. In the sheet-iron booth under the sheet-iron roof -the sweat streamed down into my eyes until I could not make out the -projection on the canvas, and the crank rubbed the skin off the inside -of several fingers. That night, in honor of the occasion, I put on a -“GREAT DOUBLE PROGRAM” so that nearly all my old film-friends came out -upon the screen to do their turns and give me a chance to bid them -farewell. The next afternoon “Tut” and I went out and pulled down the -show, and the travel-worn trunks disappeared forever from my sight as -they were rowed out to the _Ceará_, now on her return voyage. Because -she was taking with her also the state senator and the archbishop of -Pará, the military band and great mobs of _populares_ came down to the -wharf, giving us the sensation of making a holiday of our parting when -“Tut” stepped into a rowboat and slipped away into the humid night -toward the port-holes reflected on the placid bosom of the river. - -With him went Vinhães, one Brazilian whom I had found strictly honorable -in all his dealings. Naturally, as our engagement in Pará was over, the -rains had abruptly ceased. Turned out upon the world alone again for the -first time since I had joined Linton in Rio more than eight months -before, I wandered idly along the streets, wondering what on earth I -could do to pass the evening. Almost unconsciously my steps carried me -back to the “Bar Paraense,” but there was only a pitiful audience of -twenty or so, and most of those sat in the second-class seats watching -an inexcusable mess of screen rubbish. I took refuge in my room and -whiled away the time making a final report on our tour. Out of 221 days, -we had played 196, losing the rest in traveling or holidays, giving 40 -matinées, or 236 performances of an average of nearly three sessions -each. We had appeared in 49 theaters in 29 towns of 11 states, and had -failed on only one contract,—that at Itajubá, where a disrupted railroad -had forced us to remain an extra day in Ouro Fino. Our total income had -been 54,665,000 reis, of which my own share had been 6,882,000. Though -it was months later before I again had news of my adventurous ward, the -Kinetophone maintained its high American reputation to the end. -Beginning in Natal, “Tut” not only fulfilled all the contracts I had -arranged for his return trip, but carried the “eighth marvel” clear down -to Rio Grande do Sul—a remarkable feat in view of the fact that he made -the rest of the tour entirely alone, training local talent in each town -to put on and take off the phonograph records. That _tour de force_ made -me wonder if, after all, my own services had been mainly ornamental. - - - - - CHAPTER XIX - UP THE AMAZON TO BRITISH GUIANA - - -It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now -that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America. -Besides, it was fourteen months since I had done any real wandering, and -to have returned at once to civilization from the easy experience of my -Kinetophone days might have left me with as great a longing for the -untrodden wilds and the open road as when I had set out three and a half -years before. I am not merely one of those whose chief desire in life is -to go somewhere else, but I have a horror of going by the ordinary -route. There was one way home which no one seemed to have followed, one -which even Brazilians considered impossible; and the first leg of that -journey was to push on up the Amazon to Manaos. - -On the morning of May first, therefore, having added six hundred grains -of quinine and a roll of cotton bandages to my equipment, I boarded a -_gaiola_, or “bird-cage,” as river steamers are known in Amazonia, and -struck south. The journey could have been made direct by ocean liner in -less than half the time, and these flimsy native craft not only charge -the same fare, but sell tickets as if they were conferring a special and -individual favor; but they wander in and out of the river byways and -give glimpses of Amazonian life which passengers on the big steamers -never suspect. The _Andirá_ was perhaps a hundred feet long, its two -decks heaped and littered with boxes, bales, casks, trunks, and huge -glass demijohns incased in rattan, until one could barely squeeze and -scramble one’s way along them. On the open deck aft stood a long -dining-table flanked by wooden benches, while ten small, stuffy -four-berth cabins stretched along either side of the boat close to the -boilers. These, of course, were merely dressing-rooms and places to stow -one’s baggage, for everyone slept on deck. After a very Brazilian -dinner, with the big jolly captain, of pure Portuguese ancestry, at the -head of the table in the family manner, there was a scramble for places -to tie hammocks, and the space ordinarily allotted being all too small, -the entire after deck, except the table itself, was soon festooned with -a network of redes in all colors. - -“_Todo é à vontade, senhores_,” said the captain, “_Aqui nada está -prohibido. A casa é nossa: nem uma saia á bordo_;” and with nothing -prohibited and not a “skirt” on board we fell quickly into pajamas and -slippers, from which most of the passengers did not change again during -the trip. Behind us, without background, Pará lay flat across her yellow -water, only her reservoir and the twin towers of the cathedral standing -a bit above the general level, ugly with ships and warehouses, in the -foreground, scores of the vessels rusting away because rubber had lost -its spring. Slowly it receded to a line on the horizon dividing a -light-blue from a light-yellow infinity, then faded away into -nothingness. - -Even this smaller mouth of the river was very wide. The mainland on the -left was already growing indistinct, yet on the right the Island of -Marajó was only a distant faint line. As we drew nearer, this, too, -seemed covered with dense forests as far as the eye could see, with many -slender palms which I took to be the _carnauba_, though they turned out -to be the _burity_. Toward three o’clock we put in at a port on the -island, a bucolic, peaceful cove with a cool-looking two-story -farmhouse, a group of cleanly white women and children gazing down from -the deep shade of the upper veranda. Men in pajamas and wooden -_tamancos_ wandered down to the boat, from which we, similarly clad, -strolled ashore. The lower story of the house was a well-stocked shop, -an iron gate shutting off the wide stairway to the balcony above, where -the women and children lived in almost Oriental seclusion. Beside it -stood a large _cachaza_-mill grinding up sugar-cane and turning it into -rum in 25-liter demijohns, more than a hundred of which were already on -the wharf, waiting to be carried aboard the _Andirá_. A group of -reddish-gray cattle with the suggestion of a hump were grazing in the -grassy yard beyond the distillery. - -The Island of Marajó, several times larger than the British Isles, with -great plains stretching from horizon to horizon, has long been famous -for its cattle. Once they were so numerous that they were killed only -for their hides; then came an epidemic which nearly wiped them out. -Emperor Dom Pedro took a hand, made the island a breeding-place, -improved the stunted and decreasing native stock by the importation of -zebu bulls, and now the island was estimated to have forty thousand -head, furnishing meat to most of the Amazon Valley. The zebu in his -heavy hide, with its black, sun-proof lining, not only endures the -climate easily, but is indifferent to the _carrapatos_, or ticks, and -all the other insect plagues to which animals from the temperate zone -are subject; he eats any food, crosses with any species of cattle, -bequeathing all his good qualities with even a fraction of his blood, -furnishes both meat and milk of a fairly high grade, and as a -draft-animal is noted for his strength and endurance. The only great -_plaga_ left were the alligators, which every year kill much stock. When -the waters are low the cowboys of Marajó have “bees” of driving -alligators into shallow places, where they are dragged out by the tail, -unless they succeed in clinging to one another until the hunters’ -strength is exhausted, and killed with axes. Water-buffaloes were also -once introduced, but they proved inferior and did not breed well with -cows. The pet of this particular estate was a magnificent zebu bull that -had come from India by way of England and Rio, at a cost of more than -$6,000, and which strolled about with the same dignified regal tread of -the sacred bulls of Puri and Benares to whom he was closely related. He -ate anything, according to the _fazendeiro_—sugar-cane, _melgaço_, or -crushed pulp, bread, _farinha_, soap, hats, clothing, shoes—but, -continued his fond owner, he had a lordly way of choosing only the best, -which again carried my mind back to long rows of East Indian shopkeepers -shivering with apprehension lest one of the holy animals wandering past -discover their most cherished wares. - -The estate-owner was in close touch with the world and its doings and -had traveled widely in Europe, though not in Brazil. I could scarcely -maintain a seemly countenance when he told me in great detail, with much -eloquence and wealth of gestures, the story of Edison, almost word for -word as I had written it a few days before for the chief daily of Pará. -But gradually the conversation turned to politics, as it usually does -when men meet in Brazil, unless religion happens to get the right of -way. His heartfelt remarks about “this calamity of a government” showed -that he and his like were as fully aware of the knavery of their -politicians as any foreign observer; the trouble was, being talkers -rather than doers, they had no notion where to begin in an effort to -improve things. - -At the first symptoms of night we pushed on up the reddish-yellow river. -I had already made it a practice to give myself an occasional hour of -exercise on the slightly curving roof of the steamer, and as there was -but slight room for walking, I indulged in a modified form of -calisthenics, to the unbounded astonishment of my fellow-passengers. The -Brazilians not only did not exercise, except with their tongues; they -did not even read, though there were excellent electric-lights over the -hammocks. Even the most nearly educated among them start out on a trip -of a month or more on one of these _gaiolas_ without a page of reading -matter. While they were wondering amusedly at my exercising I could not -but ask myself what on earth they did with their minds during those -weeks of forced inaction. They seemed to endure the voyage in a sort of -coma, sleeping audibly by day in their hammocks, though often making the -whole night hideous with their card games. - -We stopped during the dark hours at a couple of _fazendas_ to pick up -sealed demijohns, and in the morning, a brilliant Sunday, entered the -Strait of Breves. This is a narrow and deep section of the river between -Marajó and the mainland, with endless dense forests, sometimes not more -than five hundred yards away, on either side, so winding that often the -exit was apparently closed ahead and one was at a loss to know how the -boat could proceed. The stream was so placid that the metallic -reflections were almost painful to the eyes, and so clear that the -virgin forest, from its slender little palm-trees to its liana-wound -giants, seemed to stand upright, in reversed positions, above and below -the surface, with not a suggestion of land visible. Tucked away here and -there in the edge of the water-rooted wilderness was a single house or -hut built of jungle materials and standing on stilts, with no apparent -soil, but only board-walks above the water. The dwellings were generally -new and fairly clean, as were the inhabitants in their newly-washed -Sunday clothes, at least from a distance. Now and then a compact little -island dense with forest jungle, lordly palms, and majestic trees with -great buttresses, slipped past. Natives in their _ubás_, long, slender, -dugout canoes sitting low in the water, glided along the roots of the -forest, often all but swamped in our wake, but always saving themselves -by skilful canoe-manship. Women and children were equally water-birds -and drove the steed of the Amazon as fearlessly and unerringly as the -men. They sat tailor-fashion on the very nose of the canoe, now and then -crossing the stream, plying their round or heart-shaped paddles—on some -of which were painted fantastic faces—in a languid yet energetic manner, -appearing always on the point of falling off, though to go overboard -anywhere in the Amazon is to risk being devoured by alligators, -_parainhas_, and a dozen other _bichos_. Woods, trees, _ubás_, houses, -even the women combing their hair inside them—for they generally had no -walls—showed exactly as plainly below the water as above, colors and -all, so absolutely mirror-smooth was the constantly curving strait. No -doubt after twenty-five years in an Amazonian pilot-house, as was the -case of our captain, all this would become deadly monotonous—the -endless, dark-green, impenetrable forest unrolling like a stage setting -on either side day after day and year after year, to doomsday and the -end of time—but at least the first trip on a brilliant day is a memory -not easily lost. - -It is natural to see only a dreary sameness in the endless film -unrolling at a steady ten-mile pace on either hand, but in reality the -differences are infinite, the countless tree-forms alone the study of a -life-time. The uninitiated may journey for hours in these Amazonian -wildernesses without detecting a sign of animal life where every square -yard has its sharp-eyed denizens. Though food abounds everywhere, the -unschooled may starve in the midst of plenty, as the moss-covered bonds -and rotting bones of more than one escaped prisoner from the -rubber-fields have borne witness. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, to -the newcomer is the apparent absence of bird life—unless there still -lingers in his mind’s eye that terrifying picture of our school-day -geographies—a rope of monkeys swinging from a lofty branch, the -lowermost playfully tickling an alligator under the chin. - -Early in the afternoon we slid up to an empty sheet-iron _barracão_, and -then wandered on again, the only reason for the stop evidently being -that the captain wished to buy a native straw hat, especially well made -in this region. The only ones on hand were too small for him, so he -ordered one for the down-trip some two months later. As long as the boat -was moving we were perfectly comfortable. In my steamer-chair under the -prow-awning I watched life slip lazily past, forgetting even that I was -suffering for lack of exercise. In the tropics a man seems to have as -much energy as elsewhere; but he is prone to form plans and when the -time comes to execute them to say to himself, “Oh, I think I’ll loaf -here in the shade another half hour,” and before he is aware of it -another wasted day is charged up opposite his meager credit column with -Father Time. Whenever we halted in a windless corner of the river to -take on demijohns or leave a few of the things which civilization -exchanges for them, the heat was intense. One was often reminded of the -fact that Pará is nearer New York than it is to Rio, for most of the -supplies of this Amazonian region seemed to come from “America,” as its -inhabitants call the United States. The people of the Amazon Valley, for -instance, where cows are few and generally tuberculous and children the -one unfailing crop, consume great quantities of American condensed milk. -We signed a “vale” for a milreis whenever we wanted milk with our -morning coffee, and were handed a small can of a very familiar brand. -Too lazy even to filter water through a cloth, we drank the native -yellow-brown Amazon, containing everything from mere silt to tiny -“jacarés” (alligators), as the Brazilians called them. Passengers, crew -and riverside inhabitants were equally easy-going and contented with -life. Neither the captain nor his _immediato_, a pleasing, well-mannered -man of Portuguese father and Indian mother, thought it necessary to -assume that fierce outward demeanor with which Anglo-Saxon commanders so -often seek to maintain authority. Ours was a family, a sort of -patriarchal rule which, in the end, seemed to bring as effectual results -as when nothing is left to individual judgment. - -Pinsón went twenty leagues up the Amazon before he discovered that he -had left the ocean, if we are to believe old chroniclers. It is indeed -the “sea-river” or the “fresh sea,” as the Brazilians call it, for in -most places it broadens out until the endless tree-line takes on the -wavering blue of great distance. Day after day the pageant of -magnificent trees of many species, their trunks often totally hidden by -the dense smaller growth and the lianas that draped them as with winding -sheets, crawled ceaselessly northward, though at times it receded to the -dim horizon. Rain and dull skies seemed to have remained behind in Pará, -yet there was a vapid breath to this prolific creation, a superabundant -luxuriance about us, which made the daily consumption of quinine seem a -wise and foresighted precaution. Even in the hushing heat of noonday one -seemed to feel fever ramping up and down the land, throttling man even -as the vines and fungi sapped and choked the mammoth trees; by night, -when the vampires winged their velvety flight in and out of the shaded -depths from which came the incessant night sounds of the tropics, -mingled now and then with the gentle murmur of the great river, it was -as if Death himself were striding to and fro questing for victims. - -On the third or fourth day we caught glimpses of low, wooded hills, or -ridges, and as these always give footing for _castanhas_ along the -Amazon, we were not surprised soon after to come upon sheet-iron -warehouses and huge heaps of “Brazil nuts.” The “Pará chestnut” grows on -a tree averaging more than a hundred feet in height—so high that it is -never climbed for its fruit—and clustering fairly well together on -slight tablelands on both sides of the Amazon. The nuts ripen during the -rainy season, from January to March, and fall to the ground by hundreds. -In its native state the “nigger-toe” is about the size and shape of a -husked cocoanut, but with a shell so hard that a loaded cart passing -over it will not crack it. Strangely enough, monkeys have a way of -breaking them open, as they have of picking them from the branches; but -puny and un-inventive man, at least of the Amazonian variety, not only -waits until the nut falls of itself, but requires the aid of tools to -open it. Broken with an ax or a hammer, each shell yields from twenty to -thirty nuts set tightly together like the segments of an orange. A man -of experience and average industry can harvest about three bushels of -“Brazil nuts” in a day. Many Amazonian families make a journey to the -_castanhaes_, or “chestnut-groves,” their annual _pándego_, or -“blow-out,” and though many die every year of an intermittent fever -called _sezões_, and immorality is rampant, whole villages, men, women, -and children, take to the hills to camp out during the “chestnut” -season, on the proceeds of which the survivors frequently live the rest -of the year. _Caboclos_ in palm-leaf hat, cotton trousers, and a piece -of shirt, were even then arriving at the warehouses with canoes level -full of the nuts, an empty basket set down into them to give room for -the paddler’s bare feet. Paddle and shovel are the same word in -Portuguese (_pá_), and to these dwellers on the Amazon the same -implement serves both purposes, for with the flat round paddle they -shovel the nuts into the basket when they have reached their -destination. The basketful is then dipped into the river and sloshed -about until the worthless nuts, being lighter, float away, and the rest, -well washed, are piled in heaps in the warehouse. Here they were worth -about 20$ a hundred kilograms, at war-time rate of exchange less than -five cents a quart. Wholesalers buy them from the warehouse-keepers, and -at least four fifths of them go to the United States. At home they are -not dry and sweet, as in the North, but taste not unlike a damp, -sweetish acorn, and native consumption is not so great as might be -expected. - -One afternoon the captain came back on board with a _sapucaia_, a larger -and better kind of “Brazil nut” than the one we know. These are rarer -than the _castanha_ and grow on a more bushy and shady tree than the -tall, graceful, arm-waving _castanheiro_. Unlike the familiar species, -this one must be planted, the nut being merely thrown on top of the -ground near water; and the fruit should be picked, for if the nuts fall -out while the shell is still on the tree, that limb will not produce -again for years. All this extra work, added to its scarcity, makes the -_sapucaia_ unknown in foreign lands, though at home it sells for several -times as much as the common variety. The shell is about the size of a -squash, rather uneven and angular in shape, with a _tampa_, or -tight-fitting sort of trapdoor in the bottom, which opens when the nuts -are ripe and lets them fall to the ground. In each shell there are -thirty to fifty nuts, larger than the ordinary “Brazil nut” and shaped -like fresh dates. Inexperienced visitors to Amazonia often mistake the -_castanha de macaco_, or “monkey chestnut,” for the real article, though -it grows on the trunk rather than the branches and has no edible -qualities. - -Once, soon after midnight, we took on board at Parainha a white woman -with a long stairway of children, yellow and sun-bleached country gawks, -the eyes of all of them running with open sores of what was probably -trachoma. They were going up the Juruá to the end of the _Andirá’s_ run, -near the Bolivian border, to begin life anew. The woman’s husband, a -Portuguese, had for years been manager of a large _seringal_, or -rubber-field, which he had made a very paying concern for the owner, who -lived in Pará, Rio, and Paris. Foolishly, the Portuguese, either -ignorant of or unattentive to Amazonian conditions, had let his wages -drift without drawing them, until he had more than twelve contos to his -credit. Then one day some workers on the _seringal_ came to the house -and said, in the matter-of-fact tone of the Amazon wilderness, “We are -going to kill you.” The manager asked permission to send away his wife -and children first, but the assassins did not think it worth the -trouble, so they shot him where he stood, with his family clustered -about him. Not one of my fellow-passengers seemed to have the least -doubt that the owner had instigated the murder, in order to get out of -paying the back salary. “Perhaps he had gambled himself into debt, or -had nothing more to spend on his French mistress,” they languidly -explained. The papers of Pará had reported the case and it was perfectly -well established, yet justice is so unknown up the Amazon that no one -had been arrested and the widow and orphans had finally been driven off -the _seringal_ by the owner himself, who had paid part of their fare up -the river to be rid of them. He continued to live as usual, with a new -manager, for such things are so common along the Amazon that no one -appeared to think twice about it, any more than of a man dying of fever -or snake-bite. To each new group of passengers, or to anyone who showed -interest in hearing it, the woman repeated the story over and over in -exactly the same words and gestures, after the manner of people of -sluggish intelligence, like a piece she had learned for public recital, -all in the same monotonous tone in which she might have spoken of the -failure of the mandioca crop. She was of too primitive a type to have -been able to decorate the story. Some one had advanced the equivalent of -nearly a thousand dollars to get the family up the river, where, no -doubt, they are still working it out as virtual slaves to some other -tyrant in Brazil’s national territory of Acre. - -A contrasting type was our _seringueiro_, or owner of a rubber-field far -up in the interior. He wore a goatee and mustache, cotton trousers and -undershirt, the latter always open and disclosing his caveman chest; and -he was almost childlike in his gaiety, with constant jokes and puns, -whether winning or losing at cards. Yet beneath it all one could see -that he was full of tropical superstitions and above all of the lust for -money,—or, more exactly, the lusts which money will satisfy, for the -Brazilian is rarely a miser—and that he would rob, or hold in slavery, -or assassinate by his own hand or another’s, far up there in the unruled -wilderness where he was going, not only without compunction, but almost -without realizing that he was doing anything amiss. - -At times the river opened out like a vast sea, and one wondered not how -we were to get through, but how we were to find our way. All the jungle -trees had wet feet, and every now and then pieces of forest or patches -of bushy wilderness came floating down the river, though I could make -out none of the _giboyas_ (boas), deadly serpents, or jaguars of popular -fiction riding upon them. Sometimes, in the refulgent western sun, the -procession of trees took on a sort of early-autumn tinge, as if winter -were leaving its accustomed track and was about to spread its blighting -trail across this ocean of vegetation. A fine day, like a great man, -dies a glorious death; a rainy one slumps off from dullness to darkness, -you know not when nor care, like the invalid grouch or the malefactor, -and on the whole you are glad that he is gone and that night has come. -Yet there was a certain lack of color in Amazonian sunsets. It was as if -nature had so many materials at her disposal that she was careless in -the use of them. One evening a big ocean liner, gleaming with lights, -slowly overhauled us and pushed on into the darkness beyond. Gnats -similar to those that had made life miserable during my tramp across -tropical Bolivia, and here called _puims_, gave us occasional annoyance, -though by no means as much as two “Turks” deeply marked with long Amazon -residence who persistently kept the most horrible of American -phonographs squawking far into the night. My chair and hammock were -forward, however, where it sometimes grew so cold in the wind that I had -to wrap the sides of my heavy Ceará hammock about me. - -[Illustration: Ice on the equator. It is sent out from the factory in -Pará to the neighboring towns in schooners of varicolored sails, a -veritable fog rising from it under the equatorial sun] - -[Illustration: Two Indians of the Island of Marajó, the one a native, -the other imported from India to improve the native stock] - -[Illustration: A family dispute on the Amazon] - -[Illustration: The captain and mate of our _gaiola_ were both Brazilians -of the north] - -On such a cool, black night we halted at the old city of Santarem at the -mouth of the Tapajoz after midnight, so that no one went ashore. In the -morning we crossed the river and entered first the _paraná_ and then the -_igarapé_ of Alenquer. A _paraná_, in Amazonian parlance, is a narrow -arm or branch of a river which comes back into it again; an _igarapé_ is -a blind tributary, pond, pool, or lake. Here the narrow stream ran -between unbroken avenues of trees, among which one with an almost -snow-white leaf was conspicuous. Rarely was there a bluff or high bank, -but for the most part a deadly flatness, often with a reedy swamp in -front and densest jungle-forest behind. Ocean liners go direct from -Santarem to Obidos and never see this _igarapé_. We slid almost into the -dooryards of brown, half-naked families in the scarce mud huts along the -flooded way, startling them as we might have Adam and Eve about the time -of the apple episode, and at ten in the morning went ashore in Alenquer, -a typical small town of Amazonia. - -There were perhaps a hundred buildings clustered together on a bank of -the narrow branch, everything as deadly still as only barefoot, -grass-grown towns can be, though the place was cleaner and more -comfortable than one would have expected up a little side-arm of the -Amazon in the sweltering wilderness. It carried the mind back to Santa -Cruz de la Sierra in the lowlands of Bolivia; there was the same forest -of cane chairs and settees in the wide-open houses, the same hammocks -tied in knots on the walls and soon to be spread again for the siesta, -the same atrocious pictures in hideous frames, the same garden-like -patios behind. Here, perhaps, there were more signs of comparative -wealth, though far more leaning on the elbows than work. The country -roundabout was partly flooded and the greenest of green, with some low, -wooded ridges in the near background. Cacao grows wild in the forest -about Alenquer. - -I came upon an unusually good school building for a town of this size -and situation, with more signs of energy than in the cooler but more -negro parts of the country. Almost all the children had more or less -color, but it was more apt to be of Indian than of African origin. -School “kept” from 8 to 11:30, with none in the afternoon, “and even -from ten on we get little done in this climate,” according to the -principal. His assistants were all women, rather weak and unintelligent -looking for the most part, all with some Indian blood. This was a state -school with no municipal income, and “teachers are required to be -graduates of the normal in Pará, but we are rarely able to get any, so -we have to substitute.” The principal himself was the only one who -fulfilled the legal requirements. The fact that salaries had kept -dropping, until now they were less than half the 350$ a month they had -been two years before when rubber was high, with lower exchange and -higher prices, and that no one connected with the school had been paid -anything in twenty-eight months, may have had something to do with the -lack of candidates. The teachers made arrangements with the fathers of -families to keep body and soul together. Women and men received the same -pay—when there was any—“naturally,” said the principal, “seeing they -have to do the same work.” As in all Latin-America, the teaching was -mere tutoring, crude and primitive compared with the imported American -furniture. Boys and girls sat in separate rooms, and the entire roomful -rose in unison and gave the military salute when a visitor entered. -Otherwise there was the usual Latin-American lack of order and attention -and nothing could induce the teachers to resume their task as long as -the visitor remained. The summer vacation was from November 1 to January -15, but the principal complained that a large proportion of the pupils -were even then away, for many whole families migrate to the _castanhaes_ -from February to April or May to pick up “Brazil nuts,” and the school -fills up again only in June or July. There is a state law requiring the -attendance of boys from six to fifteen and girls from six to twelve; but -law in Brazil, sighed the principal, is “largely made to laugh,” except -those parts of it that bring income to politicians, which are sternly -enforced. Compulsory attendance of female pupils was set low because -girls on the Amazon marry early. Mothers of twelve or thirteen are so -common as scarcely to attract attention. Among our passengers was a -bright young dentist from Ceará who had been born on his mother’s -twelfth birthday. He had fifteen brothers and sisters, all living, and -his mother, according to his statements and the photograph he carried, -was a comely woman of thirty-two in the prime of life, without a sign of -wrinkles or graying hair. In the interior of the Island of Marajó girls -often remain naked until puberty, the time of marriage, and there are -many jokes on the awkwardness of brides in their first clothes. - -The captain had spent his boyhood in Alenquer, so we tarried some two -hours while he visited and had dinner with relatives and old friends. -The “Amazon River Steam Navigation Company,” to which the _Andirá_ -belonged, was a British concern, with a federal and state subsidy and a -generally tangled ownership and management; but the captain had none of -the Anglo-Saxon vice of punctuality. Toward sunset that evening we -stopped at a huge pile of cordwood partly under water, in front of a -_fazenda_ house on stilts to be reached only in boats, where we could -have paddled right into the thatched servants’ quarters. But the -smallest boy or girl along the Amazon can handle a canoe with an ease -and grace suggesting that the _montaría_ has a mind and a will of its -own; and no one ever thinks of walking, even to the next-door -neighbor’s. In “summer” and non-flood time life is said to be pleasant -on the broad, open campos which were now reedy swamps. We remained -several hours, while the negro-_caboclo_ crew of half a dozen carried -the wood-pile aboard on their shoulders. Before the war these _gaiolas_ -usually burned coal, but that had risen in price to the height of a -luxury. Some of the time it rained in torrents; the sky was heavy and -dark, and it grew distinctly chilly even in this sheltered corner. The -last sticks of wood were left in a hurry and with a whoop when a fine -_jararaca_ of the deadly white-tailed variety was found sleeping under -them. - -About dawn we emerged from the _paraná_ upon the “sea-river” again, with -a horizon so broad that we could not make out its dirty-yellow end in -some directions. That afternoon, or the next, we halted before the -house, its yard flooded and backed by dense humid cacao-woods, of two -energetic young Portuguese. They were courteous fellows, though knowing -well how to drive a bargain, and had considerable education, as do many -settlers along the Amazon, where “doutores” in eyeglasses are often -found. The ambitious often come here to risk death and work for a quick -fortune, while the more languid drift through life in their safer -birthplaces. I tramped for an hour in the damp, singing silence and -heavy shade of the _cacaoaes_, everywhere damp underfoot and fetid with -decay. The cacao-pod, about six inches long and half as many across, -grows on the trunks and lower branches of its bushy dwarf tree, with a -very short stem. Slashed open, the pod yields about sixty seeds, which -are put into a long tube of woven palm-leaf, like that used by the -Indians to squeeze the poison out of the mandioca, which is suspended -and compressed by a weight attached to the end until all the pulp turns -into _vinho de cacao_, a white liquid not unpleasant to the taste and so -harmless that it might be sold even in our own model land. Then the -seeds are laid out to dry a week or two in the sun before being shipped -to Pará, and on to New York, where they are toasted and ground for our -cocoa and chocolate. The Portuguese brothers sold us two huge turtles -for our ship’s larder, as well as five pigs and ten chickens to be -resold higher up the river; but luckily, negotiations to buy some cattle -for the Manaos market fell through for that trip. There were said to be -unlimited “Brazil nuts” in this region, but it was so nearly sure death -from fever to spend a week in the _castanhaes_ that they were never -gathered. Death is a most commonplace and unexciting visitor all along -the Amazon. A friend comes on board, and in the course of a conversation -with the captain or some other old acquaintance says casually, “Oh, by -the way, my brother João died last Thursday. Do you think the cacao -harvest will be as large this year?” It is the same with the loss of -time. Speaking with a yawn of some place far up the river, the Amazon -traveler says idly, as he shuffles his cards, “_Num mez ’stou lá—ou -dois_—In a month I’ll be there—or two.” - -It was eleven that night when we anchored before Obidos, where the -Amazon crowds itself four hundred meters deep between banks only a mile -apart, one of the few places in which one shore can be seen from the -other. The captain promised to give me a warning whistle, so I went -ashore. It was a checkerboard town of considerable size, built up the -slope of a ridge, and now, at midnight, a splendid example of what a -city of the dead would be,—the wide streets deep in grass, the houses -tight-closed, for the Brazilians are deathly afraid of air, even in this -climate, and not a sight or sound of a human being in all my walk about -the town. Horses, cows, and donkeys were grazing in the streets and on -the big grassy praça, however, thereby outwitting the blazing daytime -sun; but they were so silent that I ran squarely into them in the -jet-black, comfortably cool night, its dead silence broken only by the -creaking of a few tropical crickets. - -I was awakened toward dawn as we drew up before a ranch-house and a -cattle-pen in a narrow creek. Here we wasted some time until daylight, -and then began loading fat young cattle by the crude and cruel Amazonian -method of lassooing and dragging them into the water, then hoisting them -up the side of the iron hull by the winch and the rope about their -horns, with many bumps and scratches and much bellowing and -eye-straining on the part of the helpless brutes. All this meant nothing -to the natives, however, being all in the day’s job, as was the packing -away tightly together of the cattle on the deadly slippery, iron lower -deck, where the sun poured in mercilessly a large part of the day and -where the animals would stand as best they could, probably without food -or water, for the four or five days left to Manaos. They cost an average -of 100$ a head here, and would sell for nearly three times that at their -destination. Slowly and leisurely all this went on, as if we had all the -rest of our lives to spend on the Amazon, and it was sun-blazing ten -o’clock before we pulled our mud-hook. There were countless floating -islands now, and big patches of coarse, light-green grass on their way -to the distant Atlantic. All day we slipped along, usually with a dugout -canoe or some other species of _montaria_ creeping along the extreme -lower edge of the forest; now a family gliding easily down to their -stilt-legged home, again boatmen bound for the rubber-fields paddling -desperately against the powerful current, as they had for weeks past and -would for a month or more to come, beneath these same heavy gray skies. -These Amazon watermen have a means of keeping dry that is simplicity -itself and which might be recommended, with reservations, in the -North,—they all carry a small bag made of native rubber, and when it -comes on to rain they pull off their clothes and put them in the bag! - -The greatest product of the Amazon itself is the _pirarucú_, a mammoth -species of cod that dies in salt water, which sometimes attains ten feet -in length, and has no teeth, but a bony, rasp-like tongue. It is -harpooned in much the same way, on a smaller scale, as the whale, and is -a game fighter, more than one expert Amazon fisherman having been known -to make a _pirarucú_ tow him and his canoe home. It is the chief food of -the Amazon Valley and immense quantities are dried, salted, and shipped -from Pará, looking like boxed sticks of brown cordwood and not unlike -that in taste. _Pirarucú_ and _farinha d’agoa_ make up most Amazonian -meals, as they did on board the _Andirá_. We landed boxes of this staff -of life even at towns where the _pirarucú_ abounds, the lazy inhabitants -preferring to get it from Pará to catching and salting it themselves. -The largest fish of the Amazon, but much less common, is the -_peixe-boi_, or cow-fish. This is said to grow as large as a yearling -calf, is caught with harpoons and killed by driving stakes into its -nostrils, yielding a white meat not unlike pork in taste. - -We sailed out upon the vast river again and took four hours to cross it, -stopping at the village of Jurity to leave a mailbag and dragging easily -on. Now and then a cloth was waved from some ranch along the river, the -boat whistled, and faintly to our ears was borne the shout of a man, -“_Ha um passageiro para Manaos!_” The captain, who seemed to know -everyone on the river by his first name, made a trumpet of his hands and -shouted back, “_O, Manoel! Na volta de Faro, ouvistes?_” And that night -we did pick him up on our return from Faro up the Yamundá. - -One day the talk on board ran to _garzas_, the bird that furnishes what -we know as aigrets. A native passenger, once engaged in gathering them, -said that it took about seven hundred birds to give a kilogram of -feathers, even of the larger and cheaper size. They grow only along the -back and tail, and a kilogram of the largest feathers would number about -a thousand, the smaller and more valuable ones, of course, in -proportion, and would sell for 1$500 a gram in Manaos. In other words, a -pound of ordinary aigrets would bring the gatherer about a hundred -dollars at the normal exchange, and small ones as much as twice that -sum. Time was when a kilogram of small feathers sold for five contos, -say $1,600, “but for some reason we do not understand the demand in the -United States has ceased,” said the former hunter of _garzas_, “giving -the market a great slump.” I explained the reason for this, and after -musing for some time he admitted that it was rather a good law, not -because he recognized any cruelty to the birds, but because in time the -species would become extinct and another means of livelihood be cut off. -He claimed, however, and was supported by others on board, that it is -not necessary to kill the birds. He knew a man who had a big _garzal_ -with thousands of them, and guards to see that no one killed any, and -every morning he went out and picked up the drooped feathers, getting -some eight kilograms a year, and from year to year, too, instead of only -once. He made it a rule to shoot anyone he found on his property with an -aigret in his possession. Then there was a Spaniard who had devised a -system of putting the birds into a heater at night, where several -feathers loosened enough to be pulled out in the morning. Dealers, -however, I recalled, thought little of “dead” aigrets and, as in the -case of diamonds, the whims of pretty woman force man to the roughest of -exertions to supply her demands, for real _garza_-hunting is no child’s -play. This man had known an American living in Obidos who used to have -himself rowed far up to the source of this or that tributary of the -Amazon, and then paddled down alone, arriving sometimes half a year -later with eight or ten kilograms of feathers, but half dead from his -struggle with the jungle. We frequently saw some of the birds in -question from the decks of the _Andirá_, tall, slender, graceful, and -generally snow-white, though there are species in other colors. A house -dealing in aigrets has to pay the State of Pará a license fee of 5,500$ -a year, and ten per cent. ad valorem, while the _municipio_ collects 6$ -an ounce for all feathers taken within its confines—which are generally -elastic. “So,” concluded the ex-aigret-hunter, “as usual the politicians -skim off most of the cream.” - -On the morning of May 7 we drew up near a grass hut, flying the ugly -green and yellow flag of Brazil and standing above the water on stilts. -This, according to the captain, corroborated by several passengers, had -cost the taxpayers twenty-five contos—with free material close at hand, -and labor low in price, the actual cost of the building was probably not -one fortieth that amount. From it a _fiscal_ of the State of Pará came -on board to see what we were carrying out of the state, all of which -must pay export duty, for we had reached the boundary line between the -two immense states of Grão-Pará and Amazonas, including nearly half the -territory of mammoth Brazil. It was near here, at the mouth of the -Yamundá, that Francisco Orellano claimed he was attacked by amazons, -thereby giving its present name to the river of which his trickery and -bad fellowship made him the discoverer. “_Provavelmente estaba com o -miolo molle_” (He probably was with the brain soft), said one of the -passengers; but seeing how the Indian women of the Amazon basin work on -a basis of complete equality with the men suggests that perhaps there -was something besides an equatorial sun and a troubled conscience to -make the treacherous Spaniard fancy he had been pursued by female -warriors. When he came back from Spain to conquer his great river he -could not find it, but lost himself up a branch of the Tocantins. - -That afternoon we went ashore in Parantins, first city in Amazonas, so -that at last I had seen everyone of the twenty states of Brazil, and -only the national territory of Acre, once a part of Bolivia, remained. -The city, just a little patch of red-tiled roofs in the endless stretch -of forest, stands on a bit of knoll jutting out into the Amazon, here -spreading away five miles or more to a flat, wooded, faintly discerned -shore and to the east and west running off over vast horizons on which -ships disappear “hull-down,” as at sea. Its slight elevation makes -Parantins breezy, though out of the breeze it is melting hot. I dropped -in upon several _caboclo_ families and found them instantly friendly, -though shy and modest, frank without knowing the meaning of that word, -most of all content to drift through life swinging languidly in a -hammock and gazing with dreamy eyes out across the broad, sun-bathed -Amazon. The houses had no particular furniture, except the hammocks, -swung or tied in a bundle on the mud walls, according to the hour, -though almost all contained a little hand-run American sewing-machine. -One house without a chair had two of these, and all had the crude -lace-pillow on which the women of North Brazil while away their time -making lace with a great rattling of _birros_. - -Bounded on four sides by the ways of bygone generations, the people of -these contented Amazonian villages have little more than an idle -curiosity in the ways of the great outside world. Seeing nature about -them produce so abundantly and without apparent effort, it is small -wonder they are hopelessly lazy from our northern point of view. -Sometimes the thought comes even to the indefatigable American that -perhaps the secret of life after all is this contented waiting to be -overtaken by mañana, rather than a constant striving to outstrip the -future. Yet how the whole world, even these most distant little -backwaters, has changed in the first two decades of the present century, -with its persistent flooding of commerce and invention! All this makes -life more convenient, perhaps, but it gives the world a deadly monotony, -as if one sat down everywhere to the same trite moving-pictures, killing -anything national and characteristic by imported imitations from the -world’s centers, vastly increasing the price, while greatly lowering the -value, of living, destroying the excellence of local native production, -taking away its incentive, and making the vocation of traveler a drab, -uninspiring calling, enormously descended since the glorious days of -Marco Polo, or even of Richard Burton. - -We passed, with much whistling and individual greetings, another -_gaiola_ of our line, the _Indio do Brazil_, so named, strangely enough, -not for the aborigines in general, but for a former senator from the -State of Pará, of whom this was the family name. I had just rolled into -my hammock when we stopped going forward and took to hunting about in -the dark, silent night for another wood-pile. The river was still and -smooth as glass; the light of a house on the shore-edge showed the faces -of a numerous white family peering out upon us, but it was so dark that -we slipped back and forth and frittered away much time before we located -the wood-pile and tied up before it. The owner came on board to gossip -as long as the ship remained, a chance not to be lost in these isolated -regions, and the constant chatter, added to the customary uproar on -board, made sleep out of the question until we were off again. There -were always new excuses for wasting our—or at least my—time. Early in -the afternoon we put out of the sea-broad river into a _paraná_ as -straight and narrow as the Suez Canal and suddenly anchored in the -weeds, a thousand miles from nowhere, to cut grass for the cattle! - -In the sunset of May 8 dwellings grew more numerous in the dense -vegetation along shore, and at dusk the prettiest _fazenda_ we had yet -seen loomed up on a fine grassy plateau dotted with magnificent trees, -the haystack mango and the imperial palm most conspicuous among them. -The buildings were comfortable and roomy; there was a big barn for the -cattle, which the natives aboard did not know were ever housed, and an -unusual air of comfort and intelligent cultivation. I was not surprised, -therefore, to find it had all been built by an American, one of the many -Southerners who came down after the Civil War and settled along the -Amazon. At the age of sixty he had shot himself, rumor having it that he -had grown despondent because his children by a Brazilian wife were -growing up as worthless as the natives. His estate was on the edge of -Itacoatiara, last of the four principal ports on the way from Pará to -Manaos, where we went ashore while the captain visited more relatives -and where most of the unusually white population stood on the bank above -to greet all who landed. Here we received many more passengers, among -them a group of prisoners down on the lower deck with the cattle. The -captives had been sent here from Manaos to be tried, but were now being -sent back because the judge, a life appointee, but of what was now “the -opposition,” had not had his pay for a year and claimed in the current -number of the local sheet, which was almost entirely taken up with his -case, that he “had neither clothes nor shoes necessary to uphold the -dignity of appearing in public in such a high position.” As a matter of -fact, he was well known to be a man of independent wealth, but this was -an approved Brazilian way of “getting back at” his political enemies. -The prisoners were so mixed up with the other deck passengers, in -hammocks and on the bare deck, smoking and sleeping among the freight, -pigs, cows, turtles, sheep, and the soldiers sent to guard them, -similarly dressed in undergarments and the remnants of trousers, that -they were indistinguishable. I went down with the officer in charge, who -could not tell which were prisoners and which were soldiers or deck -passengers. He found one of his soldiers among the rubbish and told him -to go and point out the prisoners for my benefit; but even the soldier -could not tell them all, and after a long search one was still missing. -The officer put his toe against one fellow lying prone on the deck and -asked, “Are you one of the presos?” “_Não s’nho’_,” the man replied, -crawling to his feet, “I am one of the soldier guards.” We had about -given up finding the missing men when a fellow lolling most comfortably -in a hammock, smoking a cigarette, spoke up with obliging and cheery -friendliness, “I’m one of them, capitão,” at the same time tapping -himself proudly on the hairy chest showing through his open undershirt. - -The night was so dense black—nights on the Amazon always seem to be jet -black, even when the sky is clear and the stars are out in myriads—that -the pilot could not find the river and finally ran crashing squarely -into the forest-jungle, where it was decided to anchor until daybreak. -It turned so chilly on the prow, even though I was considerably dressed -and covered with the thick sides of my hammock, that I took to shivering -as if my old Andean fever had overtaken me again. Heavy rain poured all -the morning, turning the world an ugly gray and so cold it was hard to -believe we were almost on the equator. These bitter cold spells are -common along the Amazon. In mid-morning we thrust our nose into a -farmyard again and changed from a ship to a grass-cutting machine. The -rain continued in an unbroken deluge, and early in the afternoon we came -out of a _paraná_ upon the Amazon proper, so broad we could not see -across it and differing from the ocean only in color. The rain -decreased, but the chill continued, and at three o’clock we reached the -mouth of the Rio Negro and left the Amazon behind. For there onward the -main stream of what the aborigines called the Maranhão, and which I had -seen rise high up on the Peruvian plateau, is known as the Solimões from -where it enters Brazil at Tabatinga. The two rivers, both of immense -width at this point, joined but for some time did not mingle together, -the yellow of the Amazon remaining perfectly distinct from the “black” -of the Negro, as black as any deep, clear water without a blue sky to -reflect can be. Here and there patches of the two waters mixed and for a -long time flowed northward perfectly distinct in color, then, like the -population, united to form the nondescript hue of the main stream. - -More and more huts and houses appeared along the shore, a bluff of -dark-reddish soil, as the few scratches showed, the rest being virgin -forest flooded up to the lower branches of the trees. The hut of many a -poor _caboclo_ was inundated, and some were standing disconsolately -ankle-deep in the water, holding the baby in their arms. Others had let -go the solid earth altogether and, thrusting a few logs in raft form -under their huts, floated off comfortably as you please, swinging as -domestically and calmly in their hammocks as if they were lodged in the -“Café da Paz,” their few possessions on crude shelves above them and -only the black, fathomless river and a few logs laid far apart for -floor. Huts, generally on stilts, became almost continuous, all, for -some reason, built out over the water instead of up on the top of the -bluff out of the wet—if it were possible to get out of the wet in such a -climate. But the _caboclos_ of the Amazon pay little attention to rain, -water being their native element, and many now appeared, male and -female, paddling homeward at the same calm, even pace in the downpour as -in the finest of weather. Farther on a few huts had broad dirt steps cut -up the face of the bluff from the water’s edge. Then dimly across the -black sea there began to paint itself a faint line of ships at anchor, -with gaps in it, like an army just after a machine-gun attack. As we -drew nearer, the _chacaras_ and “summer-houses” of rich _Manaoenses_ -appeared, nicely arranged along the top of the bluff where they could -escape from the dreadful urban rush of Manaos. Then gradually, out of -the unbroken wilderness ahead, a modern city began to appear around a -densely wooded point, finally disclosing itself in its entirety through -the wet atmosphere. Piled up on a low knoll and part of another, -looking, already as complete as many an old European city, the -yellow-blue dome of the imposing state theater bulking above all else -except the brick tower of the cathedral, Manaos was utterly exotic in -this Amazonian wilderness; it was like coming upon a great medieval -castle in mid-ocean. - -Our rubber-estate owner from the Acre, who had lived in an open -undershirt all the way from Pará, suddenly appeared on deck -resplendent in a white suit with broad silk lapels, a gay silk -waistcoat with six American $2.50 gold-pieces as buttons, a diamond -scarfpin resembling a lighthouse, and four diamond rings on his -fingers. We swung in toward the big Manaos brewery—looking not unlike -the Woolworth building through this hazy humidity—in its hollow -between the two knolls, and at length tied up to one of the many -buoys, each marked with the cost of its rental per day, floating half -a mile or more out from the city. For though we might have anchored in -an ocean port, the Rio Negro averages forty-five fathoms in depth -directly off the wharves. From these several boatloads of officials -soon put out, followed by boatmen, baggage-carriers, and hotel runners -with the first news of the outside world we had heard in ten days. -There were as many formalities as if we had arrived direct from -Europe, both the port doctor and the customs officers having to be -satisfied before any of the rowboats, of which there were at least -three for every passenger landing and which without exception were -manned by European white men, could approach the gangway. I embraced -the captain, the _immediato_, and a few fellow-passengers—male -only—and bade them contentment, if not speed, on the much longer -journey still ahead of them. - -Manaos, a thousand miles up the Amazon and nine above the mouth of the -Rio Negro, though only twenty meters above sea-level, is a real city -more than half a century old. By reason of some peculiar lay of the land -it is less troubled with rain, and in consequence is less sloppy, than -Pará. The chief objection to the place during my first two days there -was that it was so cold; after that it was nearly always brilliant with -a slashing sun and humid heat that seemed to multiply through the hot -thicknesses of the night, until for the first time I was conscious of -feeling my energy in any way curtailed by the climate. Great heat and -constant humidity producing a vegetation so prolific that man cannot -hold his own against nature, Manaos was not only jostled on all sides by -the impudent jungle, but right in town there were many patches of -rampant wilderness and immense beautiful trees that seemed to be forces -of occupation from the surrounding forests. Much split up by hollows, it -had _igarapés_, or tropical creeks, so covered with fresh-green -water-plants, often in blossom, that one could not tell them from solid -ground, while many a swamp musical with bullfrogs, and innumerable -mosquito incubators, were within a short stroll of the European center -of town. Manaos has fewer unpaved streets than its rival at the mouth of -the river, and being on rolling ground, while Pará is flat, it boasts a -few more scenic beauties; but the visitor constantly has the sensation -of watching an unequal fight between the exotic city and the mighty -wilderness that surrounds it. - -Time was when Manaos was much more of a city. The high price of rubber -had perhaps forever gone, and the “Rubber City” gave signs of -disappearing again into the jungle from which it had risen. As the -Italian proprietor of the “Rotisserie Sportsman” I sometimes patronized -said weepingly, “I would have done much better to have gone to hell than -to have come to Manaos.” Every down boat for months had been crowded to -utmost capacity with passengers of all classes and origins fleeing the -poverty that had settled upon Amazonia. So swift had been the -depopulation that I could much more easily have rented a large house -than a single furnished room; so scarce were “distinguished foreigners” -that the arrival of a stranger attracted as much attention as in a -village, and I might myself have called on the governor of the largest -state of Brazil, had I brought with me the heavy black costume of -formality which a local editor was so astonished to find me traveling -without. Yet news of this ebbing tide did not seem to have spread far. -The booming of a certain section of the world is like setting a heavy -body in motion—once it has gained momentum it is hard to stop—and a -considerable number of immigrants were still coming to Manaos expecting -to make a quick fortune because a description of it in “boom days” years -before had at last reached their local papers. Even when these hopeful -fortune seekers met returning victims, they often refused to believe -them, taking their pessimism to be canny competition, and persisted in -pushing on to be disillusioned in person. - -Yet it still had all the outward concomitants of a real city. For almost -the first time in Brazil I had my clothes washed properly, and in hot -water. John Chinaman, virtually unknown in the rest of the republic, did -it. Even the chief places of amusement for money-oozing rubber-gatherers -were still open, though the more aristocratic of the inmates had gone -back to France or sought more promising pastures, leaving the field to -stolid, vulgar, Polish and Russian Jewesses. As in all Brazil, there was -no attempt to bolster up waning commerce by selling better things more -cheaply; on the contrary, the rare victim was expected to make up for -the absence of his fellows. Restaurants and hotels habitually made one -thousand to fifteen hundred per cent. profit on their food. A kilogram -of beef cost a _milreis_ in the market, or even less after the day -warmed; and this was cut into from ten to fifteen so-called beefsteaks -that sold as high as two milreis each in the restaurants, even of -workingmen. In the market three oranges cost 100 reis; on the restaurant -table across the street one cost five times that; a _mamão_ selling for -300 reis was cut into five or six pieces at 500 each. But the -Brazilians, too indolent or too proud to go into the restaurant business -themselves, continued as usual “fazenda fita” and paid whatever was -demanded by their exploiters; or, if they could not pay, they remained -away hungry in the darker corners of their homes. - -Manaos is a white man’s city, if there is one in Brazil. Not only are -the shops mainly in the hands of Europeans or “Turks,” but virtually all -manual labor is done by barefooted white men,—Portuguese, Spanish, or -Italian for the most part. The _boínas_ of the Pyrenees are frequently -seen on the heads of carters and carriers; the laboring class, both male -and female, is largely from the Iberian peninsula,—Portuguese women of -olive-white complexions darkened by the grime of a life-time, with huge -earrings dangling against their necks, and men who would look perfectly -at home in any Spanish _pueblo_ or Galician mountain village. Many of -the customs of Rio have been imported, too,—the bread-man’s whistle, the -vegetable peddler with his two baskets, the stick-clapping, walking -clothing-stores from Asia Minor. Yet, according to the American of most -standing in Manaos, eight months a year is as much as any white -foreigner should live in the place. He knew many a bright, well-educated -young Englishman, who had been sent out hale and hearty, to remain so -physically, but to become so childish in mind that he had sometimes -wondered whether there was not something in the German claim that the -British are degenerating. Is civilization, after all, determined by -climate? “After a white man has lived steadily for twenty years in the -tropics, the less said about him the better, as a general rule,” -asserted this exiled fellow-countryman. Energy depends, in his opinion, -on variable climate; the monotony of perpetual summer saps ambition; -bracing Europe and North America must forever remain breeding-, or at -least feeding-grounds for the rulers of tropical lands. - -Strangely enough, there are no classes in Manaos street-cars, and one -may ride even without socks. The tramway and electric-light system is -English owned and is so British that the cars run on the left-hand -track; yet its intellectual motive power was furnished by a man from -far-off Maine. I had not spoken a word of English since leaving Pará, -and naturally lost no time in finding an excuse to make his -acquaintance. He had brought with him his native adaptability. It has -always been a great problem in Brazil to get street-car fares into the -coffers of the foreign companies operating them. Cash registers are of -little use, for they respond only to actual ringing. It is more common -to require the conductor to carry a booklet of receipts and hand one out -whenever a fare is paid. But the difficulty is to make people demand the -receipts, for the usual Brazilian way is to wave a hand backward at the -conductor, as much as to say, “Oh, keep the money! The company is rich, -and they are foreigners anyway.” Years ago some street-car manager -thought up the plan of making each receipt worth two reis to charity, -the company once a month paying to the nuns’ hospital that amount for -each one turned in to them. This system, widespread in Brazil, was in -vogue in Manaos when the man from Maine arrived, but it was not working -perfectly. The new manager knew that charity to others is a far less -potent motive with Brazilians than possible personal fortune and the -universal love of gambling. He withdrew the charity clause, therefore, -gave each of the receipts a number, and on the second day of every month -the Manaos tramway company holds a lottery drawing, with the first prize -100$ and the rest in proportion. It is a rare _Manaoense_ who does not -demand his receipt for fare paid nowadays. - -The only other American resident of Manaos was Briggs. It was doubly -worth while to call on Briggs, for in addition to the good fellowship -which quickly arises between compatriots exiled in far-off lands, free -beer was unlimited to those to whom Briggs took a liking—and for those -who have to pay for it, beer is a rare luxury in Manaos. Briggs was the -man who made Manaos endurable, who kept it cool and quenched its thirst, -a man who always made one think of ice and iced drinks, though there was -nothing icy about him. He was dictator and commander-in-chief of the -ice-plant at the tall Manaos brewery, native owned but, strangely -enough, run by a German. I hesitate to admit, failed, in fact, to -compute, the number of times I might have been seen emerging from -Briggs’ sanctum wiping from my mustache the circumstantial evidence of a -glass of beer. - -Of other amusements and pastimes there were still a few automobiles for -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. - - - - - CHAPTER XX - STRUGGLING DOWN TO GEORGETOWN - - -Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed -the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a -river that had changed its name from the Mahú to the Ireng while we were -crossing it, strolled through a bit of bone-dry, bunch-grass prairie, -and turned in at the first house. We could scarcely have missed it, for -there was not another for many miles within the colony. Hart had built -it himself, with the help of his “siwashes,” as he called the Indian -boys who made up his indefinite retinue,—a temporary structure in the -approved style and only available material of the region, the walls of -brush and mud, an earth floor, and a thick, top-heavy roof of -palm-leaves. Later on he planned to build a real house a few miles up -the river. Cow-hides, worth nothing whatever in this region, but which -his employees were obliged to turn in to prove that an animal was dead, -were used for every imaginable purpose,—as doormats, wind-shields, rugs, -even to stand on down at the “old swimming-hole” where we took a dip -every night, though _pirainhas_ abounded and an alligator had recently -eaten Hart’s best dog. - -He lived as everyone does and must in those parts, with certain -improvements of American ingenuity. A fire built on the ground was his -cook-stove, though he made a kind of bread-cake in an iron pot turned -into an oven, the only bread in all that region. We, too, ate _farinha_, -however, either dry or wet down with beef broth. This Brazilian staff of -life tastes exactly like sawdust, but swells to several times it -original size and is very filling and evidently nourishing. Then his -Indian boys cut up dried beef and boiled it; now and then Hart let go a -gun at a chicken, and occasionally a steer was killed, when -everyone—neighbors, servants, Indians, dogs, chickens, and -buzzards—gorged themselves for a day on fresh meat, after which the rest -was cut into strips, salted, and sun-dried. The dessert common to all -that region was “coalhado,” milk turned sour and thick as pudding and -eaten with sugar. Then there were plenty of eggs, and milk without limit -was to be had for the milking, since Hart already had hundreds of -cattle, as well as many horses, few of which he saw once a month. -Hammocks hung under the long protruding roof, as well as inside the -house, and a cool breeze was always blowing across the savannahs, as the -British call what the rest of South America knows as _campo_ or _pampa_, -in this region between three and four hundred feet above sea-level. - -Hart’s closest companions were a pair of hounds, now with a litter of -pups. As the cur dogs of the Indians make a great hullabaloo at sight of -a white man, so breed dogs are at once friendly with an Englishman or an -American, but will not let an unknown Indian approach the house while -the master is away and never make friends with the aborigines. About the -hut hovered three dog-like Macuxy Indian boys, who did all the odds and -ends of work and lived on the odds and ends of beef and _farinha_, -neither getting nor expecting any wages, except a place they might call -home. They hung their hammocks under a thatched roof on legs some -distance away and now and then received a few yards of cotton cloth -which they turned into clothing, for it is surprising how these children -of the wilds can make even a tolerably fitting jacket. These Indian boys -were never hired, but were unconsciously acquired. One of them would -turn up and go to work without a word, cooking, washing, milking, and -doing the other tasks, all of which took perhaps four hours a day, and -it would not be until they had remained longer than is customary for -visitors that Hart realized they were permanent employees. Brazilians in -this region may during the course of a year give a cowboy or an Indian -servant a cast-off cotton suit; hence word of the greater generosity of -the American had quickly spread and the difficulty was not how to get -help, but how to keep rid of too much of it. There were also fourteen -_vaqueiros_, who lived with the cattle and were rarely seen at the -house, and to these Hart furnished _farinha_ and paid two milreis a day, -not in money but in cloth and other goods, for though the milreis serves -as a basis of computation, there is no fixed medium of exchange and -barter is still almost universal. The little actual money with which he -had arrived Hart had laid away months before and never seen since, and -he had no fear of its being stolen, though he kept well-locked the back -room in which he stored his piles of cloth. Indeed, when he set out with -me on a trip that might have lasted two or three weeks, it never -occurred to him to take money with him. The _vaqueiros_, of course, -killed a steer whenever they wanted meat, turning in the hide to show -that they had not sold the animal over the border. Neither Hart nor his -“siwashes” spoke any Portuguese worth mentioning, so that their -conversation consisted chiefly of grunts and brief gestures, with now -and then an American or Portuguese word which happened to be familiar to -both sides. The Indian boys had found that certain sounds represented -certain actions, so that when they were told to “build fire” they knew -what was wanted, though the separate words meant nothing to them. They -had learned a few expressions so well that they even ventured to -pronounce them, and each evening after the dishes had been washed and -the fire put out, they filed solemnly past us, each emitting a dubious -“Goot neety” on the way to their _barracão_. Their general attitude was -about like that of a cat. They drifted in from nowhere and stayed -unasked, quiet and unaggressive, yet in a way independent and in no way -affectionate. They knew that some day Hart would give them a hat or a -few yards of cloth, and even without that reward they were quite pleased -to have the prestige of living with so “rich” a man. - -More than 12,000 square miles of this back end of British Guiana is -high, open savannah, splendid for cattle; but the government refuses to -sell it and merely issues “permissions to graze” on little patches of -fifty square miles, or 36,000 acres each, at the exorbitant rental of -three pounds a year! Hart was the sixth man to be issued such a permit, -one of the others being a German and the rest Englishmen, while in all -the immense savannahs of British Guiana only four Brazilian -_fazendeiros_ had chosen to remain after the boundary award. Hence, in -addition to his legal holding, there were some 200,000 acres more over -which his cattle might freely roam. The cattle, too, were obtained by -barter. Soon after his arrival, by way of Brazil, Hart had an entire -boatload of goods brought up from Georgetown,—dozens of cheap felt hats, -belts, soap, particularly many bolts of coarse, strong cotton cloth in -gaudy patterns. No one else for many miles roundabout had any such stock -on hand; hitherto the Brazilians over the border had been obliged to go -to Boa Vista, or even to Manaos, to get such things. Moreover, Hart did -not take unfair advantage of them, but charged the same prices as -prevailed in Manaos; that is, he asked 3$ or 3$500 for a yard of cloth -that cost perhaps six pence in Georgetown, so that they were delighted -to do their shopping so near home, and as they rarely had anything but -animals to pay with, he had already bought twelve hundred head of cattle -and eighty horses without making serious inroads on his boatload of -cloth. A Brazilian rancher anxious to give his wife or his own legs a -surprise would ride fifty miles or more across country, driving before -him a cow and a calf, and sell them to Hart for 60$—that is for twenty -yards of cloth which had cost Hart $2.50. The visitor would depart -highly satisfied with the exchange, while Hart branded the animals and -added them to his stock on “Good Luck Ranch,” known across the river as -“Fazenda Americana.” A horse and colt came to about 350$, say a hundred -yards of the best cloth, at an original cost of $14; a plump steer might -be worth two felt hats and a belt; yet Hart’s prices were considered so -reasonable that people flocked in upon him from all directions. Now it -might be an Indian of some property, who dined while his wife and child -waited out in the rain until he was done and called them in to eat what -he had left; or it might be a fellow-rancher who had neglected to keep -up his own supplies. Occasionally payment was long delayed, but was -almost always sure. Sometimes he was paid beforehand, as when a -_fazendeiro_ with whom he might spend the night would tell him to drive -such and such animals home with him, promising to come over later and -get some cloth. There was nothing of the skinflint about Hart. He -followed the time-honored custom of the region, with an American -generosity added; and of course there was the high expense and risk of -boating the stuff up the rivers, keeping it under lock and key in his -back mud room, and the shopkeeping bother of selling it. Once he lost an -entire cargo worth $2000, when the Indians who were bringing it to him -let the boat go over some falls. But he hoped to have four or five -thousand head of cattle in as many years, and to come to the rescue of -the world’s scarcity of beef and leather as soon as some means was -provided for reaching the markets. Just now the greatest drawback was -lack of transportation. The governor of the colony had recently made a -trip to the savannahs, and a railroad was planned, but the war had -postponed it. American capital would build the line, but only on -condition of certain land grants, and the governor was set on having it -a government railway. - -Meanwhile, I soon discovered, it was much easier to come in at the back -door of British Guiana than to get from there down to the front portal. -Small as it looks on a map of the whole continent, England’s South -American colony is more than twice the size of Great Britain. It was 340 -miles down to the coast as the crow flies, and vastly more than that to -any but winged creatures. With 78,500 square miles of unbroken forest -and matted jungle, only the four-hundred-and-sixtieth part of which was -even under woodcutter’s license, there is no means of travel back of the -fringe of coast except by the rivers, and these are much broken by falls -and dependent on the season. Hart’s latest letter from the United States -had been five months on the way. - -The first leg of a journey to Georgetown was to cross the divide between -the Brazilian and Guianese river systems, some fifty miles in its -narrowest part, but much more than that to the home of Commissioner -Melville on the upper Rupununi, which for several reasons was the -logical starting-point of a journey down to the coast. Hart had been -planning to go over to Melville’s within the next few weeks, and we -compromised on his getting ready as soon as possible, which was to be -within ten days. The delay I spent to advantage, for Hart was a pleasant -companion and the region full of interest. Now we trotted over several -hundred of his acres looking for a troop of mares in charge of a -tyrannical stallion; twice we roamed the lightly wooded savannahs -checking up on his cowboys and their charges. One day we went back to -Brazil to visit Antonino and his family, the only near neighbors and the -most nearly educated and civilized people in the vicinity. We brought -back with us twenty cows and as many calves, driving them to the river, -lassooing and dragging them down the bank, rolling in mud and drenched -with perspiration and tropical downpours, and taking each calf across in -the leaky dugout, the mother swimming behind. There are no frontier -formalities, the ranchers of both sides being their own sovereigns in -all matters, and Hart was as free to import cattle as he was to drive -them over to the Takutú at the beginning of high water and sell them to -the barges from Manaos. - -We set out for Melville’s on June 5. Hart said it was a four-hour ride -to the St. Ignatius Mission, but I knew how deceiving distances can be -in South America, as well as the many unexpected obstacles that often -turn up in wilderness travel, and was not too pleased when we put off -the start until some time after noon. Hart rode a gray stallion with -Texas trappings and led a pack-horse carrying our baggage, as awkward as -packs always are and requiring frequent halts for adjustment. My bay -horse had plenty of life, but with only the precarious monkey-seat the -English call a saddle I was kept busy thwarting his frequent attempts to -leave me behind. The first hour across Hart’s broad grazing-lands was -fairly dry, though our delay had brought on the rainy season again. -Endless stretches of fine prairie-grass, alternating with thin scrub -forest, lay beyond. The first house was a ruin in thatch once occupied -by a Scotchman and his squaw; the next had belonged to an exiled -Brazilian. Every ruined hovel had its story. There was, for instance, -the one in which Hart had met and tamed the “Ocean Shark.” A giant negro -from the thickly settled coast, charged with two murders and many lesser -crimes, had so named himself when he fled to the interior. However good -a government may be, it is far away and hard to reach in so sparsely -populated a country, where every man must be his own law and protection. -When Hart first came, this black outlaw was roaming these upper plains -with a band of servile and frightened Indians, bullying even white men, -if they would stand for it. An Australian had picked up the Indian woman -abandoned by the Scotchman, with her daughter and son, and settled down -with her in the hut in question. One day he came home and found the -“Ocean Shark” already occupying his hammock. - -“You see dat tree over dere?” said the negro. “Well, jes’ yō swing yō -hammock out dere. _I’se_ here now.” - -The Australian, being a man who valued his skin more than his honor, -complied, and the negro acted as his domestic substitute for a week -before whim or rumor caused him to move on. He was constantly bullying -the smaller ranchers and killing their cattle, and at length he let word -drift out that he was going to do the same for Hart. The American, -however, well over six feet and weighing 190 pounds without an ounce of -fat, was built on “shark”-taming lines. Moreover, his partner had just -left for the war and he was feeling very blue and spoiling for a fight -when, on his way home to his new ranch, it was his good luck to find -that the “Ocean Shark” had camped in the chief hut of a nearby Indian -village. With him was his “secretary,” a small yellow negro named Cecil, -for the “Sha’k” could not read or write. - -“What are you doing here?” demanded Hart, riding up to the hut. - -“Ah don’ know what dat got t’do wid yō,” answered the “Sha’k.” - -“You black ——!” said Hart. “I asked you what are you doing here.” - -“Don’ yō curse me!” screamed the negro, in the bold terms of the British -“object” the world over, though already a bit tremulous from the -seriousness of his situation. - -Hart was by nature anything but a belligerent man, but his future in the -colony depended on the evidence he gave at the start of being able to -take care of himself. He sprang from his horse, drew his heavy revolver, -and rapped the “Ocean Shark” over the head with the butt of it. Then he -thrust the weapon back into its holster and waded into the negro in -approved mining-camp style, rapidly changing his color from black to -red, and ended by giving him ten minutes to pack his traps and remove -his battered face forever from that corner of British Guiana. During -that time the Indians who formed the negro’s band ran back and forth -“just like ants” collecting his belongings, and every time his -“secretary” had to pass the American he took off his hat, ducked as if -to dodge a blow, and said, “Yessir! Yessir!” Soon the whole caravan was -on the move and the “Ocean Shark” had never been seen in this region -since, though fanciful tales continue to drift in of the “free city” he -and his obsequious followers have founded in another corner of the -colony. - -At two in the afternoon we reached the Manarí Creek and found it too -deep to cross on horseback, though when Hart had passed that way a week -before it had not been knee-deep. That is the greatest difficulty of the -overland trip from Manaos to Georgetown; one can only get up the Rio -Branco in the rainy season, which is the very time when the savannahs -are flooded and virtually impassable. Luckily I am fairly tall, and Hart -was taller. We unloaded, stripped, and carried everything, including the -saddles, across on our heads, the water just reaching my nostrils. Then -we gave the horses a bath, for which they seemed grateful, went through -all the loading process again, and rode on, the crossing having cost us -more than an hour. There were more bogs and creeks, but all were -passable, and we had only to stop occasionally to adjust the pack. All -the time we kept drawing nearer the Kanuku Mountains, now a long blue -range across the southern horizon. We had to pass around the end of this -to get to Melville’s, which was almost due south, though I was supposed -to be traveling north. - -[Illustration: Dom Antonito and one of the ant-hills that dot the open -campo of the upper Rio Branco] - -[Illustration: I crossed the boundary between Brazil and British Guiana -in a leaky craft belonging to Ben Hart, who lived on the further bank of -the Mahú] - -[Illustration: Hart had built himself a native house on the extreme edge -of British Guiana] - -[Illustration: Hart and his Macuxy Indian helpers] - -It was five o’clock when we reached the first inhabited house, that of a -Brazilian family on a bank of the Takutú. The usual formalities included -insistence that we wait for coffee, and as Hart did not care to risk -making an enemy, we complied. These people assured us that all the -_igarapés_ were so swollen from the recent rains that it would be -impossible to get to Melville’s at this season. Not far beyond we came -to a stream which Hart had easily forded the week before. I drove my -horse in, expecting the water to come at most to his belly, when the -animal suddenly dropped and took to swimming, with the water about my -waist. There was no way of getting our pack-animal across without -ruining everything. We returned to the Brazilian hut, and while I took -such measures as my soaking and that of the saddle-gear demanded, Hart -stripped, tied his clothes around his head with a strap under his chin -to hold them, and swam the _igarapé_ to an Indian hovel where he -arranged for a canoe and two paddlers. These dropped down the stream to -us, and having hobbled the horses and put the saddles astride a pole -always provided for such purposes under the eaves of rural Brazilian -huts, we and the Indians lugged our baggage to the canoe and finally set -out in pitch darkness to paddle up the river to what Hart called the -“padre’s house.” - -Like the one in which I had entered the colony, the canoe was a leaky -old dugout with rotting boards nailed along the sunken gunwale, through -which water gushed almost in streams. I had to hug the two bags on the -seat beside me and at the same time bail water incessantly, while the -Indian boys shoveled water at the bow and Hart made a poor job of -steering in the stern, because it was impossible to tell the shadows -from the tops of the trees under water near the bank, which we were -compelled to follow closely in order to make any progress against the -swift current. Even there and with the utmost effort we made barely a -mile an hour, and every loss of a stroke for any reason left us so much -farther down stream. The Takutú was about four times as deep as when I -had last left it, and was now a real river. Several times I was nearly -knocked off, bags and all, by unexpected branches of trees; then -suddenly I discovered that the boat was filling faster than I could bail -it out, the water quickly reaching my ankles and then my calves. It -wouldn’t matter so much to Hart, who had brought only a few tramping -necessities, but it was only a question of a very short time before all -my South American possessions, including even my money in the valise, -would be at the bottom of the Takutú, while I struggled ashore in my -heavy brogans with only my hat and my reputation. I shouted to the -Indians, who looked around and saw the water which they, being high in -the bow, had not felt, and by sheer luck they managed in the darkness to -tear a way through tree-tops and bushes to a spot on the bank with bare -land enough to hold our baggage. Here we found that a snag had kicked a -large hole in the stern of the rotten old craft and that water was -pouring in as from a faucet. This repaired as best we could, we bailed -out the boat and pushed on. For what seemed hours we fought against the -current and bailed incessantly before a faint light far away in the -night announced that we were approaching the mission. We could not seem -to bring the light nearer, but finally managed to land in the mouth of a -tributary, and, tearing through the jungle and stumbling over stony -ground in the black night, lugging our baggage, we at last ended at nine -o’clock the “easy four hours’ ride” from Hart’s ranch by entering the -mission of an English Jesuit, Father Ignatius Cary-Elwess. - -It was a big, two-story, thatched building on the bank of the upper -Takutú, just across from Brazil. Indian men and boys, chiefly in -loin-cloths, though some wore a shirt and some the remnants of trousers, -swarmed about the place with perfect freedom, as the “padre” seemed to -have an easy-going way that had weakened his control over them. He was a -small, wiry man of middle age, dressed in an old soutane, quite English, -yet also quite Jesuit, which made a curious combination. Eleven years -before he had come out entirely alone and lived in their huts with the -Indians, under exactly the same conditions as they, until he had learned -the Macuxy tongue—at least as well as the average Englishman ever learns -a foreign language. He knew no Portuguese, and the naked Indian youths -spoke an amusing mixture of English and Macuxy, the former chiefly -represented by “Fader, yes,” with which all statements began, usually -continuing in the native tongue. The priest was “one of the boys” in the -stories he told, but he often drifted away into dreams. After nearly -four years in Latin-America it seemed strange to hear the English names -of things I had only known in Spanish, Portuguese, or Quichua,—“bush” -for _sertão_, “Savannah” for _pampa_ or _campo_, “’gator” for _jacaré_. -It was sixty-three days since the padre had last heard a word of the -world’s news, and the long time which elapsed before our generous supper -was ready we spent in bringing him up to date, getting out of our soaked -garments, oiling our revolvers, and swinging our hammocks. - -When I rose in the early morning a cold wind was blowing across the open -country. About the mission building was a cluster of huts for the -converts, and many cattle were grazing nearby—for the good padre did not -neglect the practical things of life. He was already saying mass before -an outdoor altar set in the side of a mud house, assisted in his -formalities by otherwise naked Indian acolytes in red robes. A creek -near the mission, which one could generally step across, was so swollen -that we had to borrow a canoe, and the top branches of high trees just -peered out of the water. We soon came to another—whereupon Hart decided -that we were sure to lose the horses if we tried to continue the trip -with them. The only animal which can endure travel under such conditions -is man, and we concluded to resort to the only means of locomotion left -us. When we returned to the mission, the padre, who had been a famous -athlete in his younger days, left off a cricket game he was playing in -his flowing soutane with the Indian boys, and went with me to find us -Indian carriers. His rule was too lenient, however, and the day drifted -on without anyone offering to go. He would not order anyone to do so, as -most of the Indians had come for some Catholic celebration and the padre -felt that they could not be spared. “Anyway,” he mused, “by far the best -carriers are the women—women”—his eyes fell suddenly on Hart, -conspicuously masculine in his splendid frame and perfect -condition—“we—er—well, I’ll send for the chief and see if he can’t get -you two _men_”—the accent on the last word was probably unconscious. - -It was afternoon before a father and his son were finally prevailed upon -to make the one-day journey to the next village, and at two we were off -across country. The man, about thirty-five in years, but already old for -his race, was as ill-fitted for his task as the average white man of -sixty, and was constantly being favored by his son of eighteen, in the -prime of life. We were soon stripping to wade a stream neck-deep, -clothes, revolver, kodak, and other odds and ends on our heads, and had -barely dressed again when we came to a swamp of such extent that we -swung our shoes over our shoulders for the rest of the day. It was stony -here and there, but more often swampy, with bogs in which we sank to the -knees and several streams waist or chest deep; but the water was -lukewarm and the going almost pleasant, though we envied the Indians -their natural leather soles. That evening we reached an Indian hut made -entirely of palm-leaves, and swung our hammocks from poles with the -family. Our carriers chattered long in the native tongue with our -otherwise taciturn hosts, using the word “fader” in nearly every -sentence. We made our own tea and ate our own _farinha_ and rather green -bananas, to which the Indians added a square foot or more of mandioca -bread, here called “cassava.” Gnats made life miserable for me, but Hart -and the Indians took turns snoring all night, while the wife of our host -stood or squatted in a far corner of the hut, stirring the fagot fire -every half hour or so, darkness evidently being a cause for fear, and -gently punching her fat husband every time his snoring grew uproarious. -Not only the men and children, but cur dogs and fowls slept in the -comfortable hammocks; but either it is immoral, by their tribal laws, -for a woman to lie down while there is a stranger in the house, or it is -the admirable custom for the woman to sit up all night and keep her -lord’s fire burning. Yet there is a vast difference in the comfort of -life between these tropical Indians and those of the Andes, a difference -due mainly to one thing,—the hammock. Their floors may be as hard and as -filthy, even as cold at times, but swinging above it in a soft, -native-woven hammock is like living in another sphere. The hammock is -the most important thing in the life of the Indian of this region, as, -indeed, of all residents. He is conceived in a hammock, born in a -hammock; a hammock is his chair, sofa, and place of siesta, it is his -bridal bed and his death bed, and usually it is his shroud, for it is -the custom to bury him in the hammock in which he dies. If he travels in -light marching order, the Indian may leave everything else behind, -except his loin-cloth, but he carries his hammock. - -Rain fell heavily most of the night, and we did not once put on our -shoes during the next day. Our feet were under water certainly half the -time. Barely had we started when we had to wade a deep, muddy creek, -followed by a long swamp; and similar experiences continued in swift -succession. The vast savannah was dotted with scrub trees, but there was -no sign of life except occasional birds. The Kanuku Mountains, -everywhere heavily wooded and blue with the mist and rain that always -hangs about them, drew slowly nearer on our left. This region might be -dubbed the “Land of Uncertainty,” for one never knew what might be -waiting a mile ahead, whether we would have to come all the way back, -after struggling through most of the trip, because of some impassable -obstacle. Particularly the Suwara-auru, a branch of the Takutú which -foams down from the Kanuku range, was likely to prove such a barrier. - -[Illustration: Fortunately Hart was a generous six feet or my baggage -might not have got across what had been trickling streams a few days -before] - -[Illustration: We impressed an Indian father and son into service as -carriers] - -[Illustration: Macuxy Indians with teeth filed or chipped to points] - -[Illustration: An Indian village along the Rupununi] - -We were already soaking wet, so that we paid little attention to the -roaring rain that soon began to fall, though I still strove to keep my -kodak from being ruined. Even the shoes on our backs were as wet as if -we had worn them. Our baggage, on the Indians’ backs, was covered with -old pieces of canvas, but the rain poured down in cataracts upon it and -promised to soak everything it contained. To make things worse, the -Indians could not keep up with us. The aged thirty-five-year-old man was -in sad straits, and we were in constant dread of his falling down in -some mud-hole. At down-pouring noon we reached the base of the range of -hills and began to skirt it, the storm making a tumultuous yet musical -sound on the dense forest. In dry weather, no doubt, it would be -screaming with parrakeets, though it is said always to be raining in the -Kanukus. Deep in the woods we stopped among mammoth trees at the bank of -a creek to assuage our gnawing hunger. It was pouring incessantly, yet -the older Indian got a fire started, roofed by green banana-like leaves, -and into this we thrust slabs of sun-dried beef spitted on sticks. We -made tea, also, and each ate his rationed half-pint of _farinha_, which -would soon swell to a quart. All this time we had not a suggestion of -shelter and the water ran down us in streams throughout the meal, -washing our fingers as rapidly as we soiled them. Yet somehow we felt in -unexpectedly good spirits. Hart rolled three cigarettes, handed two of -them to the Indians, and we were off again. The forest grew ever denser, -and the rain became an absolute torrent. Only in crossing the Malay -Peninsula years before had I bowed my back to such volumes of water, -water which, as the ground grew a bit hilly, rushed down the narrow ruts -worn by former travelers so swiftly as almost to sweep us off our feet. - -With every step forward I grew more uneasy. We were drawing near the -notorious Suwara-auru, situated where the forest that spills down a spur -of the mountains is thickest and the rainfall is said to be the heaviest -in all British Guiana, and which, according to Hart, “the devil himself -often could not pass.” It may be knee-deep in the dry season, and a week -later fill up the whole gorge or valley with a rushing current half a -mile wide—a gorge still densely forested, too, for there are trees -everywhere, except in the bit of space occupied by the creek in the dry -season, and horses have been killed by the force with which the current -hurls them against the trunks. Of course man himself can pass under -almost any conditions; but it might well be impossible to get even such -baggage as I carried across, and I might have to go clear back to -Manaos, or wait for months until the rains subsided. - -The gorge promised to be at its worst that day, for most of the streams -we had passed were near their high-water mark. Yet the Suwara-auru was -not. When we finally came to it I shouted above the storm to ask Hart if -this almost placid stream, which barely reached the lower branches of -the trees, was the mighty obstacle about which I had been hearing for -days. But such is the tenacity of a bad reputation that my companion, -never attempting to cross it as we had many others, tore his way -upstream with great difficulty, gashing his feet and tearing his -clothing in his fight with the jungle, to a half-submerged tree-trunk -that offered a possible but precarious crossing. Meanwhile I, skeptic -from birth, had thrown off revolver and kodak, waded in—and crossed with -the water barely to my armpits! Before Hart could fight his way back I -had taken the Indian youth over twice, with all my belongings on his -head, though he was so much shorter that the water came to his nostrils -and I had to walk close to him on the downstream side to keep him and, -what was more important, my possessions from being washed away. Then, -with my help, he carried his father’s load across, and the old man -managed to cross “empty.” Through it all it kept raining as I had never -seen it rain before, except once in the jungles of the Far East. Perhaps -the most surprising part of the whole episode was the much greater fear -of the elements shown by these children of the wilderness than was our -own. The superiority of savages in struggles with nature, as compared -with civilized man, is all very well in popular novels, but my own -experience has been that in real life the balance tips the other way. - -Evidently the sources of the Suwara-auru were so far up in the mountains -that it did not respond to the rains as quickly as the other streams; -and a day or two later it might have been quite as impassable as it is -by reputation. - -On the opposite bank was an immense rock with a sheer side up which we -could never have pulled the horses, even had we succeeded in getting -that far with them. Yet their loss on the trail would not have made Hart -any poorer, for when he returned one had died of snake-bite and the -other had injured itself so badly that it had to be killed. We coaxed -the worn and frightened Indians under their packs again and pushed on in -the drenching roar. For an hour or more we plunged on through dense -forest; then, as the nose of the mountain we were flanking receded, the -rain decreased and at length subsided almost to a drizzle, though the -rest of the day was bathed in successive showers. Having flanked the -range, our trail now turned more to the east and came out on swampy -scrub savannah again. All day it had been barely a foot wide, and so -seldom was it traveled, even by animals, perhaps not in months by a -human being, as to be almost invisible, except where it was deep enough -to be filled with water. But that was not the worst of it. Lack of -travel had let the long, sharp prairie-grass grow out over the path from -both sides so as almost to cover it, and the saw- and razor-edges of -this cut and gashed my bare feet until the tops of them were a -mosquito-net of bleeding scratches. - -We expected to get a welcome and a plentiful meal that evening in -“George’s Village,” a small settlement since the oldest foreign resident -could remember, of which “George” was the Indian chief. Life itself -depended on the food and supplies we were to get there. Our feelings may -easily be imagined, therefore, when we came in sight of the village and -found it only half a dozen patches of charred timbers and broken pots, -even the heavy red-wood uprights that would not burn having been cut -down. It turned out that “George” had recently died, though news is so -sluggish in this region that few knew it. In much of tropical South -America it is the custom, upon the death of a chief, to burn down his -house, or even the whole village, after burying him in and under the -hammock in which he has died, and then to abandon the locality to escape -the “evil spirit” that has killed him. For no Indian of these regions -ever dies a natural death. He is always killed by some supernatural -spirit. “Did the spirit hurt him much?” the civilized man will ask the -Indian informant. “Why, he broke every bone in his body,” the Indian -will answer—no doubt because of the limpness of the corpse. - -Miles farther on, across another thigh-wearying swamp, we sighted a -cluster of huts, and our spirits rose, only to fall again, for these, -too, had been abandoned, though not burned. There were half a dozen of -them, including two large ones of oval shape made entirely of thatch -palm, except the rounded ends, which had been plastered with mud. I -arrived with a tooth-rattling chill, but our Indians had faded away -behind us and we had no dry clothing. I stripped naked and rubbed down -with my wet garments, that being at least preferable to standing in them -in the penetrating chill of evening. We forced the door of the largest -hut, which was no great task, and found it a single room large enough -for fifty men, but chiefly full of emptiness. The only things left were -some cracked water-gourds and a few woven palm-leaf fire-fans, scattered -over a broad expanse of hard, uneven earth floor. When the carriers at -last arrived, we built a fagot fire inside, swung our hammocks, and made -tea of swamp- and rain-water with which to wash down our dry _farinha_, -wondering the while what we would live on ahead. The old man was -shivering with fever, and we feared he would not last much longer, even -if both did not refuse to go any farther. They swung their hammocks side -by side at some distance from ours and built another fire between them, -which the youth kept going all night. Whenever they had occasion to go -outside they went only in close company, like children afraid of the -dark. The hut had no windows, and both doors were closed against -insects, night air, and evil spirits. Yet the mosquitoes and gnats were -so numerous that I used my _mosquitero_ for the first time since buying -it in Manaos. Also the tiny _mucuim_, or “red bug,” crawled up from the -floor and bit our legs fiercely. - -The moment I saw the darkness begin to gray through the many lapses in -the grass wall I tumbled out and aroused the others. Hart and I had tea -and dry _farinha_, but the carriers only the latter, for they did not -“know” tea and preferred to breakfast on mandioca meal alone. Our great -difficulty now was to get them not to abandon us. They had agreed to -carry our stuff only to “George’s Village,” and now insisted on -returning. They were at the outskirts of the Macuxy tribe, and to go -farther was to run the risk that their enemies, the Wapushanas, would -“blow on them”—not in the Bowery sense, but in correct English—and -thereby cast a spell over or an evil spirit into them which would cause -them to die soon after they reached home. It is likely that the -superstition comes from the former custom of using blow-guns with -poisoned arrows. The Wapushanas take up all the southern end of British -Guiana and once fiercely warred against the neighboring tribes; and -though they rarely resort to violence now, the younger generation, being -meek and unwarlike, thanks largely to the man we were trying to reach, -the ancient enmities remain and members of one tribe rarely enter the -territory of the other for fear of being “blown on.” We had the one -weapon of refusing to pay them anything if they left us in the lurch, -which was not a particularly powerful one. Luckily, the youth had made -one trip to Manaos and had not only learned enough Portuguese so that I -could talk to him, but had dulled the edge of his superstitions, which -eventually brought him on our side against his father. But all this -would have been inadequate without the most powerful aid of all, the -white man’s will-power, which, when brought into conflict with that of -the aborigines, will almost always win out, if one has patience. For -will-power, whether over fear or in argument, is rarely strong among -savages. - -Having lost two hours in discussion, therefore, our caravan got under -way again, Hart and I, knowing a long and hungry day was before us, -setting a sharp pace. Swamps began again at once, and more than half the -day’s walk was under water, from ankle- to chest-deep. In time this -weighed so heavily on the thighs and the small of the back that they -ached severely. The razor-like prairie-grass was almost incessant, even -under water, and a tiny twig, thorny and sharp as a keyhole saw, hung -everywhere across the faint path. In consequence, the tops of my feet -were virtually flayed and every step was more painful than the last. Yet -we could not have worn our shoes, for that would have been to lift some -twenty pounds of water with every step. Rain began again almost as soon -as we started, and kept up all the morning. The worry about my baggage -was constant, for in it was nearly all I possessed, including twenty -pounds in gold, and the will-power by which we had forced the Indians to -continue might lose its strength, once they were out of our sight. Yet -they could or would not keep up with us. If we waited for them, they -grew slower and slower; if we took our own pace, we were soon out of -sight of them, and I at least expected them to drop the stuff in the -trail and flee from the “blowing” Wapushanas. Yet as between having to -sleep out here on the flooded savannahs without food and losing a few -paltry possessions, there was only one choice. So after several delays -on a day when delay might be serious, until we caught another glimpse of -two specks crawling along across the vast, scrub-wooded plains behind, -as hard to see as an animal of protective coloring, we strode -unhesitatingly on. By and by we came to some of the undulations of the -Kanukus, hard and stony ridges that were torture to our feet, yet these -were now so swollen that it would have been worse torture to put on our -shoes. Down in a rocky hollow called the “Point of the Mountains” we -managed to build a fire of wet wood, but waited in vain for our Indians. -When we felt sure for the tenth time that they had abandoned us, they -came snailing over the rise behind us and dropped down as if utterly -exhausted. We divided with them the handful of _farinha_ left, and took -a long time to coax them to their feet again. Swamps disagreeably -alternated with stony patches. A hill in the blue distance was still -three miles short of our goal. The sun came out for the first time in -three days and quickly added sunburn and stiffness to our other -troubles. The country was faintly rolling in places, and on the tops of -slight ridges between lake-like swamps we glanced back, but though our -carriers had disappeared from the landscape, we dared not halt. Hart -assured me they would not abandon the stuff, and that if they did, it -would sit safely on the trail, even in the unlikely event of anyone else -traveling this route at this season, until other Indians were sent for -it; but I had not so high a faith in human virtue. - -In mid-afternoon we sighted the Rupununi, a branch of the Essequibo -River that is the chief outlet to the coast; but Melville lived ten -miles upstream, and the trail was almost completely lost on these deeply -flooded savannahs. This greatly increased the chances of losing our -baggage, for the carriers, being in enemy territory where they had never -ventured before, could only guess at the road, while their fear of being -“blown on” would be greatly increased by our absence. We struggled on -through swamps and rocky spurs of hills, straining our thighs and backs -against water made doubly burdensome in many places by bogs and mud. I -seemed to be lifting a ton with every step, yet we were forced to make -wide detours. Several times I reached what I thought was the point of -exhaustion, yet kept on by force of will, that determination which -Indians and other primitive peoples lack in comparison with the white -man, because it is allied to reason. Toward sunset we came upon the -first footprints we had seen in two days, during which the only signs of -life had been the birds and a scattered herd of half-wild cattle. A line -of trees ahead showed the edge of the Rupununi, which we could not pass, -even in a boat, if we arrived there after dark. Just at dusk we reached -an Indian hut on the bank, and even before we asked for it a woman -brought us a bowl of _farinha_ wet with cold water, which we gulped down -like starved savages. This quickly put new kick into our legs. But there -was no boat on this side of the river, now miles wide and covering a -large forest. An Indian youth climbed to the top of a tree and hallooed -a peculiar musical call and the most pleasant sound I had heard in a -long time was a faint answering hail. I fired my revolver to suggest the -presence of white men, and by and by, after we had several times given -up hope, there grew out of the night the peculiar thump-thump of paddles -against a boat, common to all Amazonia, and then the voices of the -paddlers fighting against the forest. At last there crept out of the -flooded tree-tops a large canoe manned by four Indians, with a negro boy -of West Indian speech in the stern. His was the first native English I -had heard in the colony. We had crossed the divide between the Brazilian -and the Guianese river systems. - -The paddlers were a long hour fighting the trees and recrossing the -swift river, born barely thirty miles above in the high forest and -rising and falling many feet in a single day; but we were finally -welcomed by Commissioner Melville in the best house I had seen since -leaving Manaos, and I dropped into my first “Berbice chair,” joyfully -stretching my weary legs out on the long folding arms of it. Two-story -houses are rare sights in these parts, but here was one with good -hardwood floors and all reasonable conveniences, of open bungalow build -and covered with “shacks”—that is, un-tapered singles split with a -“cutlass,” or machete—the servant quarters, kitchen, dining- and -store-rooms below, and a real white-man’s home above. We were loaned dry -clothing and given a mammoth supper, which left me highly contented with -life, even though all I had left in South America was a soaked revolver -and kodak and thirty pounds in five-pound bank-notes in an oilcloth -pouch about my neck. I painted my feet with iodine, but could not wash -them, though they were grimy and black as those of any Indian who had -never known shoes. Then we swung our hammocks in the “guest-house,” a -bungalow on stilts a few yards from the main building, and were heard no -more until late the next morning. - -All that day I hobbled about barefoot, as was every person in the -region. To my astonishment and delight our Indians walked in toward noon -with our baggage, though most of it was dripping, and even my -indispensable kodak-tank, made of flimsy materials evidently stuck -together with flour paste, after the hasty American manner, had fallen -apart and warped out of shape. The bank-notes about my neck had been -soaked, too, and had run with color until they were all but illegible. I -spread them out in the sun to dry with the rest of my belongings, much -more pleased to have water-soaked possessions than none at all. To the -Indians I gave a gold sovereign, an exceedingly high reward for the -region, where the white settlers pay native carriers three or four -shillings for such a trip; but my generosity did them little good, for -Melville’s half-Indian son took the coin, to which the Indians seemed to -attach little value, and gave them each five yards of cotton cloth for -it. The unadvised traveler cannot know until he gets there that what he -should have brought to interior British Guiana is not money but goods. - -Melville was an Englishman born in Jamaica, of good family and well -educated. Some thirty years before, in his early manhood, he had come to -British Guiana, soon striking out for the then unknown savannah. Here he -had lived for fifteen years without a single civilized neighbor, often -unable for a year at a time to hold communication with the coast. He -spoke the native tongue so well that he was now an authority on it, even -among the Indians, with whom he ranked as the “Big Chief.” No white -woman had ever yet been in this region, nor, until recently, anyone with -authority to perform marriages, so that the exiled Englishman could only -seek companionship among the Indians. Of the several mothers of his -children, none had ever spoken English, but the children themselves had -been sent to school not only in Georgetown, but in England. John, the -oldest, was a well-built man in the early twenties, as much Indian as -Briton in manners and features, speaking his fluent English with a West -Indian or Eurasian twist. All except this young man and a little girl of -three were away at school. John gave the impression of being an -improvement on the native stock, but his father, who was in a position -to know, said it was his experience that there is no essential -difference between an Indian and a half-Indian. Melville unconsciously -had come to treat his women much as the Indians treat theirs, with a -sort of servant-like indifference. The latest one he always referred to -as “my cook,” and even then not unnecessarily, leaving her in her place -below stairs, never unkind to her, yet never treating her as an equal. - -Melville was a remarkable and rare example of a white man who has spent -most of his life alone in the tropics without letting himself go to -seed. Not only that, but he had made his isolation an opportunity to -improve himself, until his mind was as keen, his will as firm, and his -interests as wide as the best of his race living in civilization—with an -added something of New World initiative which the average Englishman -does not develop at home. With a large library on all subjects, -considerably traveled in Europe and the United States, and apparently -gifted with a remarkable memory, he had a veritable fund of sound, -thorough, and ever-ready information about all parts of the earth and -all the activities of mankind, and was practiced in everything from -photography to astronomy, from medicine to British law. His isolation -seemed to have rid him of the common trait of superficiality, and as -soon as he found interest in, or reason to know, anything, he went at -once to the bottom of it and did not stop until he had every detail at -his tongue’s end. He spoke Portuguese as well as Wapushana, and was -plainly a man equally at home barefooted among Indians or silk-hatted in -London. Naturally, having lived nearly all his life among inferiors, -Indians, negroes, and his own half-breed children, he had grown -assertive, but his information was so wide, exact, and fluent that his -dogmatism was rarely oppressive. - -A generation before, he had found the Indians of the interior all -“blow-gun men,” every man and boy carrying a long reed tube, a quiver of -arrows, and the lower jaw of the fish known as _pirainha_. The arrows -were made of the midrib of the large leaf of the _carúa_ palm, were -pointed by drawing them between the razor-like teeth of the fish-jaw, -made poisonous with _urali_, and notched in such a way that the point -broke off in the victim and the arrow itself could be repointed and used -again. _Urali_, obtained from a tree up in the Kanuku hills, acts on the -nerves governing respiration and kills simply by halting the lung -action, without poisoning the flesh of the victim. If respiration can be -kept up artificially until the poison has run its course, death does not -result. It is rarely fatal to salt-eating white men, and can be cured by -rubbing salt on the wound at once. Melville had tried some of the -arrow-points as phonograph needles and found them excellent, eliminating -all harshness and giving the illusion of distance. Gradually he had -broken the Indians of the blow-gun custom, so that now only a few old -Indians know how to prepare the poison. He had long been accepted as the -chief of all the tribes of the region, who have become so meek under -this single-handed British rule that they now obey even a negro. Either -Melville or his Scotch assistant and deputy had only to drop in at a -village, call some Indian aside, and talk to him a few moments in a -confidential tone to have him accepted as chief by all the rest, who -thereafter took through him all orders from the government by way of -Melville. - -The Macuxys and Wapushanas (or “Wapusianas”) are, according to this -authority, roughly of the Carib and the Arawak families respectively, -with different linguistic roots, the former being cannibals up to a -generation or two ago. The two tribes have always been enemies, with -little in common, and habitually regard each other with aversion. The -Wapushanas, in particular, are fatalists of passive demeanor. As an -example our host mentioned the case of an Indian who had recently walked -in upon another, lolling in his hammock, and announced in a -conversational tone, “I have come to kill you.” “Very well,” said the -other, throwing the two sides of the hammock over his face and allowing -himself to be killed without making the slightest resistance. The -religion of the Indians Melville had found entirely negative. They -believe the Good Spirit will never do anything but good, hence give all -their attention to placating the evil spirits, swarming everywhere, even -in various pools of the rivers, which boats must therefore avoid. They -call the rainy season the “Boia-assú,” or “Big Snake,” because the -constellation we know as the Scorpion and they as the “large serpent” is -then in the ascendancy. - -When he planned to leave the region to return to civilization some years -before, the government had induced Melville to remain, by certain -concessions, including his appointment as commissioner for all the -Rupununi district, so that now he was virtually the whole British Empire -in the very sparsely inhabited southern half of the colony, being deputy -chief of police, deputy customs inspector, deputy judge trying all cases -in the back end of the country, and deputy almost anything one could -name. A most earnest and efficient government officer he was, too, one -of the few who rule well in the wilds without constant supervision and -overseeing. He was the only man, also, who owned land in the far -interior, another concession wrung from the unwilling government. The -latter prefers that the territory remain crown land, so that the College -of Keisers or Court of Policy, mainly made up of dark-complexioned -natives, cannot interfere with it. His homelike dwellings overlooked -what would be broad acres again as soon as the immense lake covering all -the surrounding region subsided, with a golf links and half the sweep of -the horizon beautified by blue range behind range of hills, the nearest -peak four miles away, the others isolated mounds and hillocks scattered -across the bushy but splendid grazing plains to far-off Mt. Roraima, -highest in the colony. When we arrived the houses were on an island in a -vast lake extending in all directions, with here and there the tops of -trees appearing above it and the huts of most of the Indians inundated. -Next morning more than half the lake had disappeared, and the river, -which had been completely lost in the inundation, so that thirty hours -before a boat could travel miles beyond it on either side, now showed -ten feet of sheer bank. Nowhere have I ever seen water rise and subside -with such rapidity. - -We were still in the Land of Uncertainty. Melville expected any day a -cargo-boat he had sent down to Georgetown months before, bringing him -orders to go down a few days later; but though it might arrive -to-morrow, it might also not be here in a month. It would have been a -great advantage to continue my journey in a covered, well stocked -government boat, with the greatest authority in southern British Guiana. -When several days had passed without any news of the expected craft, -however, I decided to push on alone, and Melville loaned me the only -boat available—a fairly large but very ancient, worm-eaten dugout, with -the usual submerged gunwales protected by boards nailed along the sides, -through which water seeped constantly. With this he let me have a -tarpaulin to cover the baggage by day and serve as a tent by night, a -lantern, and necessary eating utensils, all of which, with the boat, I -was to leave at the mouth of the Rupununi for his men to bring back with -them. In his combined capacity as the government of the southern end of -the colony, the commissioner required me to fulfill all legal -formalities, writing out a detailed account of my arrival in the colony -and an explanation of why I carried a revolver and how many cartridges I -had. The onus for this I put on the Brazilians, rather than imply that -they might be needed in so modelly governed a country as British Guiana, -and formally asked permission to “carry them through the colony.” In -reply, the one-man government examined my belongings, gave me an -official letter saying I had reported to the constituted authorities, -had been found harmless and in proper form, and need not be waylaid and -examined by officials along the way, issued me a license to carry a -revolver, gave me an unofficial sealed letter to the governor, which no -doubt contained private opinions as to the reasons for my existence, and -finally, inasmuch as I was “going down to town” anyway, intrusted to me -several letters on official business, so that I was raised to the -dignity of being “On His Majesty’s Service.” - -All this took time, and even then I could not go without supplies, but -must wait until they rounded up and killed a steer, sixty pounds of -which was cut into large slices and packed in a drygoods box, with salt -between, while every living carnivorous creature in the vicinity gorged -himself on the rest of the carcass. A half-bushel basket of _farinha_, a -can of matches, and two novels completed my outfit. All this was piled -on saplings laid across the bottom in the center of the boat and covered -with the tarpaulin. Our two Indians had not the slightest desire in the -world to be transformed from carriers into paddlers, but preferred to go -directly home as fast as their now restored legs could carry them. But a -judicious mixture of moral suasion and enlarging upon the danger of -being “blown on” if they traveled alone finally caused them to agree to -go as far as the Protestant mission on the Yupucari, which was really -nearer their own and from which Hart would return with them. - -Several days after our arrival, therefore, we were off down a much -swollen and hence swift river that carried us, without seeing them, over -what most of the year were rapids with laborious portages and -waterfalls, that were now only ripples and small whirlpools through -which we raced at express speed. Hart and I, and a negro boy loaned us -as guide through the first nine miles of rapids, sat in the stern, and -our metamorphosed carriers steadily plied their paddles in the bow. -There was a strip of forest along the bank, but sometimes only the tips -of the trees were visible above the flooded savannah. At ten o’clock we -stopped to cook beef and to exchange the negro boy, who was to walk -home, for “Solomon,” an Indian chief and henchman of Melville’s, and the -first aboriginal South American I ever met who spoke any considerable -amount of English. We dropped him a few miles farther down, past what in -the dry season would have been half a day of portaging. Travel and -commerce in this region, I reflected, are about what they were in all -the world before the age of money; it was not only like going back to -nature, but back to the Stone Age. There was a good breeze, though not -enough to drive off the clouds of _puims_ or _jejenes_, here simply -called “gnats,” which seemed a weak term for those almost invisible -pests with a bite that leaves a torturing red itch for a week afterward. -Some name with a wide blue border would have been more appropriate. - -We skirted close to the densely wooded Kanuku Mountains, now and then -glimpsing a small monkey and a few birds, but otherwise finding nothing -except insects and primeval solitude. About four o’clock we began to -look for a place to land, cook supper, and camp, but this was by no -means so easy as it sounds. The banks consisted of unbroken forest with -little more than the tops of the trees above water and with no signs of -land, the swift current making a halt doubly difficult. We did, however, -finally drag ourselves up to a bit of elevated ground, where the jungle -was so thick there was barely room for all of us to stand, to say -nothing of lying down. Moreover, it seemed a pity to lose the swift, -rapid-defying current that might be gone by morning, so after building a -fire of green wood with great difficulty and roasting a few slabs of -beef, we decided to travel until an hour or two after dark. We probably -never will again. The plan would have been all right had there been -landing-places; but surrounded on both sides by an absolutely unbroken -forest-jungle without a foot of land above water, except far back among -the flooded tree-tops where we could not penetrate, we soon found -ourselves in a precarious situation. The stars were out, but there was -no moon and a suggestion of mist, so that the darkness seemed a solid -wall on either side of us. Only with the greatest difficulty could we -see the river ahead or tell the shadows from the trees, and we were -constantly on the point of smashing full-tilt into some snag or -submerged tree-trunk that might easily have sunk the boat and all it -contained, leaving us floundering in the trackless forest-sea. - -Toward midnight we decided we must get a bit of rest somehow, and in the -black darkness, increased by gathering storm clouds, we shot for the -bank and grasped wildly at the endless, impenetrable forest-jungle as -the river tore us past it at boat-smashing speed. The stupidity and fear -of our Indians made the task doubly difficult. Several times we clutched -at the slashing branches and tried to drag ourselves far enough into the -flooded forest to get out of the current, for there was no hope of -getting land under our feet; but each time we had to give up and tear on -down the river, to risk all our possessions, if not life itself, by -trying again. It was like attempting to catch an express train on the -fly. In one such effort we smashed into a great tangle of immense -branches through which the water tore and dragged us until we were -certain the boat would be knocked to pieces, or at least that some -refugee snake would drop upon us. Somehow we got through this, only to -strike instantly a whirlpool that sent us spinning into the tops of -several more trees out in what seemed to be the middle of the stream. - -Then, unexpectedly, we struck a sluggish corner and were half an hour -dragging ourselves in among the bushes. Once fire-ants drove us out, -swiftly. Finally we tied up to a branch, from others of which I managed -to hang our hammocks while Hart steered the craft in and out among the -tops of the submerged trees. His own hung over the boat, but mine was -far out from it, with no one knew how many fathoms of water beneath me -and splendid chances of falling out among _pirainhas_, if not -alligators. Should the water recede during the night, we might be left a -hundred feet or more aloft. - -The old Indian threw himself down on the cargo; the young one squatted -out the night in the boat, bailing it occasionally. All night long an -awful roaring came from off in the forest, a sound with which there is -none to compare, though an enormous engine blowing off steam in short -blasts, or an immense multitude of insane people screaming at some -little distance might faintly suggest it. It came from howling monkeys, -black apes about half the size of a man, according to Hart, who insisted -that there was only one of them, though it sounded like at least a -hundred in angry chorus. Everything portended an all-night downpour to -add to our pleasures, but this did not come until the first peep of -gray, just as we had gotten our hammocks down and stowed away under the -tarpaulin. Then a roaring deluge, cold as ice-water, drenched us in an -instant; but we could only sit and paddle and take it hour after hour. -There was room for one of us under the tarpaulin, but that would have -been selfish to the other. The rain beat so hard on the surface of the -water that thousands of little fountains sprang upward under the impact. -As it showed no signs of let-up, we decided we must build a fire and get -something hot down our throats before we froze or shook ourselves to -death. We grasped a piece of overhanging bank, which luckily did not -pull loose and drop us into the racing stream, and dragged ourselves -ashore. There was barely standing-room for the four of us, huddled and -streaming in the pouring rain, the teeth of all chattering audibly. It -was then that Hart and I broached the bottle of Dutch rum from Curaçao. -It would have given us exquisite pleasure to have let a prohibitionist -stand there without his share until he was convinced that “demon rum” -sometimes has its uses. The fiery stuff may not have saved our lives, -but it came very near it. He who has never tried in a raging downpour to -light a fire of wood soaked through and through on ground an inch deep -with water, himself running like a sieve and shaking until he can -scarcely hold a match, has no notion of the high value of profanity. We -fought tooth and nail for almost two hours before we finally got some -hot tea, and more or less roasted four slabs of beef. The Indians had -very little strength, and though it took most of my time to bail out the -river- and rain-water, the rest of it I paddled hard in an effort to -restore my warmth. - -All things have an end, however, and at last the sun came out and, -broken by a couple of showers that drenched us again, stayed with us the -rest of the day. In mid-afternoon we sighted the first human beings, a -group of Indians with file-pointed teeth and wearing more or less -clothes, who stood in the edge of the jungle beside two small deer they -had shot with ancient muskets, and which they were now skinning and -preparing to roast or smoke over a fire on the ground. We tried to buy -one of the chunks of venison, of some ten pounds each, that lay about -them, but we had no money except gold and paper. Any coin would do; in -fact, the chief Indian asked “one coin”; but he was a wise old trader of -some experience with civilization, and refused even my pocket-mirror. As -a last resort we offered him two boxes of matches, a very high price; -but he had evidently once been in Brazil and had set his heart on a -milreis. We had none, nor any coin that resembled one, so we tossed the -meat back at them and went on. Though we wore socks against the insects, -shoes would have been a burden in the ever possible necessity of -swimming for our lives, and our feet were constantly in water. We were -now past the Kanuku Range, and one side of the river broke into -savannah, though it was bushy along shore, while on the other side -stretched the unbroken forest wall. Along this little monkeys dropped -from high trees to the branches of others much lower with a crash that -set them swiftly to vibrating. Big noisy toucans now and then flew past -in gorgeous couples, their tails streaming. We heard the howling monkeys -again, but by day their uproar was nothing like so weird and terrifying -as it had sounded high up in the flooded tree-tops of the boundless -forest the night before. - -The best time anyone had ever made from Melville’s to the Church of -England Mission at Yupukari, even in high water, was four days. It was a -most agreeable surprise, therefore, when long before sunset on this -second day Hart suddenly recognized some landmark and swung us into a -little back-water in which we soon tied up at a landing in the silent -woods. Here, taking a Sunday afternoon stroll along a trail cut through -the jungle, we met Parson White and his wife, the first Caucasian woman -I had seen since leaving Manaos, followed by their baby and a Hindu -nurse. The parson, being the upholder of civilization in wild regions, -had not succumbed to bare feet, but wore stout shoes and golf stockings, -with “shorts,” or knickerbockers, above them. His knees were bare in -defiance of the swarms of gnats, perhaps as a sort of penance, but in -spite of this and our unexpected appearance, he greeted us like an -Englishman and a parson. He was a very effective man, his methods being -quite the opposite of those of his Jesuit fellow-missionary. He believed -in keeping a curb-bit on the Indians, never allowing them to come into -his house and ruling them with military sternness. When I told him that -I needed three Indians to go on with me as soon as possible, he did not -go out and ask if there were any who wished to go, but answered, “Of -course; you shall have them to-morrow morning.” - -We swung our hammocks under a new thatched roof over a split-palm floor -on stilts. The Church of England Mission to the Macuxy Indians, into -whose territory we had come again, was built on high ground some little -distance from the Rupununi, though mosquitoes and gnats were still so -troublesome as to force us to put up our nets. Well built and clean -Indian huts stood at a respectful distance from the parson’s bungalow, -where there was an air of business efficiency. The mission had many -cattle, and numbers of Indians worked for it, though they were also -given a certain amount of instruction. In British Guiana the -predominating church has some of the faults of unrestrained Catholicism -in the other lands of South America, the bishop, for instance, owning -personally large numbers of cattle; but having no confessional or oath -of celibacy to spring leaks in weak vessels, the result is mild -commercialism rather than widespread social corruption. The parson did -not believe in teaching the Indians English, but in learning their -mother tongue, perfecting it as much as possible, reducing it to -writing, and using it as the medium of instruction. He had found its -grammar excellent, with many things shorter and sharper than in English; -but it was impossible to teach them arithmetic because of their awkward -counting system. For “six” they said “a hand and one over on the other -hand,” and larger numbers were whole sentences. A few Indian children he -had found remarkably bright. He said that the tribe scarcely knew what -it is to steal, but that those members who had come in contact with -negroes in the “balata” camps quickly became expert thieves. Their -greatest fault was irresponsibility. Show a man or woman how to do a -thing every day for a month, then impress it upon them that it must be -done that way daily, and at the end of three days it would be found that -they had ceased to do it, had succumbed to atavism and sunk quickly back -into the ways of their ancestors. - -Two youths in the Indian prime of life and a boy of sixteen who looked -about twelve, but who spoke English and was to act as my interpreter as -well as steersman, were ready at dawn. The parson’s orders to them were -concise. “You will take this gentleman down to the “balata” camps as -rapidly as possible, and bring the boat back here,” he commanded, and -the Indians showed no tendency to argue the matter. Out of their hearing -he told me to pay them for six days,—two down and four back—and that -five shillings each for the trip, either in money or goods, would be a -fair wage. Hart was to walk back home—much nearer from here than from -Melville’s—with our other Indians, carrying various things that had come -up the river for him. Intrusted with the parson’s big tin letter-box, -well padlocked, for the bishop in Georgetown—so seldom does anyone “go -down to town” at this season—I became doubly His Majesty’s Royal Mail -Train. - -[Illustration: The father and son turned boatmen, against their wills, -and paddled us down to Rupununi] - -[Illustration: Two of my second crew of paddlers] - -[Illustration: One of my Indians shooting fish from our dugout] - -[Illustration: “Harris,” my “certified steersman” on the Essequibo] - -It began to rain the instant we set off, but this time I could crawl -under the edge of the tarpaulin, though huddled and cramped as I had not -been since I hoboed under the hinged platform over Pullman steps. The -Indians, of course, got wet, but having stripped to their red -breech-clouts as soon as they were out of sight of the mission, this -seemed to trouble them little. Notwithstanding their rounded stomachs, -full to capacity of that miserable hunger antidote made of the mandioca, -they showed some energy. It is a fallacy, however, that wilderness -people are necessarily robust because they lead simple lives. They are -patient and enduring, but exposure and alternate stuffing and fasting -are not conducive to robust health. Sunshine and showers alternated -throughout the day. Here and there were patches of savannah, but most of -the time we were surrounded by endless forest walls and utter solitude. -When I felt it must be near noon, I gave orders to land at the next -opportunity and start a fire. We were doing so when I heard curious -mutterings and stealthy movements among the Indians and to my question -“Vincent” replied in a low voice, “Black men.” The story of the “Ocean -Shark” still fresh in memory, I at once buckled on my revolver and took -the direction indicated, only to find a group of negroes of the West -Indian type, who rose to their feet as I approached and addressed me as -“sir.” They were part of the crew of Melville’s long expected boat, -which had left Georgetown three weeks before, and they were waiting for -the black policeman in charge, who had gone up an estuary with twelve -paddlers to arrest a native. We boiled some beef, which my boys ate with -dry _farinha_, refusing beef-broth, and pushed on. - -During the day we thoroughly boxed the compass, running to every point -of it with the winding river. It was broader and more placid down here, -though still swift and reaching to the tops of many good-sized trees. -Hour after hour the steady, rhythmic thump of the paddles against the -boat continued with the glinting lift of the gleaming blades as the two -boys in the bow shoveled water behind them. Their idea of good paddling -appeared to be to throw as much water into the air with each stroke as -possible, and this sort of “grandstand play” and the constant monotonous -scrape of the paddles on the edge of the boat seemed much wasted effort. -Yet we bowled along much faster than the swift current. I paddled -considerably myself, but though I was visibly much stronger than the -Indian youths, and gave much more powerful strokes, I could not hold -their pace. They were remarkably constant in keeping it up, going faster -and faster until the bowman gave a signal by throwing water higher than -usual, whereupon they started anew with a deeper and more measured -stroke, which in a few minutes became fast and forceless again. They did -very little talking, though they were natural and unembarrassed enough. -“Soldiering,” such as letting go the paddle to feel of a toe or caress a -scratch, never brought protest from the others, as it would under like -circumstances from civilized workmen. Clothing was still largely -ornamental and a fad with them, and their wrecks of shirts and trousers -were more often discarded than worn, except in the case of “Vincent,” -with whom they seemed to be a sign of his higher social standing. But -under the useless garments forced upon them by the missionaries each -wore a bright-red loin-cloth always kept carefully in place by a stout -white cord about the waist. Like most savages, though they were -indifferent to the lack of other clothes, they were far more careful not -to show complete nakedness than are most civilized men. - -I had planned to camp at dark, but to my surprise the Indians preferred -to go on, saying that the mosquitoes and gnats were too thick to make -sleep possible. Near sunset, therefore, we stopped to cook, and were off -again at dark. The deadly stillness of night at times was not broken -even by the faintest sound from the floating boat, but only by the -occasional howling of some animal, evidently a “tiger,” off somewhere in -the jungle. It was too cold to sleep; besides, my back ached with much -sitting and there was not room to stretch out. Hour after hour the boys -went on, sometimes paddling, sometimes floating and talking. Then the -clear sky grew overcast, distant lightning flashed, and the rain began -again. I crawled under cover, though too cramped to sleep. It must have -been at least midnight when I heard the Indians snatching at bushes -while it still rained, and peered out to find them on land looking for a -place to sling my tarpaulin. They got it up after a fashion in the dense -darkness and constant drizzle, though with barely room under it for my -hammock and net. Then they swung their own hammocks outside and dug good -clothes and blankets from their bags; but though they had made their own -hammocks, insect pests did not seem to trouble them enough to induce -them to make themselves nets. - -I was aroused by the bashful, girl-of-twelve voice of “Vincent,” whose -English was probably similar to the soft language the Indians use to one -another in their own tongue, in which there never seems to be a harsh -word, telling me that it would soon be daylight. We bailed out the boat -and reloaded it, all in wet weeds, sore feet, and constant drizzle, and -were off in the phantom of false morning. The soft, velvety tropical -dawn came quickly, as if fleeing before the mammoth red ball that -pursued it up over the horizon. Pairs and trios of parrots flew by in -the fresh morning, chattering cheerily to one another. Chirruping black -birds with long queenly tails were the most conspicuous of many little -singing birds; a big white or gray, ponderously moving bird, like a -heron, was the largest of many species. Trees and bushes of innumerable -kinds were interwoven into solid walls along either bank, “monkey ropes” -galore swinging down the face of it, but they were peopled with none of -the playful creatures of our school geographies. I gave the boys a big -dinner, which was unwise, for feast or famine is their natural way of -life and, like hunting dogs, they were of little use when gorged. The -river was lower and had turned far more sluggish for lack of fall, and -our speed depended mainly on paddling. I ached from head to foot from -sitting cramped for four days, particularly from the “jiggers” that had -burrowed into my bare feet on the tramp to Melville’s, a tiny insect -which lays its eggs under the skin and especially under the edges of the -nails, where they begin to swell and produce acute pain until they are -cut open and squeezed out. No one had any notion where we were or -whether we would get anywhere that day; but it was evident that we could -not make the mouth of the Rupununi, and at dusk we pitched camp in a -site cleared by other travelers in the edge of the sloping woods, where -the mosquitoes and gnats were so numerous that I took refuge under my -net while supper was cooking. - -Monotonously the wide river, now placid and mirror-like, with very -little current, slipped slowly along into the vista of endless forest -walls. The sun poured down like molten iron. In mid-morning we passed -the only boat we had thus far met on the trip, carrying an Indian -family, the woman steering, two full-grown girls with no visible -clothes, and several men paddling, a cur dog gazing over the gunwale. -They, too, tossed water high in the air with every stroke. I alternated -between paddling, bailing the boat, soaking salt meat for the meal -ahead, reading, writing, and sitting stooped forward or leaning back to -ease the cramp of my position. At least one did not need to go hungry on -such a trip, as does frequently the traveler on foot through the wild -places of the earth. Not half an hour below where we stopped to cook -dinner beneath a majestic tree in the cathedral woods we passed the -first human habitation I had sighted from the river since leaving -Melville’s, though I had expected to see scores. It was an Indian hut, -or rather shelter, for it had no walls; and close beyond were two or -three more, one of two stories, though consisting merely of thatched -roofs on poles. The women were naked as the men, except for bead -bracelets and anklets, and sometimes an old skirt, though more often -they had only a beaded apron a foot or more square in lieu of the -fig-leaf. Little girls wore the same ornaments, including a smaller -apron, as they began to approach puberty. Formerly all the native women -confined themselves to this costume, but the advent of missionaries and -ranchers, with their “civilizing” influence and the payment of -everything in cloth, has begun to breed an unnatural prudery. - -It was perhaps two o’clock in the afternoon when the Chinese wall of -forest was broken, or rather spotted, by a large, rough wooden building -with a sheet-iron roof, a cluster of smaller ones about it. This was -“The Stores,” headquarters of three rival “balata” companies, and the -only place, except Boa Vista, on the journey from Manaos where goods are -professionally for sale or buildings are made of imported material. We -halted at the third and last among many canoes and “perlite” negroes, -just before the Rupununi flows into the Essequibo. - -[Illustration: We set off down the Essequibo in the same worm-eaten old -dugout] - -[Illustration: “Harris” and his wife at one of their evening camp fires] - -[Illustration: Battling with the Essequibo] - -The manager of “Bugles Store,” to whom Melville had given me a letter, -was a burly, bearded man nearing forty, born in the colony of Scotch and -Irish parents and speaking with a peculiar accent gathered from all -three sources. He had a large comfortable house and a long hut for the -stores and his negro henchmen, all surrounded by a pineapple plantation. -I had my belongings brought up to the house at once and, lest my Indians -should disappear before I knew how the land lay, the paddles also. The -place was shut in at a crook of the river, behind a forest wall that -utterly smothered the breeze for which the region is noted and made it -hotter than I had ever known it in British Guiana. We sat down to a -supper of rice, canned meat, boiled pawpaw, and insects, the last in -such numbers that lights were taboo. Then the Scotch-Irish Guianese -closed every window with a fussy manner and some remark about the -dangerous night air and we began to undress in the darkness. When -breathing became difficult, I noticed that an air-proof tarpaulin had -been drawn over the place where the ceiling had wisely been left out by -the builders, and that another had been spread over the floor to shut -out any air that might have seeped through its narrow cracks! A house in -British Guiana should consist of roof only, as the Indians know; this -one, having tight walls, still held the heat of the day, as an oven -retains its warmth after the baking is over. Thus does atavism cause -even a civilized white man to cling to old customs when they should be -thrown away. Outdoors, in the breeziest spot, would have been none too -comfortable sleeping-quarters; yet here was I in a hermetically sealed -room and down in the depths of a thick Ceará hammock with a tight -gnat-proof net over me! Within ten minutes I could almost swim in it, -the perspiration making my many insect bites and skin abrasions itch -beyond endurance. Though he had lighted a lamp as soon as we were ready -for bed, the prudish colonial was still fussing with his garments, as if -fearing I might catch sight of his ankles, when I looked out again to -suggest mildly that perhaps it would be less inconvenient for him if I -moved my hammock out into the hall. He agreed; but to my increasing -astonishment I found the veranda, too, which had been pleasantly wide -open by day, likewise hermetically sealed with tarpaulin curtains! After -I had hung my hammock, my incomprehensible host spent half an hour -looking for another lamp, which he evidently expected me to keep blazing -all night, and finally retired to his sealed quarters, leaving me to -listen to the ticking and striking of the dozen or more trumpet-voiced -clocks scattered about the house. He plainly had a hobby for clocks, -perhaps to keep time from running away from him here in the wilderness. -I noiselessly opened a couple of curtains and blew out the light, and -actually slept a bit before a heathenish hullabaloo broke out long -before daylight. I found my host tramping moodily back and forth across -the hollow wooden floor in his heavy boots, waking everyone and -everything within gunshot, though there was no earthly necessity for -anyone being up for hours yet. This, I learned, was one of his -invariable customs and innumerable idiosyncrasies. He could not get or -keep Indian employees, not only because he was too harsh with them, but -because he insisted on everyone going to bed about seven and aroused -them all with his infernal alarm-clocks at four, keeping even the -neighboring camps awake from then on by stamping back and forth on the -resounding floor. Truly, a man living alone in the jungle develops his -own individuality. - -Strictly speaking, “The Stores” were not public, but furnished supplies -to the “bleeders” of the three companies in the “balata” forests, who -gather a cheap rubber similar to the _caucho_ of Brazil. “Balata” boats -had been in the habit of leaving for the coast every few days, and no -one had so much as suggested the possibility of my having any difficulty -in getting down to Georgetown, once I had reached the mouth of the -Rupununi. But I quickly discovered that instead of the worst being over, -as I was congratulating myself, the crisis of the trip was still ahead -of me. The Essequibo from the Rupununi to Potaro mouth, whence there is -a daily launch, is, under favorable conditions, only a short week’s -trip; but there are many dangerous falls, to be passed only in certain -seasons, obstacles which have often held up travelers for months. My -host implied that such was to be my fate. Because of the drop in the -price of rubber, not a “balata” boat had gone down the river in weeks; -and though a messenger was dispatched even to the rival camps, word came -back that none would have a boat leaving before September or October! It -was then the middle of June. My remark that I would much prefer going -over the falls and be done with it seemed lost upon my egregious host. - -Not only common sense, however, but the law forbade my attempting the -trip without reasonable preparations. Entire boatloads of passengers as -well as goods had more than once been completely lost; once a group of -American missionaries who had insisted on going down alone had been -drowned, according to the exiled Scotch-Irishman, and while he did not -seem to feel that a personal loss, it required him, in his capacity as -the only British official in the region, to compel me to comply with the -law. First of all, I must have a certified pilot and bowman, of whom -there were not a dozen on the river. Moreover, my host was a justice of -the peace, as well as a man of harsh and eccentric ways, so that the -Indians who had not been hired on long contract and forced to stick to -it gave the place a wide berth, particularly as this was their “off” -year, when they wished to stay at home to burn off and plant their -gardens, or because they properly prefer loafing in the wilderness to -working for a song for cantankerous white men. To comply fully with -legal requirements, I should evidently have to build, buy, or hire a -larger new boat and assemble a whole expedition, at a cost of several -hundred dollars. My only other hope was to find a certified captain who -would be willing to risk his life with me in the rotten old dugout in -which I had arrived; and the only possible candidate for that romantic -position lived way back at the Indian huts we had passed the day before. - -We set out for them at seven in the morning, my three unwilling boys -augmented by a half-sick negro named Langrey, who wished to get down to -Georgetown. It was quite a different task from traveling downstream. All -five of us paddled the whole morning without a let-up, yet the great -forest wall along the edge of which we struggled seemed barely to move, -and I had a vivid sample of the hardships of weeks and even months of -rowing up-river in Amazonia, where the loss of a single stroke to catch -the breath leaves that much of the toilsome task to be done over again. -We finally landed at the slight clearing and found a strong, -good-looking young Indian, his forehead and cheeks painted some tribal -color, lying in loin-cloth contentment in his hammock under a roof on -legs. This was “Harris”—the missions have overdone themselves in giving -the Indians clothing, wedding-rings, and English names which they cannot -pronounce—or, as he called himself, “Hăllish,” certified captain of the -interned gasoline launch of one of the stores, but who was “not working -this year.” He spoke a considerable amount of a kind of pidgin-English, -which added to his enigmatical air and somewhat almond eyes to suggest -remote Chinese ancestry. Langrey opened fire at once, and there followed -a long argument, or almost a pleading on our part, with little but -silence from the other. The first inclination of primitive people is -wary attention, one of questioning suspicion, with a tendency toward -antipathy. Finally “Harris” deigned to remark, raising himself on an -elbow in the hammock and glancing toward it, that our canoe was too old -and small for such a trip. Perhaps we could borrow the new one of his -next-door neighbor a few miles down the river, he added some time later, -lending him “mine” until his own was returned. For some reason “Harris” -wished to “go down to town” himself, or no argument I could have put -forward would have shaken his aboriginal indifference. I told him to -name his own price. He asked ten pounds! Stranded as I was, I balked at -that, but Langrey butted in, and it turned out that “Harris” did not -know the difference between pounds and dollars, so that ten dollars -would be just as agreeable. Then he must wait for his wife, to see if -she wished to go! Yet there are men who assert that Indian women are -downtrodden. She appeared by and by from the woods, where she had been -digging mandioca-roots, carrying a big load of those poisonous tubers on -her back in a peculiar open-work basket held by a thong across her -forehead and wearing nothing but a scanty skirt from waist to thighs. -Though she had already been seen by all, so that any modesty she might -have possessed should have recovered, she went to a nearby roof on poles -and put on a long skirt and a crumpled waist, though the latter scarcely -concealed her charms and the former she unconsciously pulled up far -above her knees when she sat down on a log to peel the mandioca. The -missionaries who had given her and her husband their wedding-rings and -their names had taught them what to wear in the presence of white men, -but she knew only an academic reason for doing so. - -Our errand was not allowed to interfere with household duties, so while -“Harris” lolled in his hammock and the rest of us squatted on stumps and -stones in the shade of his roof, the woman peeled the mandioca-roots, -washed them, grated them on a native implement, and ran the mash into -the open end of a snake-like _matapi_, or press made of woven flat -fibers. This she hung by the upper loop from a beam-end and attached a -weight to the lower end, thus squeezing out a yellowish juice that is -deadly poison. This is carefully guarded from children and dogs, but, -being volatile, is easily eliminated by boiling. The residue is then -dried, sifted through basket sieves, and finally baked into cassava -bread, the most horrible imitation of food extant, great pancake-like -sheets of which were even then spread about the thatch roofs. Though -similar in origin, cassava is far more trying to the civilized stomach -than the bran-like _farinha_ of Brazil. - -Negotiations were opened again in due season. I agreed to the princely -price of ten dollars, food down and back for the whole party, even -including the wife, and promised of my own free will a premium of a -dollar for each day gained over the usual time for the trip. But here we -struck another snag. The only paddlers available were the three I had -brought with me; and they absolutely refused to go. They insisted that -the Reverend White had told them to come straight back from “The -Stores,” and that he was a man to be obeyed. I knew it; yet I was not -going to be held a prisoner in the jungle for months to suit the -convenience of three Indians, even with a parson thrown in. I put it to -them strongly. If they would go down to Potaro mouth with me, I would -pay them good wages and give them good food for both the down and the up -trip and write a letter of explanation for them to carry back to the -missionary. If they did not go, they could sit here twirling their -thumbs without food, for I would not let them have the dugout until I -was done with it. They had a gun and bows and arrows with them, and no -doubt other Indians would not let them starve and might even lend them a -boat; yet I felt that if I made my bluff strong enough, the pressure of -the white man’s will would win in the end, barring some untoward -incident. So I assured “Harris” that I could get plenty of paddlers, if -these wished to starve, assuming great indifference, though fearing all -the time that I might not be able to coerce them, and told him that it -would save me paying what I owed them, though of course I should have -given them what I had agreed upon with the parson. Leaving that bug in -their ears, we finally ended our long and leisurely diplomatic -conference, “Harris” agreeing to come down to “The Stores” next morning -with his neighbor’s new boat, his own wife, and one man, while I was to -furnish four paddlers, including Langrey, to provide all supplies, and -to advance him five dollars upon his arrival. - -All the way back I let the paddlers stew in their own thoughts, -purposely saying nothing and reading a novel, as if my mind were at -peace. Like all children, whether of the wilderness or merely in age, -coaxing, I felt sure, would be far less effective with them than moral -pressure. Time, patience, and, above all, propinquity would eventually -cause their primitive wills to yield to mine. As we passed one of the -huts along the bank, they shouted a conversation in Macuxy at those -about it, perhaps getting some promise that a boat would be sent for -them. Ignoring this and their former vociferous refusal, however, I -called “Vincent” aside when we landed and said, in the tone one might -use to a pouting child, “You talk it over with the other boys, and when -you have made up your minds, come and tell me and I will get you food to -cook.” As they had not eaten at all that day and were, if my own -appetite was any gauge, half-starved, I depended on hunger as my most -important ally. - -The Scotch-Irish native, who addressed his negroes as “Mister,” and was -chary of running foul of the official “Protector of the Indians,” as -well as having the Englishman’s fear, several times multiplied, of the -unprecedented, could not for a long time be talked over. Finally he -agreed mildly to lend his aid, and sitting down on his doorstep, like a -justice holding court, he called the three boys before him and addressed -them in laborious pidgin-English. “Now can’t leave gentleman here, you -see. Me going supply provisions. You paddle he down ...” and so on; -after all of which they mumbled and went back to the bank of the river. -But my most powerful ally eventually got in its work, and about sunset, -having meanwhile visibly wept, they came to me and said they had decided -to go—whereupon I gave them a meal that left “Vincent’s” little paunch -protruding like a chicken’s crop. Then they came again, in a far more -cheerful mood, and wanted a pair of trousers, a shirt, and a belt -respectively, whether to gloat over them or merely to see the color of -my coin I do not know. These things I gave them on account from the -storehouse, and they were soon beaming and gay as happy children. - -But I was not yet done. The law required a certified bowman and more -paddlers. “Had you not been recommended to me by Melville, I could not -let you go on without a permit from the Protector of the Indians,”—who -never stirs out of Georgetown—added my charming host, much impressed -with himself as an officer of the law, like all wooden-headed -authorities. We debated another hour or more before he agreed, with the -air of doing my whole nation an extraordinary favor, to consider me one -of the paddlers and my best boy an experienced bowman. Then, out of the -kindness of his heart, he permitted me to buy from his store—at prices I -found later to be between five and six times those of Georgetown—the -rations required by law,—seven days’ supplies for seven people, or -forty-nine rations, each of which must include a pound of flour, half a -pound of rice, two ounces of pork, ditto of beef, twice that of fish, -two ounces of sugar, and so on through about twenty items, not to -mention milk and cocoa and many other extras for “the captain, Harris” -and myself. The fact that the manager himself gets twenty per cent. on -all sales from the store may or may not have made him so insistent on -full compliance with the law. When the list was completed he handed me a -bill for $22.71, and then growled because I paid him with a five-pound -note, instead of in gold. - -When I fancied everything settled at last, Langrey came to me with tears -struggling over his eyelids and said, “So sorry, sir. I was so -_interested_ in this trip. But I can’t go.” - -“Why not?” I asked. - -“Because, sir, I have not the passage money from Potaro mouth down to -Georgetown.” - -“How much will that be?” - -“$2.08, second-class, sir.” - -“But surely, after working nearly four months for this company you have -earned that much?” - -“No, sir. I took an advance, and the food costs so much.” - -“Well, as you were injured working for them, surely they will help you -to that extent to get back home?” - -“No, sir, them don’t help we none,” replied Langrey, slipping back into -his more habitual speech. - -This statement having been confirmed by my host, I gave him a hint of -what I thought of the company he represented and promised the invalid -negro his fare to Georgetown. By this time the visible cost of the -perhaps four days’ trip to Potaro mouth exceeded fifty dollars. - -These “balata” companies exploit not only the natural resources, but the -natives, with a system almost as near slavery as that in the -rubber-fields of Amazonia, against which England had recently made a -loud uproar. Langrey’s case was typical of many. He had worked seven -years for this company. Each spring he applied at headquarters in -Georgetown and got $10 advance and a $10 order on the company store. -Leaving the latter with his family (and no doubt gambling away the -former), he joined many other negroes who had signed similar contracts -and helped row a company freight-boat up the river. On this wages were -48 cents a day and an allowance of $2.08 a week for food; but as they -must buy all provisions at the company stores, at breath-taking prices, -because they are forbidden to bring anything with them from Georgetown -and there is nothing for sale elsewhere up the river, it is easy to see -that the “bleeders” cannot but make a decided inroad on their future -wages before they set off into the woods to hunt the “bullet-tree.” This -is a very large member of the _sapote_ family, the bark of which the -“bleeder” gashes in zigzag form from the ground to a height of perhaps -thirty-five feet, using a ladder and a rope—spurs are illegal—and -cutting with a machete. It requires long practice to cut deep enough, -yet not too deep; wherefore the average “bleeder” makes little or -nothing during the first year or two. Incisions in the bark must run -into and not cross one another, and must not be more than one and a half -inches long. No “bullet-tree” can be cut down, except when necessary in -making a trail; the law forbids a tree being bled in more than half its -circumference at a time, the tapping of any tree of less than thirty-six -inches diameter, the “bleeding” of the branches, or cutting clear -through the bark. Once it has been tapped, the tree must stand five -years before the other side can be bled. Companies with “balata” -concessions are allowed to take nothing else from the crown lands that -are leased to them for that purpose, and if the workmen were half as -well protected as the trees, the “balata”-fields would border on Utopia. - -Every “bleeder” must be registered with the department of forests and -mines, and pay a government license fee of one shilling. The negroes -build rude huts in the forest, but are not allowed to bring their women -with them. Each tree yields about a gallon of “milk,” which the sap -resembles both in looks and taste, and which is gathered every afternoon -and poured into an immense wooden tray protected from the direct rays of -the sun. Here it coagulates, forming a kind of cream on top. This -hardens into an immense sheet of celluloid color that is peeled off and -folded like an ox-hide for shipment. Day after day “milk” is added and -the “cream” peeled off, each gallon of “milk” giving about five pounds -of “balata.” In December the “bleeder” carries his traps back to the -river and down to camp, usually averaging a bit under a thousand pounds -of “balata” for the season, for which he was then getting $170. -Advances, food, and high priced provisions subtracted, he is lucky if he -has anything left to gamble away when he gets back to town. If a man is -sick or cannot work for any other reason, such as heavy rain, he gets no -wages, but he must pay 40 cents a day for his rations, as well as for -his medicines. Of course the company has to guard against malingering by -lazy negroes; yet if Langrey was a fair example, they are moderately -earnest, responsible workers. He had not lost a day in his seven years, -he asserted, until he had injured his back falling from a tree a short -time before; yet the company would give him no assistance to return to -town. If a negro runs away from his contract, he gets from four months -to a year in prison and is made to pay back his advance; if he lives out -his contract, he goes down the river again by rowing a company boat at -two shillings a day. But down on the coast a negro gets only 32 cents a -day—the minimum wage in British Guiana—or perhaps two shillings for -loading ships, at which “he not easy to find job,” so that the more -enterprising of the race come up-river annually to “bleed” the -“bullet-tree.” - -In the morning “Harris” turned up, accompanied by his wife, a parrot, -many sheets of newly baked cassava bread, and his “canister,” a small -tin box for personal possessions such as most workmen in this region -carry. He bore no tribal marks now, and his wife was fully dressed from -neck to ankles. But he came in a miserable little old dugout of his own, -saying he could neither get the extra man nor borrow his neighbor’s new -boat. My plans seemed again about to topple over. But, to my -astonishment, “Harris” agreed to try to make the trip in Melville’s -decrepit craft, evidently being very anxious to get down to town. This -might have served as a last resort, in spite of the much greater fury of -the Essequibo than the Rupununi, had we been allowed to go on short -rations, or even with the amount we would probably need. Legally, the -wife would serve as the extra paddler, but we were compelled by law to -load the poor old derelict to the gunwales—nay, far above them. I -protested that such a load would almost certainly swamp the boat. My -delightful host said that did not matter in the least; the law required -that those who hired Indians must have one pound of flour, and so on, -each day to feed them, but it did not specify that they should not be -drowned before the end of the trip. So I was compelled to pile the -fifty-pound sealed can of flour on top of all the rest of our load, -though even the exiled Scotch-Irishman admitted, in his non-official -capacity, that Indians do not eat flour, except under compulsion, and -that we had more than they could eat without it; and thereby our already -excellent chances of bringing up at the bottom of the Essequibo were -considerably increased. - -[Illustration: More trouble on the Essequibo] - -[Illustration: High Street, Georgetown, capital of British Guiana] - -[Illustration: Cayenne, capital of French Guiana, from the sea] - -[Illustration: The “trusties” among the French prisoners of Cayenne have -soft jobs and often wear shoes] - -My host maintained his reputation to the very moment of our departure. -The company having abandoned Langrey half-sick from injuries sustained -in their employ, and I having agreed to take him all the way home, one -would have supposed that a slight parting kindness would not have -bankrupted the corporation. As we were on the point of leaving, I said, -“By the way, that man of yours we are taking down with us has no paddle, -unless you can lend him one.” - -“He’s no mon of ours!” hastily and half-angrily answered the provincial -Scotch-Irishman. “If I lind a paddle, it will be to you personally, and -I will hold you responsible for getting it back to me!” - -Thereupon he got a miserable old cracked and mended paddle about the -size of a lath and tossed it out to us. I promised to send it back by -special messenger. - -So at last, on June 18, we were off at eleven in the morning. My three -now tanned and tamed paddlers were in front, the rather useless Langrey -and “Harris’” paddle-less wife and her parrot on the seat back of the -tarpaulin-covered baggage and supplies, while I was cramped in between -them and the certified “captain-and-pilot” squatting on the stern. It -seemed foolish to take pictures or keep notes of the trip, so slight -were the chances of ever getting them back to civilization. I took the -laces out of my heavy shoes, however, so that I could kick them off and -at least have a fighting chance to save my own hide. - -In a few minutes we slid out of the Rupununi into the Essequibo, wide as -the lower Hudson and six hundred miles long, the principal river of -British Guiana, and struck across a veritable lake at the junction, with -the waves running so high that we shipped much water to add to that -constantly seeping into the old and now badly strained dugout. For a -time it looked as if we might sink immediately, instead of doing so -after several days of arduous toil. I bailed incessantly, and at last we -came under the lee of the wooded shore and plodded along more or less -safely, shut in by the long familiar wall of unbroken forest-jungle. - -We had no champion paddlers on board. The three boys messed along -steadily but not very earnestly; Langrey, the invalid, slapped his -lath-like paddle in and out of the water with just exertion enough to -pass as a boatman rather than a passenger; and though I got in some long -and more powerful strokes, I never succeeded in keeping the bowman’s -pace for any length of time and shoveled water mainly to relieve the -monotonous drudgery of bailing the boat. This eminently feminine job was -the only work expected of the captain’s wife, but most of it fell to my -lot because the water gathered deepest about my feet. The lady wore a -skirt and some sort of bodice or waist, but these were thin and mainly -ornamental, and rather than wet her skirt she would pull it above her -knees, disclosing plump brownish legs decorated with a cross-bar and -three painted stripes running from ankle to—well, as high as the skirt -ever went in our presence. Her face, also, was symbolically painted, and -she wore a towel about her plentiful horse-mane hair. Her rôle was -strictly passive. She made no advances, never speaking to anyone but her -husband, and then in barely audible undertones, not merely because she -knew no English, for she was quite as taciturn toward the paddlers of -her own race as with Langrey or me. Yet her husband granted her their -better umbrella when roaring showers fell, and in general, considering -their scale of life, treated her as well as does the average civilized -husband of the laboring class. To be sure, he had lain in a hammock -while she dug mandioca and made cassava bread, but somewhere I have seen -a civilized man lie in a Morris chair while his wife washed dishes and -baked pies. They seemed to have as much mutual understanding and to -“communicate by a sigh or a gesture” as easily as more fully clothed -couples. - -We were gradually turning to English; four out of seven of us now spoke -it. In the pidgin-English of the Indians, which passed between “Harris” -and the now deposed and disrobed “Vincent,” comparatives and -superlatives were always formed with “more” and “most,” and the positive -rather than the negative adjective served both purposes. The river was -“more deep,” “not deep,” “not more deep,” but never shallow; it was -“most wide,” “not wide,” or “not most wide,” but never narrow—though -both knew the meaning of the other words readily enough. Nothing could -induce the Indians to express an opinion of their own, or rather, they -never showed any sign of personal volition to a white man if they could -possibly avoid it. Ask them, “Is it better to stop at the clearing, or -to camp across the river?” and the reply would be, “Yes, sir; all right, -sir,” or something similar. One might strive for an hour to find out -what they would do if they were alone, and even then succeed only by -carefully refraining from suggesting any preference. Like the Indians of -the Andes, they preferred to wait for a leading question, so that they -could answer what they thought the questioner would be most pleased to -hear. - -Langrey had his own opinions, but it was long since he had heard any -news from the outside world. He did not know that there was a war in -Europe, though he did leave off paddling suddenly one day to say, “Ah -sure sorry to heard, sir, dat Jack Johnson los’ de champeenship. When he -winned, all we black man in Georgetown parade, sir.” He was convinced -that the “black man”—under no circumstances did he use the word -“negro”—was superior to the white, mentally as well as physically, and -spent many a sun-blistering hour citing examples to prove it. One such -assertion was that the white authorities had to change and give more -examinations in the schools and colleges of the colony, because the -blacks were winning everything. Yet he was always obsequious to white -men, addressed me unfailingly as “sir,” and was much pained to see me do -the slightest manual labor. Yet it may be that he would have treated in -the same manner one of his own race having what to him were money and -position, as I saw him later act toward wealthy Chinese. - -A bit after mid-afternoon we came to several arms of the river where it -split between densely wooded banks, with immense reddish-brown rocks -protruding here and there from the water and the sound of rapids -beginning to worry us. But the river at this point was so high, broad, -and swift that we had no difficulty in running what Langrey called a -“scataract,” though in other seasons it had often proved a -time-consuming obstacle. The sun had sunk behind one of the walls of -trees when we swung in to clutch the swiftly passing bank just above -another rapids, where the men soon cut saplings and pitched camp. First -they set up a frame and stretched my tarpaulin tent-wise over it, -putting my netted hammock and baggage under it and forming what Langrey -called the “chief’s place.” He was so much higher in the Guianese social -scale that, though “Harris” was supreme in the matter of steering and -boatmanship, the negro assumed the place of first lieutenant under me -the instant we set foot on shore. He swung his own hammock at a -respectful distance from my own luxurious quarters, yet far enough from -the Indians to emphasize the difference in rank; while the Indians -themselves split carefully into two parties, even building separate -fires, “Harris” and his wife close together under the same net and the -three boys in a group a little removed from all the others. Thus the -caste system was religiously and Britishly preserved even in the -wilderness a thousand miles from nowhere. Langrey pestered me to death -with his servitude. If I tried to cook anything myself, he dropped -whatever he was doing and ran to insist on doing it for me. When it was -cooked and I told him to have some himself, he stood stiffly at -attention and refused—by actions, rather than by words—to touch a -mouthful or even to assume the position of “at ease” until I had -finished. If I dared to wash my plate or cup, he bounded forward with -the air of an English butler, exclaiming, “Now, now, sir; you must -always call _me_ when you want anything done.” Sometimes I could have -kicked him; but I always recalled in time that it was not his fault, -that this was part of that British civilization I had come overland from -Manaos to study, and that, being a mere visitor in this foreign realm, I -must not, even inadvertently, Americanize British subjects. Theirs was a -manner quite different from the Brazilian or the Iberian, even of men of -Langrey’s color, with which I had grown so familiar that the Anglo-Saxon -style struck me as stranger and more foreign. The same race which -incessantly shook hands and kowtowed to one another on every provocation -over in Brazil, here had adopted that staid, caste-bound demeanor of the -Briton, keeping up the acknowledged rules of society in the wilderness -just as the lone Englishman will put on evening clothes to dine with -himself in a log cabin. Yet for all the superficial super-politeness of -the Brazilian mulatto or _cabra_ and the Englishness of these Guianese -negroes, they were the same man underneath; in both cases their manners -were only borrowed garments put on to make them look like other people -and help them get along in the world with the least possible friction. - -Indians working for white men must eat expensive supplies from town, -though they much prefer their native food; but negroes can be fed -anything, though here they have been accustomed for generations to the -fare of civilization. Complete as were our legal rations, the Indians -did not like them, so that they fell chiefly to Langrey and me. The -fifty-pound can of flour for which I had paid $8.75 proved to be so -moldy that no one would touch it; the sugar was the coarsest grade of -brown, and the rest was poor in proportion. The ration law, like many -another isolated British ordinance, had plainly been made by a man who -had never set foot in the wilds. Our _farinha_ had run out, more’s the -pity, for though it tasted like sawdust, it was swelling and filling; -and now in its place we had far less palatable cassava bread made of the -same poisonous tuber. We all ate cassava, and the flour might to great -advantage have been thrown overboard, but law is law. - -Swift places in the river were numerous the next day, and finally, at a -“scataract” among countless massive brown-red boulders, we had to get -out and let the boat down by ropes. Dense jungle crowded close to the -shore wherever there were no boulders and often made it impossible to do -likewise in worse spots, where we had to run the risk of shooting the -rapids, shipping water perilously. Twice a day we stopped to cook, the -second time to camp as well. Sometimes, during the noonday halt, I -strolled a little way into the majestic forest, the leafy roof upheld by -mighty trees averaging a hundred feet in height, with buttressed roots, -as if they had been designed as pillars to support the sky, and with -room for a whole Brazilian family to sit down in the space between any -two buttresses. Other trees were incredibly slender for their height, -some barely six inches through, yet climbing straight up to the sunlight -far above. On the river long-tailed parrots flew by in couples at -frequent intervals, screaming like a quarreling Irish pair; but here in -the woods not a bird sang, rarely, indeed, was one seen. From the hour -when the night voices of the jungle-forest ceased in the great silence -of dawn, as if nature stood mute at her own magnificence, there was a -cathedral stillness in these woods. Yet at times the ears were filled -with an indefinable, almost intangible sound, a curious humming, -mysterious as the sensual smell of the forest. Parasites seemed trying -to suffocate the trees with their passionate embrace, yet I got little -sensation of that “death everywhere exuding” reported by so many -Amazonian travelers; rather did one feel an agreeable impression of -isolation and of well-being under that impenetrable roof of vegetation, -in a world such as Adam might have seen on the first day of his life. - -Insects were less troublesome along the Essequibo, and for some reason -we suffered little from heat, though the sun struck straight down upon -the broad river, which threw it back in our faces in scintillations of -polished copper that blinded, visibly tanning us all—except Langrey. A -cool breeze was rarely lacking, and every little while there came the -growing noise of rain, castigating the woods ever more furiously as it -drew near, the wind swaying the great tree-tops and now and then turning -aside from their course a pair of voyaging parrots. Occasionally we -passed the skeleton of a camping-place, a tangle of poles over which -tarpaulins had been hung by other and larger parties. The howling of -monkeys, like the roar of a far-off riot, like some great but distant -crowd furious with anger, often sounded from back in the forest. The -river frequently broke up into many diverging branches, almost as large -in appearance as the main stream, which disappeared off through the -wilderness. In the dry season the Essequibo is a meandering stream that -one can almost wade, its broad bed filled with dry sand and stretches of -huge rocks which now were racing rapids, showing themselves chiefly as -immense whirlpools on the surface of the deep river. - -We ran some very heavy rapids, the waves often tossing over our low -gunwales; but “Harris” was skilful, and the mere fact that he had his -wife along seemed pretty good proof that he hoped to escape shipwreck—or -was it? Then one afternoon a mighty booming began ahead and soon filled -all the forest with its echoes. I pulled out my map, but Langrey -disputed its assertions with an excited, “On de chaht dat’s a scataract, -sir; but dat ain’ no scataract; dat’s a _falls_!” The emphasis on the -last word was not misplaced, even though what is a sheer fall of several -feet in the dry season was now a long series of rapids which we ran, -constantly expecting to be swamped the next moment, and finally coming -to a real drop over immense boulders. We eased her down for a long way -hand-over-hand, clutching bushes along the shore, struggling to maintain -a waist-deep footing on slippery rock, needing the combined exertions of -all of us, except the woman, to keep even the lightened boat from -submerging and leaving us stranded in the wilderness. But though they -did not look as dangerous, the next series of rapids was far more so, -for there was nothing to do but run them, and suddenly in the very -middle of them two waves all but filled the boat, and I prepared to say -good-by to my earthly possessions and take up my abode under a tree in -the impenetrable forest—though at the same time I bailed as savagely as -the men paddled, so that we saved ourselves by a hair. For more than an -hour there was a constant succession of these near-disasters. The river -split up into many channels, and the one we entered might look smooth -and harmless, only to prove a young Niagara when it was too late to turn -back. Dry clothing was unknown among us during those days. It was, of -course, mainly fear for my baggage that sent the twinges up my spine; -for I could probably have saved myself. But to be left boatless, -foodless, and kodak-less here in the heart of the trackless wilderness, -with the chances remote of meeting another human being during a -life-time, would have been more heroic than interesting. When we came at -last into more placid water, Langrey cheered me with the information -that there were “more worse scataracts” and falls a couple of days -farther on. The rocky streak where the high lands of the savannahs get -down to sea-level runs clear across the colony here near its geographic -center, yet the dense forest never broke in the descent. - -“We’ll meet camp jes’ now,” said Langrey about five o’clock; and sure -enough we did “meet” it, coming up river along with the endless -procession of forest, a half-open place, with some of the most -magnificent trees I had yet seen. It was near here that a boat in which -“Harris” had been steersman and Langrey one of the paddlers had buried -the last white man who had attempted the overland trip from Manaos to -Georgetown. He called himself Frederick Weiland, claiming to be an -American born in Texas, but later confessed himself a Hungarian, and -therefore subject, as an enemy alien, to internment for the duration of -the war. He had left Manaos nine months before and tried to walk across -from Boa Vista to Melville’s, but lost himself looking for water, and, -having set down his baggage, could not find it again. For three days he -wandered at random without food and almost without drink, until -half-wild Indians found him and took him on to Melville’s, who was then -in Europe. He gave himself out to be a house-painter, and carried many -collapsible tubes of paints and pencil-brushes; he claimed to know -nothing of soldiering, yet he had a military manner and his talk often -unconsciously showed knowledge not common among workingmen. Most of the -belongings he had left he gave the Indians to row him down to the mouth -of the Rupununi, where the Scotch-Irishman, losing no chance to improve -his official importance, sent negroes out to his camp to arrest him as a -German spy. His captor kept him for a while, letting him paint or do -other work where he could, and finally started down to town with him. -The prisoner seemed to worry much as to what might happen to him there, -though assured that at worst he would be interned; but he was gay most -of the way down, until an up-boat gave them a newspaper that reported -serious German losses. From that moment he seemed to lose heart. Some -thought he swallowed some of his paints; at any rate, he suddenly “t’row -a fit” in the boat one afternoon, and an hour later he was dead. - -“We jes’ take tea,” concluded Langrey; “den we dig a hole an’ put he in, -an’ get in de boat an’ gone.” - -The twentieth of June was badly named Sunday, for not a glimpse of the -sun did we get all day; rather was it a most miserable Rainday, during -which a deluge fell incessantly, leaving us cold to the marrow and -cramped beyond endurance most of the time, sneaking along streams raging -down through the impenetrable wilderness, now stripped and letting the -boat down over rocks, now grabbing from branch to trunk along the shore, -always in more or less immediate danger of going to destruction. Luckily -I had “three fingers” of brandy left to ward off the chill, which I -shared with Langrey. The law forbids, under serious penalty, giving -“fire-water” to Indians, and though our companions shivered until their -teeth rattled, I complied with it, for the “Protector of the Indians” -has many ways of detecting violations. At the beginning of what we -guessed to be afternoon, we cooked a dismal “breakfast” in the downpour, -and were barely off again when to our ears was borne the loudest roar of -water we had yet heard. This time it was the Itanamy Falls, about which -there is a negro ballad among the popular songs of Georgetown, part of -which Langrey chanted as we approached them: - - It’s go’n’ drownded me, - An’ ah ain’ come back no mo’, - EE-tah-nah-meeee! - -For hours we fought this greatest rapids of them all, struggling through -the woods by roaring branches, over rocks, fallen trees, sudden falls, -and a hundred dangers, the men in the water clinging to the boat, when -we were not “dropping her down” backward from tree to bush, with the -woman and our baggage in it. All of us were soaked and weary when we -finally camped at five o’clock, but “Harris” said we not only had passed -the worst part of the river, but had made the longest journey over it in -one day that he had ever known. In the morning I found that an army of -wood-eating ants had attacked my wooden-framed Brazilian valise, and I -had to take out and brush every article I possessed, to the -expressionless delight of the Indians, who, of course, had been dying to -know what I had in it. As these ants eat even clothing, extreme -vigilance was the only possible way of saving what I had spent much -trouble, time, and money to bring from Manaos, so that several times -thereafter I had to spread out and repack everything. Truly, the Indian -who travels with a loin-cloth, a hammock, and a bow and arrows is best -accoutered for these wilds. The itching of old insect bites was -augmented now by what I at first took to be boils, but which turned out -to be tropical ulcers, to which most white men fighting the Amazonian -jungle are subject. Then the jiggers I had gathered on the walk to -Melville’s ripened daily, especially with the feet constantly wet, and -though I frequently cut new nests of them open and squeezed out the -eggs, my feet ached—“like dey was poundin’ you wid hammers on de haid, -yes, sir,” as Langrey concisely put it—especially at night, robbing me -of sleep. - -Though I had thought they were over, we had troubles again next day from -the start, and this time came almost to disaster. The men were letting -the boat down over a rapids, “Harris” and Langrey holding it and my -three worthless Indians clinging to the chain painter. At the crisis of -the falls the boys were told to let go the chain and leave the rest to -the pilot and the negro, as quick work was necessary. Instead, finding -the water deep, they clung to the chain in fear and let the rushing -water pour into the boat in such volume that only by using my stentorian -voice to its capacity did I save it from sinking in another five -seconds. As it was, the baggage was filled with water, but my own was -luckily in a water-proof bag. Do not talk to me of “brave untamed -savages.” Those Indian boys, though big, strong fellows, were the most -unmitigated cowards, like horses in their senseless fear, compared with -any three average American boys of the same age, who would have -considered such a trip a lark. - -To my astonishment, there came signs of the end sooner than I expected. -During the still early afternoon of the fourth day, at the last bad -rock-and-boulder falls, below two convenient portages through the woods, -we met a big new “tent-boat,” belonging to one of the “balata” -companies, on its way upstream. There was an Indian crew of twelve, -under an Indian captain, all commanded by several pompous negroes -sitting comfortably under canvas awnings, dressed in ostentatious town -clothes which looked unduly ludicrous here in the untamed wilderness. -The Indians and several blacks, all but naked, were in the water and on -the rocks, struggling to drag the boat upstream, the most burly negro -under the awning shouting, as we sped past, to a young black evidently -new at this game, “Keep yō nose above de watah, mahn; den yō ain’ go’n’ -drownded!” I congratulated myself that I was traveling down rather than -upstream. Scarcely an hour later, a brilliant sun giving the broad, -placid river the appearance of a vast mirror, we sighted the “balata” -camps at the mouth of the Potaro, and my troubles dropped suddenly from -me like cast-off garments. Two days more, by launch, train, and steamer, -would carry me to Georgetown, with a record, rarely equalled, of -thirty-four days from Manaos, which I could perhaps have cut -considerably shorter by not having halted with Hart or Melville. - -Though they had been rather sluggish the last few days, the sight of the -end caused my three boys to paddle so hard that they splashed water into -the boat and had to be rebuked for their enthusiasm. As we drew near the -sheet-iron buildings at the mouth of the black branch river, stretching -away between the familiar bluish, unbroken forest walls, I lived over -again the pleasure it had been to get back to nature, and beneath my joy -at returning to civilization and entering new scenes was an undercurrent -of regret at leaving the primitive world of gentle, guileless savages -behind me—tempered, to be sure, by curiosity to know what the other -world had been doing during the long month in which I had not heard a -hint of news from it. - -Of the forty-nine rations, we had eaten twelve, the Indians generally -preferring their own food. When I settled up with them, I found that -even in their own tongue they used not only the words “dollar” and -“cent,” but our numbers, no doubt to save themselves from their own -complicated “one-hand-and-one-over-on-the-other-hand” system. “Vincent,” -interpreting my remarks to the other boys, used such expressions as -“t’ree dollar fifty-seven centes,” which, sounding forth suddenly amid a -deluge of Indian discourse, were almost startling. The words seemed to -have little more than an academic meaning to them, however; such sums as -two shirts and a pair of trousers would have been much more -comprehensible. The Indians do not want money, but the government thinks -it knows what is best for them, and the law forbids their being paid in -anything else—though there are easy ways to circumvent it. The trip from -Manaos had cost me about eighty dollars; it might have come to vastly -more both in time and money. - -Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred -feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their -width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by -Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along -in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have -viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed -Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in -British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the -ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that -came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen -was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs -daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but -“Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to -“go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of -our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful -to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for -nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I -should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the -placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the -afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts -surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real -meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three -days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the -star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man, -but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived -without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity -as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are -the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door. - -A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car -rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the -charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines -pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber. -Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream -compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and -barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the -mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British -Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the -capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is -completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The -colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it, -and the counties took their names from them. The _Lady Longden_, a -river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness -travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most -of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared, -though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides -the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their -childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so -Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely -could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves -(here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from -their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born -in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly -as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer -strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest -cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken -around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak -Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who -carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down -Chinamen lying about the “stellings.” - -For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns -breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of -bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an -unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the -Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few -miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back -in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick -up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu -coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of -these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as -sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some -were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had -undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of -green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not -float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the -center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen -more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in -British Guiana. - -The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less -inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of -the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since -leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack -of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated -continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten -miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and -yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden -shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually -turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown -burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it -seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a -plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to -it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the -past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the -picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness. - -As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed -so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief -that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and -one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay -several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a -negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the -color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came -to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail. -Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a -chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned -on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman” -desired hot water. - -“_Hot_ water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence. - -“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant. - -Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of -Anglo-Saxon civilization. - - - - - CHAPTER XXI - ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS - - -The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two -leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing -up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so -soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation -between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent -enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen -of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white -toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive -than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves, -unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when -there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks, -with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted -with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the -more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly -belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very -deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people, -rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of -Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few -passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the -commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again -from their monthly excursion to the outside world. - -Just two hours later we stopped far out near a lighthouse on a rock -called the Enfant Perdu, a low coast with some wooded hills and a rather -insignificant looking town several miles off. The water was already -yellowish-brown, and there was not enough of it to allow the steamer to -draw nearer. Launches and barges finally tied up alongside us and, with -the usual chaotic volubility of Latins, the considerably tar-brushed -crowd of arrivals fought their way into them. With us were eight -prisoners, four of them pasty-white, but tough-faced _apaches_ from -Paris, still in their heavy civilian garments, each with a bag over his -shoulder; the rest were evil-eyed negroes from other French colonies, -already in prison garb. We chug-chugged for nearly an hour toward what -seemed to be a scattered village on a slight knoll, largely hidden by -trees, a big, box-like yellow building which my mentors said was the -Colonial Infantry barracks conspicuous in the foreground among royal -palms. Cayenne is the best port in French Guiana, yet even the launch -could not reach the shore, but tumbled us into rowboats manipulated by -impudent, patois-chattering blacks, to whom we paid a franc each to be -set across the fifteen feet of mud remaining. Once there was a landing -jetty here, but the sea carried it away and the tropical Frenchmen had -not yet been moved to carry it back. Our baggage was inspected as if we, -too, were incoming convicts, but as I had luckily left most of my own, -including my revolver, in Georgetown, the haughty black officials could -not trump up any just cause to refuse me admission to the colony. - -I had expected to find Cayenne a less model place than Georgetown, but -the glaring reality was beyond my worst dreams. One would have to go -back to the West Coast, to such places as Popayán and Quito, to find -anything approaching this. It showed at a glance why the French failed -at Panama, what Colón and Panama City would still have been had not -Uncle Sam taken them in hand. Indeed, the wide streets of crushed stone -and earth lined by rows of noisome two-or three-story wooden houses gave -the place considerable resemblance to those cities before the Americans -came, the general appearance of a negro slum in the dirtiest of our -cities, with all the sanitary laws ignored. Built on a shallow mud shore -among jungle brush into which all but a few of its streets quickly -disappear, with swamps and mosquito breeding-places overgrown with -unkempt vegetation in the town itself, it is everywhere a rubbish heap. -Little advantage has been taken of the riches of nature; even the strip -of land between town and sea, which a progressive people would have -turned into a blessing, is a constant litter of filth. Cesspools abound; -there is dirt in every hole, corner, or place enough out of the way so -that daily movements do not inadvertently keep it clean; carrion crows -are the only members of the street-cleaning department, except two -decrepit old women armed with brush brooms. The conglomeration of odors -is beyond description; nothing seems to be regularly kept in repair, so -that even the most recent buildings have already a dilapidated aspect. -Some of the larger houses have mud-plastered façades to imply wealth or -importance within, yet every residence I entered was visibly unclean, -and men whom in other climes one would expect to find in spick and span -surroundings here lived in noisome holes that one shuddered to enter. -Out of doors every imaginable iniquity against sanitation is committed -with impunity, and one is not surprised to learn that epidemics are -frequent and that the death rate exceeds that of births, though the -native population is notoriously industrious, irrespective of age or -marriage vows, in the reproduction of its uncommendable species. - -Here the traveler, though he be rolling in wealth, will see what the man -with only ten cents for lodging is forced to endure. I told the negro -boy carrying my bundle to lead me to the best hotel, whereupon he gave -me a leer of mingled stupidity and insolence and turned in at a -miserable tavern of the kind to be found in French slums, kept by -negroes into the bargain. The wench behind the dirty counter admitted -that she had one room and that she “could cook for me”—any susceptible -person would have fainted to see where and how. The room turned out to -be an incredibly filthy hole up under the baking roof, with a nest of -ancient mattresses, visibly containing all the iniquities of half a -century, on a wooden platform-bedstead. When I protested, my guide -assured me with a gesture of indifference that it was the best in town, -whereupon I dismissed him, determined to sleep under the royal palms in -the high grass of the pleasant, though astonishingly unkempt, central -_Place des Palmistes_ unless I could find better than this. There were -“Chambres à louer” signs all over town; but though everyone seemed -anxious to rent rooms, none would clean them. I found at last a negro -woman who offered to let me have her own room, reached by a noisome -stairway, but on a corner, with four windows making it as airy as one -could expect in Cayenne, with its ridiculous clinging to the European -style of architecture so unfitted to the tropics. The room was cluttered -with rocking-chairs, tables, kerosene lamps, and all the gaudy, -worthless rubbish beloved of negroes,—photographs, porcelain dolls, -bric-à-brac—until it was impossible to make a sudden movement without -knocking down something or other. A corner was partitioned off with -paper to form a washroom with entirely inadequate washing facilities, -and everything had an air about it which made one hesitate to sit down -or even to touch anything. Everything in plain sight in the room looked -clean enough, for the usual occupant prided herself on being of the -Cayenne aristocracy; it was only when one began to peer into or under -things, to move anything, that the negro’s lazy indifference to real -cleanliness came out. The enormous bedstead of what appeared to be -mahogany had five huge mattresses, one on top of the other; all of them, -it turned out, were ragged nests of filth, except the uppermost, and the -bed was so humped in the middle that it was impossible to lie on it. -Evidently it had been made so purposely, for I found great bunches of -rags and worn-out clothing stuffed into the middle of the various -mattresses, which the owner had evidently found it too much trouble to -throw out when a new one was indispensable. - -The yard below, always rolling and howling with piccaninnies of all -sizes, had a hole in the “kitchen” where one might throw water over -oneself with a cocoanut-shell, if one insisted—unless it happened to be -between three in the afternoon and seven the next morning, when the -request for a bath brought a scornful sneer at one’s ignorance of the -hours of the Cayenne waterworks. In a ground-floor room, looking like an -old curiosity shop kept by a negro under penalty not to use a broom or a -dust-cloth for a century, was a rickety table on which I ate amid the -incessant hubbub and rumpus of Galicized negro women. Their “French” was -a most distressing caricature of that language, and they could never -talk of the simplest things without giving a stranger the impression -that they were engaged in a violent quarrel that would soon lead to -bloodshed. Virtually every negro woman—and one rarely sees any others of -the sex in Cayenne—wears a loose cotton gown of striking figures and -colors, and a turban headdress of general similarity, yet always -distinctly individual, a little point of cloth, like a rabbit’s ear, -rising above its complicated folds. In theory the turban is wound every -day, but in practice that would mean too much exertion, and it is set on -a sort of mould. For the market-women and those habitually out in the -gruelling sunshine there are sunshades of woven palm-leaves, large as -umbrellas, but worn as hats. - -The town claims 13,000 inhabitants, which possibly may have been true -before the World War drained it of much of its manhood; yet with the -exception of high government officials, soldiers, convicts, and -_libérés_, there are very few whites. In fact, French Guiana is so -eminently a negro country that unless one is a high government official -one is out of place in it as a white man; others of that color seem to -the thick-skulled natives to be outcasts who have come there more or -less against their will. The few white women are seen only after sunset -and along the few shaded avenues, and white children do not seem to -thrive. The social morals of the colony are admittedly low, and -influences are so bad that even whites of the most protected class -assert that they must send their girls away as children or all will be -lost. The Cayenne negro is not only dirty, impudent, and sulky, but -forward and presumptuous, constantly striving by such manners to impose -upon the whites the superiority he feels, or pretends to feel, over -them. French residents treat the negroes with deplorable familiarity and -equality, many a white man obsequiously taking off his hat to haughty -colored officials, who accept the homage with a scornfully indifferent -air. I called one day on the mulatto editor of the local daily -newspaper—of the size of a handbill, taken up entirely with -advertisements on one side, and on the other chiefly with the names of -negroes ordered to the front. Together we went to call upon the colored -aide of the governor, both editor and aide treating me with a -patronizing air and a haughty manner which said plainly that, while I -might be officially a “distinguished foreigner,” I was, at best, -considerably lower in the social scale than men of their color. Suddenly -there was a swish of silk skirts at the door behind me. All of us sprang -to attention—when into the room, with a manner that might have been -borrowed from Marie Antoinette herself, swept the Parisian-gowned negro -wife of the aide, whose bejewelled hand every other man in the room, -including two white Frenchmen, proceeded to kiss. - -The usual indifference and inefficiency of Latin public officials is to -be expected in Cayenne. Public employees have a certain superficial -French courtesy, but with it even more than the Frenchman’s gift for red -tape and procrastination. One ordinarily stands half an hour before a -post-office window to buy a stamp, and the distribution of the mails -rarely begins within twenty-four hours of their arrival. There is no -bookstore in the colony, except that a Jewish ex-convict rents lurid -tales of bloodshed; and though there is a public library, it is open -only from 6 to 7:30 four evenings a week and is never crowded then. -Though it lacks many such things, the town has several elaborate -fountains—most of which fail to fount—and more than a fair share of -statues—another proof, I suppose, that Latins are artistic. The place -makes one wonder whether the English are good colonizers because their -calm self-control has a sobering effect on primitive races, whose -passions are always near the surface, while the French, the Latins in -general, are poor colonizers because they are emotional and lack full -control of their own passions, thereby making the wild race worse by -influence and example. - -Out under a grove of trees in the outskirts white French officers were -putting negro youths through the manual of arms. “They don’t want to go -and defend their country (patrie), the poltroons,” sneered the officer -who had come out with me; but conscription is as stern as in France, so -that hundreds were being trained for a month or more and shipped to -Europe by each French Mail. The laws of France apply only to three of -her colonies,—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Réunion; Cayenne, though it -has a representative in the Chamber of Deputies, is ruled by decrees and -a governor sent out from Paris. Perhaps it is this spirit of -centralization which causes the clocks of the colony to be so set that -at six in the evening it is dark and at six in the morning the sun is -high and hot. The local bank issues notes on poor paper of from five -francs up; otherwise the money of France is used, except the “smacky” -(which is what has become of the words “sou marqué” in the mouth of the -illiterate negro), a local ten-centime piece made—one could hardly say -coined—in 1818 and resembling worn-out tobacco tags, used -interchangeably with the big two-sou pieces of France. - -I went one evening to a “Benefit Concert” at the Casino, a barn-like -board structure recalling the “Polytheamas” of Brazil, where local -talent gave a performance in aid of those left behind by the men who had -gone to war. The entertainment began at 8:30—in French style, so it was -nine even by Cayenne clocks and really near midnight when the curtain -finally rose. The governor, a Frenchman with a white goatee, sat with -the elected town mayor and other authorities, all of more or less negro -ancestry and wearing the same Gallic facial decoration, as well as -haughty official expressions. There was no heavy formal evening dress, -as in Brazil, but mostly white duck, which is taboo for men of standing -in the big land to the south. Every shade of black to white humanity was -hobnobbing like intimate friends. It gave one a creepy feeling to see -dainty French démoiselles entertaining not only elaborately dressed men -of color but jet black men—though personally I prefer the full black. -The entertainment, chiefly musical, was produced by the local talent -left in the colony, particularly by a trump of a white girl of scarcely -eighteen, who not only made up more than half the show but carried -herself unerringly through several trying situations. For example, she -played the heroine in a silly little local drama, and as the departure -of most of the white men for the war had left them hard up for heroes, -it became her duty in a particularly emotional and tragic love scene, -with a speech about “your beloved wavy locks,” to lay her dainty hand -lovingly on the bald pate of a dumpy lump of a man beyond fifty, the -ridiculousness whereof caused even the Latinized audience to burst forth -in laughter. It seemed to be the Cayenne system for all white French -residents who had been called to the front to leave their women behind -at the mercy of the negroes, economically and otherwise. Some had been -given minor government positions, such as in the post-office, never -before filled here by members of their sex; but as the sternness of -Penelope is not characteristic of hard-pressed Gallic womanhood, and the -French color-line faint, certain conditions had already grown up that -would not have been tolerated in an American community. - -The former inhabitants of Cayenne called it Moccumbro. An expedition -financed by merchants of Rouen landed on the coast in 1604, and more or -less successful attempts were made during the next half century to -establish colonies there. Holland held the territory for a time, as she -did most of the northeastern coast of South America, and gradually the -claims of the French on that continent shrank to their present -insignificance, as in the rest of the New World. About 1660, colonists -stole fourteen negroes from a traveler along the coast and established -African slavery. Twelve thousand French immigrants came out in 1763, but -no preparations had been made to help them endure tropical life, and -only two thousand survivors returned in a sad state to France. The -slaves were freed by the French Revolution; and the Convention, and -later the Directorate, sent out _déportés_ to take their place; but with -Napoleon slavery was revived. Portugal held the colony from 1809 to -1817, “luckily,” a local school-book puts it, “for if it had been taken -by Portugal’s ally, England, it would never have been given back.” -Finally, in 1848, complete emancipation of all slaves in “French -America” followed the introduction of a resolution in the French -congress by Schoelcher—a statue of whom decorates Cayenne—and the -colony, by admission even of its own people, has vegetated ever since. -Naturally the liberated slaves took at once to the bush, built -themselves rude shelters, and settled down to eat bananas and mandioca -and prolifically to multiply. The discovery of gold and the promise of -quick fortune in the placer mines of the interior for the few who cared -to exert themselves was the final straw that broke the back of -agriculture in French Guiana. - -[Illustration: A former Paris lawyer digging sewers in Cayenne, under a -negro boss] - -[Illustration: Schoelcher, author of the act of emancipation of the -negroes of the French possessions in America] - -[Illustration: The human scavengers of Cayenne are ably assisted by the -vultures] - -[Illustration: In the market-place of Cayenne. The chief stock is -cassava bread wrapped in banana leaves] - -In 1891 the Czar of Russia established the boundary between French and -Dutch Guiana at the Maroni and Awa Rivers, and in 1900 the Swiss -president named the Ayapoc as the frontier of Brazil, leaving the French -about one fourth the territory they had claimed. At that, they have no -definite conception of its extent, most of it being virgin forest -unexplored by civilized man. Though in theory it runs far back to the -plateau and watershed of Tumac-Humac, France has no real hold over more -than a comparatively narrow strip of coast. The colony claims 30,000 -inhabitants, virtually all of whom live within cannon-shot of the sea. -Alcohol has done for the aborigines, except a degenerate tribe called -the Galibis back in the interior, estimated by the latest census as 534 -in number, and there are some three thousand “boschs” or “bonis,” wild -negroes descended from runaway slaves. The few towns besides Cayenne are -insignificant, and in most cases have scarcely half as many inhabitants -as a century ago. In those days of plentiful slave labor there were -sugar plantations, spice trees, and prosperous estates along all the -coast from the Ayapoc to the Maroni, and many ships carried to France -sugar, rum, cacao, coffee, indigo, and cotton. Then there were more than -20,000 field laborers alone; to-day there are barely two thousand -loafing tillers of the soil scattered about the colony, and agriculture -in French Guiana is a blank. Once many cattle were introduced; now there -are none left and even milk for babies comes from the North in tin cans. -As a native editor puts it, “A country placed on a burning soil, swampy -and unhealthful, where paludic fevers, plague, and elephantiasis abound, -needs the patience of the Hollander to become such a prosperous colony -as our neighbor on the west.” Ambitious projects for opening up the -country have been formed, but there has been much promise and little -accomplishment. Sixty kilometers of French highways stretch out in all -directions from Cayenne, passing simple dwellings and careless gardens -peering forth from the bush; but these are the only roads passable the -year round and soon die out in the untamed wilderness. Even what were -good roads a century ago have in many cases become mere paths, or have -completely grown up to jungle again. The native inhabitants are content -to live on cassava—which now suffers severely from a big red ant called -the _fourmi-manioc_—and foreign capital shuns a Latin government and a -penal colony; indeed, the negro inhabitants complain that the coming of -the convicts ruined their “invaluable” country, though it would still be -prosperous “if there were any arms to do the work,” they add, at the -same time completely overlooking the idle arms hanging on either side of -each of them. - -Cayenne is known in France as the “dry guillotine.” In the middle of the -last century, soon after the abolition of slavery, some French idealist, -or practical joker, thought of a plan to kill two birds with one stone. -Cayenne needed laborers; France was overrun with criminals. Jean Jacques -Rousseau had asserted that “Every man was born good; it is society which -inculcates in him the germ of all his vices and defects, and as he is -also essentially corrigible, he must be offered means to redeem -himself.” The betterment and regeneration of criminals by work was the -panacea of the day, and this idea, “more or less modified,” inspired the -establishment, in 1854, of the present penitentiary system. It is not -likely that the hard-headed, materialistic statesmen of France took the -prattle of theorists seriously; but it opened up to them a possible way -out of certain troublesome perplexities. In 1851, therefore, the French -president issued a decree prescribing the “use of convicts in the -progress of French colonization,” and appointed a committee to decide to -which colony six thousand _forçats_ in the crowded _bagnes_ of Toulon, -Brest, and Rochefort should be sent. Guyane was chosen, with “Devil’s -Island” as a landing-place, and the following year volunteers were -called for among the inmates of those institutions. More than three -thousand offered to go to Cayenne—and soon deeply regretted it. Way down -under its superficial buncombe the chief purpose of the plan, of course, -was to give the government a means of getting rid of its radical enemies -and all those whose presence at home greatly worried the ruling powers, -and to-day old J. J. Rousseau would be delighted to see how man, -essentially good, is regenerated and recovers his manly dignity at -Cayenne. - -During the second year of the plan, volunteers became insufficient, and -new decrees ordered all individuals sentenced to hard labor or -reclusion, or criminals of African or Asiatic origin, to be sent to -Guiana and used in “les traxaux les plus pénibles” of the colony and its -public works. This last clause, at least, has been manfully carried out. -At the same time a penal colony was established in Algeria, but the -latter proved too strong to have its protests unheeded and the onus was -transferred to New Caledonia. The first law of deportation was for not -less than five and not more than ten years. Causes for such a fate -included conviction of belonging to a secret society. Then New Caledonia -was limited to those prisoners of European race sentenced to less than -eight years. All others, of longer terms or of the negro or Arab race, -as well as all _rélégués_ and recidivists, were to be sent to Cayenne. -Of late years New Caledonia has become less and less popular with French -judges, so that to-day the cream of the criminality of France, as well -as of her other colonies, comes to end its days in French Guiana. - -For years different convict camps were established within the colony, -and changed because the prisoners died of fever in droves—which would -not have mattered had not some of their guardians suffered the same -fate. In 1867 there were 18,000 convicts, with an average of 1200 -arriving every year. They are divided at present among four penal -stations, of which that at the mouth of the Maroni River and the big -stone penitentiary on a slight plateau at the edge of the sea in Cayenne -are, the most important, the latter housing about 330 regular prisoners -and 400 “transients” at the time of my visit. Though they come from all -the other French colonies,—Algeria, the West Indies, Madagascar, and the -rest—by far the majority of the convicts one sees in Cayenne are white -men from France, probably a large percentage of them from Paris, many of -them truly rough looking customers, for all their whipped-dog attitude. -A few are educated men of good families who have gone seriously astray -and been caught at it. The man who stole millions of French church money -after these churches were declared state property; another once high up -in the government who made undue use of that position to feather his own -nest; several lawyers who were unusually rapacious in robbing their -clients; half a dozen traitors are there—or were, for one must not -assume the present tense long in such surroundings—all dressed in -exactly the same buff-colored blouse and trousers of coarsest -canvas-like stuff, the former generally open to the navel, and a crude -straw hat woven of the _awara_ palm-leaf, working at the same digging of -sewers, the cutting of grass, or the breaking of stone in the public -streets as the thieving degenerates from Les Halles and the perverted -_apaches_ from Montmartre. Irrespective of their origin and former -habits, newcomers begin at the hardest manual labor under the blazing -tropical sun, which soon kills off the weak and establishes a new sort -of survival of the fittest. “The climate itself is a great factor in -bringing repentance,” as a jailer puts it. This, the arduous toil, and -the diet—or lack of it—give those who survive a greatly changed -appearance, and it is only by looking twice that one can see the -Parisian _apache_ or trickster under the sallow, yellow faces, gaunt -with fever, of the wretches whose clothing hangs about them as from a -clothes-pole. - -The _déportés_ are divided into three classes,—_transportés_, merely -sentenced to a certain number of years at forced labor; _rélégués_, -serving life sentences; and _libérés_, former convicts free to live -where they choose within the colony. Highwaymen, burglars, and murderers -make up a large percentage of the list; yet if he is asked, almost any -one of them will answer “affaire de femme,” though he may be the most -miserable sneak thief or a man who “only killed his mother.” There are -no women in the Cayenne penitentiary, for they are sent to a prison in -charge of the Sisters of St. Laurent over on the boundary of Dutch -Guiana. Professional criminals and recidivists are particularly assigned -to the Cayenne establishment; though there are men with sentences of -from five years up for almost every conceivable crime. In practice, any -man sentenced to seven years or more is virtually a life prisoner. Even -if his sentence is less than that, he can only get back to France after -serving a like term as _libéré_ and earning his own passage money -honestly—and honest money does not float about French Guiana. When one -considers how stern is the struggle for existence in crowded French -cities, the hardship of the accused being obliged to prove his innocence -under French law, and the carelessness or indifference of French judges -in handing out sentences of seven years or more for almost minor crimes, -it is not strange that, though the world has never heard of them, there -are many more examples of the devilish injustice of man to man than the -notorious case of Dreyfus. - -Not only can he wear only the two coarse garments and a hat, without -shoes, but the prisoner is denuded even of the Frenchman’s pride, his -mustache, being clean shaven and shorn to accentuate the difference -between him as an outcast and the free members of society. Luckily, I -was wearing a labial decoration, and thus was looked on with less scorn -and suspicion by the negro population than might otherwise have been the -case; for the standards and symbols of Cayenne are to their primitive -minds also those of the outside world. Educated prisoners are sometimes -made use of, after they have served the first part of their time at hard -labor, as bookkeepers or skilled mechanics—a bright-looking _rélégué_ -was installing new telephone lines with convict workmen during my -visit—but these things are mainly for the convenience of the -administration and to save the officers in charge from work, never with -the idea of helping the man himself. In fact, “the regeneration of the -man sentenced to _travaux forcés_, imagined by the law of 1854, has -become a legend at which the first to laugh are the unregenerated -themselves.” Somehow I had pictured to myself a penal colony as a place -where the unfortunate, removed from their former troubles and -temptations, were turned loose in a new and virgin land and, with an -occasional helping hand from above, given the opportunity to begin life -anew. Nothing could be farther from the fact in French Guiana. The -officers themselves consider it a punishment to be sent there, and their -treatment of the wretches under them is that of noxious animals which it -is an advantage to be rid of as soon as possible. In view of the many -splendid qualities of the French, it is incredible how few “bowels for -their kindred” these officers in charge have for their prisoners, -unbelievable that the French soldier, who has known some of the -hardships of life as a conscript, can treat his own flesh and blood in a -way that does not seem human, giving the onlooker full credence in the -story of “Jean Valjean,” making their helpless victims feel that what -society seeks is not reform, but revenge—revenge for forcing the -particular members of it with whom they come in contact to spend months -or years as prison-guards or administrators in a hot and fever-stricken -land far from their beloved France. - -I am not a particularly firm believer in the efficacy of repentance, but -even if he felt the desire to do better stirring within him, the convict -of Cayenne would find every conceivable difficulty on the road to -reform. He is marked and stamped with, and hounded for, his past sins, -without a friend on earth, except in the rare cases when he has money, -without which he is made to understand that his early elimination is the -thing most desirable. The great majority, of course, are scoundrels who -deserve their fate—or at least a somewhat more humane one. But imagine -yourself an educated, well-bred man who, succumbing to overwhelming -temptation or cruel force of circumstances, has appropriated public -funds, for example, and been suddenly removed from Paris boulevards to -dig sewer-trenches in stony soil in the public streets of a negro city -beneath a tropical sun, working in bare feet on the scantiest of prison -rations under a bullying negro boss! The most iniquitous part of the -whole French system is that not only are white prisoners set at the most -degrading tasks among the black population, but that they are often -under command of negroes—and naturally, the effect of this on the -primitive African mind is to double their native insolence and convince -them that all white men are of a low and criminal type. The other two -Guianas would never dream of letting the negro population see white men -doing manual labor, even though they were sentenced to it—much less put -them under negro command; but the intangibility of the color-line among -the French is notorious. - -Forty years after the establishment of the penal colony, the prisoners -were allowed to be rented out to private individuals. Those who hire -them must pay the prison authorities about two and a half francs a day -each, defray certain hospital insurance, and comply with several irksome -and rather stupid rules. The red tape and poor dovetailing between -departments is especially troublesome. The man who hires a prisoner pays -the government a total of 78 francs a month, or considerably more than -the wages of free labor—when this can be had. A foreigner long resident -in the colony had found that only by giving the convicts wine with their -meals, tobacco at night, if they had worked well during the day, and -other gratuities, could he get any real work out of them, so that in the -end the prisoner cost twice as much as free labor and was a much poorer -workman; while if the convict falls ill, a mishap at which he is an -expert, the cost becomes “fantastic.” Most of the prisoners, therefore, -still toil directly for the government on public works, and, the negro -freeman scorning labor, private persons who require workmen usually hire -_libérés_, whom it is not necessary either to treat or pay well. - -Though he cannot leave the colony, the _libéré_ can go where he chooses -within it, and dress like a civilian—if he can afford it. When his -sentence is up he is given a suit of blue jeans, a slouch felt hat, -clumsy shoes, and is left to shift for himself, though often obliged to -report to the authorities at frequent intervals. Almost always he has an -avoid-your-eyes manner which discloses his past, even if his five years -or more as prisoner has not made his face familiar to all the colony. -Here and there in a stroll through the town one is startled—at least -after three years of disconnection between manual labor and the European -race—to find white men working as shoemakers, butchers, small mechanics, -or anything else at which they can rake and scrape a livelihood. These -are invariably _libérés_, some of whom have formed alliances with such -females as the colony affords and bred more of their kind with negro -trimmings. As there are no white women available for this class, and the -_libéré_ has been a familiar sight in French Guiana for the past sixty -years, unquestionably many of the mulattoes and quadroons one sees -strutting about town, holding political places of importance and looking -with deepest scorn upon the white convicts, are the sons and daughters -of released criminals. Having in most cases lost all sense of shame or -decency during their bestial imprisonment, _libérés_ not only work at -odd jobs about the market and the town, but throughout the colony, the -sight of their groveling and lowly estate naturally not decreasing the -negro’s conviction of his own superiority over the white race. Coming -from prison life after a background of artificial civilization, most of -them cannot cope with existence in such surroundings and often commit -new crimes for no other purpose than to get back into prison and at -least have something to eat again. - -Though there has been an average of 1200 convict arrivals a year since -1854, and almost none have returned home, the number in the colony -remains almost stationary, at the remarkably low figure of from six to -eight thousand. Of the surplus, perhaps four per cent. have escaped; -many have been shot by guards or been killed in prison feuds, while -great numbers have died of tropical diseases, rough treatment, and -virtual starvation. Many have run away into the bush or the dense -jungles on the Brazilian or the Dutch side of the colony; but being -mainly city men and generally of slight education or intelligence, they -have absolutely no adaptability in the bush, not even knowing enough to -take directions by the sun; and while a man used to wilderness travel -might get away, most of the refugees have found the jungle impossible -and have returned to serve life sentences. The bones of others are not -infrequently found up in the interior. The few who reach civilization in -Brazil are the most fortunate. Those who get into Dutch Guiana are, in -theory, subject to extradition, but are commonly overlooked, unless they -make themselves conspicuous by becoming penniless or returning to their -old ways. A few have become men of importance in the neighboring colony, -particularly a well-dressed rascal who has lived some twenty years now -as a merchant in Paramaribo. Rafts of _moco-moco_ stems, and a canoe -made from a sheet, are among the curiosities left by escaped prisoners -to the Cayenne museum. On the Dutch side of the Maroni River they are -free from French pursuit, but have still greater trials with the -Indians, and particularly with the wild negroes, who shoot them freely, -or more often, make them slaves and work them until they are all but -dead, then bring them back to the French and claim the standing reward. - -It is against the law, or at least almost impossible, to visit the -“camp,” as the big prison in the town of Cayenne is called, particularly -since some American got the former commander “in wrong” with the French -Government by publishing an account of such a visit. But neither laws -nor strict rules survive personal friendship in Latin countries, and I -had made good use of my short acquaintance with the four Frenchmen who -had landed with me. At that, they politely hedged when I hinted a desire -to get inside the prison, until one morning, catching alone one of them -who had just been transferred from New Caledonia as a guard, I mellowed -him with strong iced drinks under the earth-floored veranda of Cayenne’s -least disreputable café. So wheedlingly did he introduce me to the stern -“principal” of the prison, a French captain, that the cut and dried -refusal shriveled on his lips and, taking down a large bunch of big -keys, he led us into the prison in person. - -It is under strict military régime, the building that forms a part of -the wall of the immense yard being the barracks of soldier guards. Here -they had good spring beds and paid the nominal sum of one franc -twenty-five centimes a day, with an additional two francs for their -wives, in the rare cases in which they had brought them out from France. -There were separate rooms for one or two families, and a good kitchen -well served by convicts, with wine and champagne for those who could -afford it. Across the bare yard were many massive gates with prisoner -turnkeys, for discipline is maintained largely by making trusties and -“stool-pigeons” and setting them as spies over the rest. There was an -_infirmérie_ where the merely sick are shut up in pens, a sad looking -place with much fever and crude, careless surgery without anesthetics, -from which those who can convince the hardhearted officials that they -are really ill are sent to the hospital. The “principal” was full of -courtesies for me, but he took it out on the prisoners, always -addressing them as one might a particularly low class of animal. Indeed, -officials high and low were incredibly prejudiced against the convicts; -not one of them seemed to be large enough to recognize them as partly -the victims of society or of circumstances. The officers have a secret -identification system, and the prisoners a secret _argot_, or slang, -which keep guards and guarded still farther apart. There are special and -incredible punishments for the slightest offenses, such as failing to -grovel before the meanest underling among the soldier guards, which -increases the number of invalids. Even in the infirmary there was not a -book to be had, nothing whatever to take the minds of inmates off their -present deplorable surroundings, not even a sign of a priest. I have -never seen a human institution over the door of which Dante’s famous -phrase would be more entirely appropriate. The bitter cynicism of the -monument of Schoelcher freeing a black slave in the main square of -Cayenne is sure to strike one after a visit to the prison. - -The bulk of the prison is made up of big dungeons with a few small -barred windows high above the unleveled earth floor, in which are -confined the regular prisoners divided by “classes,”—Arabs here, men -from Madagascar there, white Frenchmen in others. This division is no -concession to the color-line, but is merely for the purpose of -simplifying the administration. Three feet above the ground were four -parallel poles, and fastened to these were strips of stiff canvas two -feet wide and a little more than five long, all so close together that -even a thin man could barely squeeze between them, forming two rows of -sleeping quarters the length of each dungeon. Evidently nothing else was -allowed, for one fellow with a fever being covered with a dirty old rag -the “principal” demanded of the trembling trusty in charge, in a voice -such as one might use to a street cur, at the same time snatching the -cover off the invalid, “Where did he get that?” The trusty shakingly -replied that it was an old flour sack, which he was forthwith ordered to -turn over to the guard outside. “Do you dare not rise and take off your -hat when you see me pass?” bellowed the commander to another emaciated -wretch who with the greatest difficulty could crawl to his feet and -force his legs to hold him, though he hastened to do both. Even this was -not enough for my wine-cheered friend from the boat, who proceeded to -shout more insults at the fellow for his “insubordination.” - -In another room were a few trinkets, odds and ends, and covers of -various origins for some of the canvas-strip beds. The “principal” -explained that this was the room of trusties and turnkeys, several of -whom were then standing at attention before him. Then, still pretending -to give me information, but raising his voice to a bellow, he screamed, -“Yes, these we allow a few extra privileges, and they are even greater -pigs than the others—_Oui, ils sont les plus cochons de tous!_” There -was not much visible sign of an opportunity to be anything else. I not -only saw no bath anywhere within the “camp,” but no place where a -prisoner could so much as wash his hands. Nothing but absolute brute -necessities were recognized, and even then everything was of the crudest -and coarsest. - -“And do you treat educated men and those who have formerly lived in -clean surroundings the same as you do the recidivists and the apaches?” -I asked. - -“Bah!” cried the captain, with his nastiest sneer, though maintaining -his attitude of overdrawn courtesy toward me. “After a few days they -become just like the others and you never see the slightest difference.” - -Come to think it over, I suppose they would. - -The prisoners get up at five o’clock, have coffee, and go to work at -6:30. A “breakfast” of thin soup, one vegetable, half a kilo of bread -_de deuxieme qualité_, and what is supposed to be 250 grams of meat -before it is cooked, but which boils down to about half that, is served -at 10:30. Three hours later the famished convicts are marched out into -the blazing sunshine again to complete their eight hours of daily toil. -At night they get a slab of bread and a kind of vegetable hash, duly -weighed on dirty scales. It is impossible that any grown man doing -manual labor should not be habitually ravenous on such a diet. Not only -was the stuff of the coarsest grade imaginable, and unsavory as food -carelessly cooked in great bulk always is, but it was handled by guards, -visitors, and any other chance passer-by exactly as one might handle the -food of a dog, perhaps dropped underfoot and then tossed back into the -pan, from which it may be doled out to a man who a year or two before -ate in the best restaurants of Paris. - -An old chapel, now full of cells, was a place of punishment for minor -infractions of the rules, the inmates of which slept on boards and were -given bread and water two days out of three. In another building were -the _cachots_, or dungeons proper, stone rooms about four by six feet in -size, with very low ceilings, solid doors, and only a hole some ten -inches in diameter for ventilation. Here recaptured men awaiting trial -were kept in solitary confinement, with a plank for bed, worn concave -during many years of occupation, a block of wood as pillow, and bread -and water one day out of three. For those who aroused still greater -wrath among their guards there were cells in which a man could neither -stand up nor lie down, and other underground horrors worthy of the -Inquisition. I am not one of those who believe in making prison life a -perpetual ball-game; but there are limits to the brutality which man -should permit himself toward his fellow-man. After all, it did not look -as if Hugo’s famous novel had done much to mitigate the lot of French -prisoners. Things may have been alleviated in France itself, but in this -tropical Hades there has certainly been no improvement over the _bagnes_ -of Toulon of a century ago. - -“Look at that dog!” cried the commander, as the occupant of one of these -ovens rose to his feet when we entered. Then, with all the sarcasm he -could throw into his voice, “_Vous êtes content, hein?_” The officials -all seemed to try to impress me with the fact that they had a -particularly dangerous and incorrigible lot of wild animals in their -charge, and looked for applause at their ability to keep them under -control by such methods as savage brutality and by taking every -advantage of the helpless wretches to taunt them. Yet no owner of wild -animals would have dreamed of keeping them in such airless, crowded and -starved conditions. There was a den of _rélégués_, for instance, -ex-convicts who had violated their parole as _libérés_ and were awaiting -trial—nearly all white Frenchmen and as fine a collection of hopeless, -helpless, careless, don’t-give-a-damn toughs as it has ever been my -privilege to see. The atmosphere was exactly that of a den of savage -beasts who considered all the outside world their implacable enemies and -were ready to rend and tear anyone who was so careless as to come within -reach without a weapon with which to cow them. There were between thirty -and forty in each of the 12 by 16-foot rooms, and by no means space on -the two wooden platforms, resembling those in the _aisles de nuit_ of -French cities, for all to lie down at once. - -To add to the joy of their lot, the prisoners are constantly robbed of -their legal rations to fill the pockets of the officials and guards. -There is a saying that officers arrive in Cayenne with half a trunk and -leave with six. In theory, the men are entitled to wine, tobacco, and -reading matter; practically, they never see any of those things unless -they manage to get them from outside. At Albina, across from the chief -penal station on the Dutch boundary, wine is always for sale at a song. -The Indians or “boschs” who bring in an escaped prisoner get two of the -five dollars paid by the French Government, the prison officials -pocketing the rest. There is always an advantage in killing off -prisoners, for their names are still kept on the books and the officials -still draw their ration money, as they do that of un-captured fugitives. -It has often been proved quite possible for a guard at least passively -to bring about a prisoner’s death, merely for the few cents a day he can -pocket for his rations. Naturally there is much underground favoritism, -and the prisoner with money or powerful friends outside can usually get -away. The guard is not only amenable to a bribe, but glad to have -another dead man on his ration books. Such escapes are generally -engineered from over the Dutch border. An expert American cracksman, -well known to our police, “did a job” in Paris a few years ago and was -sent to Cayenne; few who have been there will blame the perfectly -respectable Americans of Paramaribo for helping him to escape. The -German who attempted to get Morocco to revolt against French rule -escaped while I was in the Guianas, and there were very persistent -rumors to the effect that the German Moravian missionaries in Dutch -Guiana knew quite well how it happened. - -The prisoners themselves sometimes help their oppressors in the matter -of ration money, for they have secret societies of bloodthirsty -tendencies and private enmities are often settled while the prison camp -lies in restless slumber. Sometimes it is merely a quick stab upward in -the darkness through a stretched-canvas bed; sometimes a ring is formed -by the other prisoners, and the two opponents, each armed with a knife -and attended by a second who has no other right than to give his man -another knife if his own is knocked from his hand, go at it, with no -quarter asked or given. The guards will not risk their lives—and their -probable “rake-off”—by entering and attempting to stop the fight in the -dark, and when one combatant is killed he is left to lie where he has -fallen until morning, when everyone in the room assures the -investigating official that he slept soundly all night long. Death -naturally has few terrors for these convicts, and it is impossible to -punish them more than they are already being punished; hence there is no -motive to restrain themselves. In short, Cayenne definitely proves the -existence of a hell, though its geographical location does not exactly -tally with the notions of old-fashioned theologians. - -It took all day to get back on board the _Antilles_, silhouetted far out -on the horizon beside the lighthouse of “Lost Child” Rock. For, with -typical Latin disorder, the sailing was postponed as often as it was -announced. At the customhouse outgoing baggage was examined by slovenly -but pompous negroes as thoroughly as if it were being landed, mainly -because it is illegal to take gold out of the colony. A rowboat carried -us out to a small steamer which could not touch shore. Another brought -out that month’s contingent of conscripts, in blue-jean uniforms and the -familiar French army cap, their shining new cups, canteens, and the like -hanging about them. With few exceptions they were negro youths, pale -under their jet-black skins; and it was difficult to decide which looked -the sadder—the white prisoner boatmen from France who had to stay -behind, or the black “freemen” soldiers of Cayenne who had to go. Among -them was a French priest already gray and heavily bearded, still in full -priestly garb, but with a soldier’s kit and cap hanging over one -shoulder. All the afternoon the Gallic chaos reigned, until at last we -neared the _Antilles_ and were transferred to her again in rowboats, the -soldiers descending into the third class and the canvas-clad convicts, -who had come on board carrying the bags and bundles of negro passengers -and the officers, meekly descending the gangway again, their manhood -evidently so completely shattered that they dared not even attempt to -stow themselves away. We were off about six; and as I looked back upon -the dim, flat land dying away in the sunset, there came to mind an old -slab of wood that had been removed from a prisoner’s grave to the museum -of Cayenne, on which one can still make out the epitaph, crudely carved -by some fellow-convict: - - Qu’ avons nous besoin de savoir ton nom? - N’étais-tu pas comme nous un compagnon d’exil? - Dors en paix, maintenant que tes cendres réposent, - Nouveaux exilés, nous vous souvenons - Et t’offrons nos regrets. - A bientôt. - -Next afternoon the ocean gradually turned yellowish again, and we slowed -down near a lightship marked _Suriname Rivier_ to take on a pilot who -looked like a tar-brushed German. To my surprise, we steamed for two -hours up a broad river before we sighted a mainly three-story -wooden-clapboarded town of Rotterdamish aspect along a slightly curved -shore, a town far prettier at first view than either Georgetown or -Cayenne. The _Antilles_ manœuvered her way up to a wharf, and we were -free to land in Paramaribo, capital of Surinam, better known to the -outside world as Dutch Guiana. The black French conscripts were not -allowed ashore, even their own officers admitting that they would run -away at the first opportunity. The streets were wide and, in contrast to -the paved ones of the other two Guianas, covered with hard-packed, -almost white sand. Everything was of wood, except a few old mansions and -government buildings of imported brick, said to have been sent out as -ballast in the old slave days when the colony shipped much produce to -Holland. It was a noiseless and almost spotless town—at least, until one -began to look more closely—with steep gables, pot-grown flowers peering -over clapboarded verandas, and negrodom improved and held in check by -the staid and plodding Hollander. Particularly did it present a -beguiling sight in the quiet of evening, under its soft gas-lights. - -Coming from Cayenne, one was struck especially by the outward -cleanliness of everything. Garments might not always be whole, but even -those of the poorest people looked stiff and prim, as if they had that -moment come from the laundry. The negro and part-negro women, though -less noisy in their tastes than those under French influence, still wore -gaily figured kerchiefs about their heads, tied boat-shaped, with the -two ends at the sides of the head. Like them the calico gown, which was -evidently a six- or seven-foot skirt fastened about the neck and hitched -up in great folds and bunches at the waist, were newly laundered, giving -the wearers the appearance of gaily decorated and freshly starched -grainsacks. The mixture of the negro and the staid Dutch burgher has -produced quite a different result from that with the temperamental -Frenchman. Here the populace was calm, grave, noticeably more orderly -both in its movements and its mental processes than in the other two -Guianas, with much of the natural African animality apparently -suppressed. Some of the Dutch-negro young women were magnificent -physical specimens, and, if one could overlook their color, distinctly -attractive in their immaculate, well-ironed gay gowns and turbans. In -the streets of Paramaribo was the greatest conglomeration of races I had -seen in all South America. Soldiers, from the blackest to the blondest -of Hollanders, all youthful and neatly dressed in dark-blue uniforms -with yellow stripes, hobnobbed together; there were hordes of Javanese -from Holland’s overpopulated East Indies, still in their native dress -and looking like a cross between Hindus and Japanese; bejeweled women -and lithe, half-naked men from the British East Indies; and so many -Chinese of both sexes that there was a “Tong” or Chinese temple in one -of the ordinary white clapboarded buildings, made gay by red -perpendicular Chinese tablets at the door. These and many more were -there, and crosses between all of them, except between the Hindus and -the Javanese. Of them all, only the Hindus, male and female, wore -unclean garments. Children were noticeably numerous, and looked as neat -and orderly as did the large, airy schoolhouses they attended. Men wore -starched white suits with a uniform-like collar buttoning close under -the chin, requiring nothing beneath them but a thin undershirt, a cheap -and convenient custom in vogue in all Dutch tropical colonies. Among the -throng one frequently saw pallid, yet comely, Jewish women, for the Jews -are so numerous in Paramaribo that they hold synagogue services both in -the old Portuguese and in the modern Dutch fashion. They intermarry -chiefly among themselves, and are among the most wealthy members of the -colony. In Surinam society the Jews are rated next below the white -Dutch, followed by the Chinese, and so on down the scale to the Javanese -and Hindu coolies. Of the many mixtures, the “lip-lap,” or -Dutch-Javanese, is the least promising, while the Chinese-negro, -especially with a slight dash of white or Hindu, is rated the most -lively, quick-witted, and, especially in the case of the women, the most -ardently sensual. - -The first traders with the Indians in this region were Dutch mariners, -chiefly seeking tobacco, to which the Hollanders had taken a great -liking and which they could not otherwise obtain after their revolt from -Spain. During a history as chaotic and checkered as that of all the -Guianas, Surinam was once held by the British, under the name of -Willoughby Land, and in the ensuing negotiations it was virtually -exchanged for a worthless little rocky island up on the coast of North -America, called Manhattan. It is said that the British regret the -trade—since for some reason the island and its village of New Amsterdam -slipped through their fingers. Surinam’s greatest problem has always -been to get manual laborers. Her African slaves revolted, her Chinese -coolies committed suicide or went into trade, the Hindus proved on the -whole more troublesome than useful, and some twenty years ago she began -importing ship-loads of workers from the crowded Dutch Island of -Java—but still the problem is not satisfactorily solved. Commercially, -the colony is largely in German hands, particularly of the Moravians, -whose first missionary found it necessary to enter business in order to -keep up his mission. Now, a century later, the firm which bears his name -is the most powerful in Dutch Guiana. The Moravians confine their work -to negroes, of whom they educate thousands in free schools and orphan -asylums. There are several other missions; in fact, the colony is a -friendly battle-ground between several religious sects, with Lutheran -schools for the higher class, Catholic schools for little Hindus and -Javanese, and, saddest of all, a great leper hospital on the edge of -town with scores of little houses, a church, a priest who comes to hold -service daily, and European nun nurses who now and then succumb to the -dread disease toward which the natives are, on the whole, happy -fatalists. - -On the evening of my arrival I wandered into the Dutch Reformed Church -in the sanded central square. It was crowded, though large, and the -worshippers had an earnest appearance which for the moment gave me the -impression that here, at last, was a South American country where the -church is a real force in the community. Later I found that the crowd -had come to greet a popular minister, just returned from several months -in Holland, and who, it was hoped, would be moved to include in his -sermon the latest news from the front. As to the earnest manner, it was -merely the habitual one of the staid population, and those who should -know claim that the church is really a slight force in the life of Dutch -Guiana. The audience was divided not by color, but by sex, the women -separated from the men by the main aisle, the congregation facing the -minister from three directions. Directly before him across the church -were a regal few, headed by the governor of the colony and other -important and perspiring Hollanders in heavy black and formal dress. The -majority of the men of the colony, however, were dressed in white, or at -least very light, garments, and not one dark dress was to be seen in all -the sea of white spreading forth from the seat I had found in the -gallery. There seemed to be no poor people in the congregation—a -noticeable fact against the background of Latin-American churches -habitually oozing paupers and loathsome beggars. Perhaps this was due to -the fact that the blacker and more ignorant part of the population went -to the big wooden, Gothic cathedral nearby, or to the Moravian churches. -All the women wore hats, the part-negro girls in their starched bandanas -evidently not being admitted. Though there were many of some negro blood -and apparently no hint of a color-line, there was not a single really -black woman and very few half-black ones, though the men, on the other -hand, were often ebony Africans such as might have emerged that day from -the heart of the Dark Continent, rubbing elbows with equally haughty -blond Hollanders. The cause of this disparity of color in the two sexes -seemed to be that the negro men of means pick out as light wives as -possible, leaving the black girls to their poorer brethren. The form of -service was familiarly Protestant, even to the pre-reading of the hymns, -which were played by a jet-black organist and sung by the standing -audience. During prayers, on the other hand, only the men rose—whether -because the women did not need them or were beyond hope was not -apparent. The _Predikant_, with a blond pompadour and the Judgment Day -air and voice of some Protestant ministers, preached not one, but four -sermons—_four_, count them!—broken by hymns, during which tar-brushed -ushers in black Prince Alberts took up as many collections. An old -white-haired mulatto, similarly garbed, had as his task to reprimand -boys who made the slightest disturbance. Indeed, there were many hints -of old-time Puritanism, even to evidences of smug hypocrisy. - -The Reformed and the Lutheran churches of Paramaribo alternate in their -Sunday night services, in order that competition shall not cut down -still lower their congregations. From the church the crowd went, almost -intact, to the “Kino,” as the “movies” are called in Surinam. The -paternal government burdens these—there are three, all owned by -Jews—with many stern rules. The films must be run by hand, not by motor; -since the hard times incident to the World War only two performances a -week were allowed; the show must be over by 10:30; and so on, until one -became amply convinced that it was no happy-go-lucky Latin government -that ruled over these sedate African Dutchmen. But there are limits to -suppression. To me, fresh from Brazil and the blasé, drawing-room -silence which prevails in its cinemas, the most striking part of this -performance was the almost constant howling and screaming of the largely -negro audience, now cheering on the doll-faced hero, now shrieking -threats at the top-hatted villain. - -[Illustration: A market woman of Cayenne, and a stack of cassava bread] - -[Illustration: Homeward bound from market] - -[Illustration: French officers in charge of the prisoners of Cayenne] - -[Illustration: White French convicts who would like to go to France, -rowing out to our ship black French conscripts who would rather stay at -home] - -Down at the market-place along the water front there was an incredible -mixture of races, tongues, and customs each morning. Dirty, almost-naked -Hindu beggars slunk in and out among buyers and sellers; Javanese paused -to squander the single copper left from their gambling, and plodded -noiselessly on in their bare feet, munching the mouthful it yielded; -Chinese women, still in the cotton trousers of their homeland, but -already wearing the gay starched bandana of their adopted country, -bargained with a squatting Madrasee or a pig-tailed Mohammedan from -northwestern India over a handful of green plantains. But most numerous -of all were guffawing negro women, almost invariably carrying something -on their heads, be it only a bottle of Dutch rum sitting bolt upright. -The negroes, especially of the younger generation, to whom labor bears -the stigma of the lowly Javanese or Hindu, consider themselves a kind of -aristocracy in this conglomerate society. The negro girl working in a -shop and dressing in modern finery is too nice to carry her own bundle; -she is followed by her mother in the old native dress, bearing her -daughter’s burden. A negro youth whom an American resident hired as a -fireman on his launch appeared in a red tie and patent leather shoes, -followed by his mother and his grandmother, carrying his baggage on -their heads. - -It is a sturdy man who can live day after day at a Surinam dinner-table. -Not only is the food as heavy as only Dutch or German food can be, but -it is the custom to eat five meals a day. Over at “Sally’s Hotel,” where -nearly all visitors come sooner or later to accept the ministrations of -a proprietress whose Dutch training is tempered by African cheerfulness, -we were served coffee upon rising, a heavy breakfast as soon as we -descended to the dining-room, dinner from twelve to two, an afternoon -“tea” that was a meal in itself, and _Koud Avondeten_—“cold evening -eats”—of generous quantity and staying quality from seven to nine. Once -upon a time ice-cream was imported from New York in special cold-storage -compartments, but those glorious days are gone. - -Had Surinam confined itself to its legal language, I should have been -tongue-tied, except for its slight similarity to German. But every -educated person, from boys or girls to even the negro policeman on the -street-corners, spoke more or less English; and those so low as not to -know any of that did not speak Dutch, either, but a “pidgin” mixture of -all the tongues that have mingled in the history of Dutch Guiana, called -“taki-taki,” that is, “talkee-talkee.” Signs in Paramaribo are sometimes -in both tongues, as when a watering-trough bears the warning: {_Niet -Drinkbaar_ / _No boen vo dringi_} All higher government officials speak -English fluently, though legally their duties can only be carried on in -Dutch. An American resident one day had business with the minister of -finance. They both belonged to the club, and drank, smoked, and played -cards together almost nightly; yet the American was obliged to hire one -of the two official interpreters in the colony—as well as to borrow a -frock-coat and a silk hat—before he could be admitted to the official -presence, where everything he said was turned into Dutch and the replies -of the minister translated into English. - -One morning I drifted into the Supreme Court. Five barefoot negroes were -on trial, two of them being English and three French. They were part of -a gang of marauders who had attacked a gold mine once claimed by France, -but which the boundary award had given to the Dutch. Several others had -been shot by soldiers sent against them—and rumor had it that most of -the stolen gold found its way into the troopers’ pockets. Five Dutchmen -in black robes with white starched stocks at the neck, their pallid -faces in striking contrast to the consensus of complexion, flabby with -good living and no exercise, entered and sat down at a semicircular -table. In the center was the wrinkled, worldly-wise old chief -justice—his son-in-law was said to be by far the best lawyer to win a -case before the court—flanked by two assistants, and they in turn by the -similarly garbed prosecuting attorney and the clerk of the court. All -five of them were plainly indoor characters and had the “square” heads -of their race. Over the center chair, the back of it carved with the -coat-of-arms of the Netherlands, was a large portrait of Queen -Wilhelmina. A Frenchman being called upon to testify, an interpreter was -summoned, though the witness spoke tolerable English and all the court -spoke both French and English perfectly. The entire trial was conducted -by the chief justice, who asked all questions—in Dutch, as required by -law—which were turned into French or English, and the answers rendered -back into the legal tongue again, though the impatient jurist soon tired -of waiting for the unnecessary translation and sped swiftly on. Indeed, -he so far forgot himself at times, particularly when the hands of the -clock began to approach the hour of dinner and the afternoon siesta, as -to ask the question in the language of the witness, or to correct the -interpreter, whose knowledge of the tongue which he professed to know -was so shaky that the justice often turned the whole answer into Dutch -before the interpreter had begun. For patois-speaking French negroes -another interpreter was called, though he spoke exactly the same French -as the other—while the “English” of the man legally intrusted with that -tongue was eminently West Indian. - -The colony is governed directly from Holland, officials, from the -governor down to the last pasty-faced clerk, being sent out by the -mother country. It has never been self-supporting—at least, to the -people of Holland it is a constant expense, though the queen personally -gets tidy sums every year from her extensive Surinam estates; hence -Holland feels itself justified in making it a dumping-ground for -political pets. These are sent out for five years, after which they -serve a like term in the Dutch East Indies and retire to Holland on a -pension for a life of Dutch contentment. Naturally, under such -circumstances they do not spend a cent more than is necessary, never -acquire property in the colony—except in the rare case of a man marrying -a native whom he is ashamed to take home with him—and have no interest -in developing it. There is much grumbling against this state of affairs, -though to one inclined to compare it with its Latin-American neighbors -the government seems worthy of praise. Some claim that the natives -themselves could govern better, which is doubtful. The greatest -complaint appears to be that the appointed officials have no knowledge -of, or interest in, the colony, wishing only to serve their time as -easily, and go back to Holland as rich, as possible. There are few -charges of corruption on the Brazilian scale, but the natives, -especially of the class that might aspire to political office, never -tire of pointing to the backwardness of the colony as proof of their -contentions. Just when the rest of the world was putting in electricity -a Dutch gas company operating in all the colonies of the Netherlands got -an exclusive concession to light Paramaribo for twenty-five years; -therefore, though one may have electric-light in one’s own house, no -wire can be run across or under a public street, nor may any public -building be so lighted before 1932. A tramway might be legally operated, -but neither the cars nor the power-house could be lighted with -electricity. It is possible, as certain outspoken natives contend, that -there is some connection between this arrangement and the fact that the -former governor was handed a large bundle of gas shares, “merely as a -friendly present and a free-will offering,” on the day he sailed back to -Holland. - -Jim Lawton was manager of several plantations owned by an American -corporation. We chugged in a motor-boat down the Suriname into the -Commewijne, and later up to the Cottica, to visit one of them. The -country was deadly flat, and all our way was lined with mangrove roots -uncovered by the tide, resembling ugly yellow teeth from which the gums -had receded. Not far from the capital we passed a big sugar plantation -of which the Queen of Holland is chief stockholder, as she is of many -others in the colony, but the manager of which was a Scotchman. Under -him were six overseers, six “drivers,” generally Hindu coolies or -Javanese who have worked out their time, and two thousand workmen, one -for each acre. Many of the largest estates along the rivers and coast -belong to men who have never been outside Holland, so that when the -cacao is attacked by a tropical disease, or a similar disaster sweeps -the colony, there is neither money nor intelligent ownership on hand to -combat it. - -The manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck,” a white Surinamer who met us at the -landing-stage, seemed to speak all languages,—Dutch, French, English, -Chinese, Javanese, Bengalee, Hindustani, “taki-taki”—though merely -enough of each to “get it across,” so that they all sounded as many -kinds of food boiled together in the same kettle taste. Here were six -hundred acres, with fifty Javanese laborers, thirty-five Hindus, and -some odds and ends, among them a convict of Madagascar who had escaped -from Cayenne. As we wandered about the muddy plantation, slapping -incessantly at mosquitoes and mopping our faces in the thick, humid -heat, we were greeted in many tongues,—“Dag, Mynheer!” “Salaam, sahib!” -“Tabay!” “Ody, masará!” or “O-fa-yoo-day!” “Bon jour!” and even “Good -mahnin’, sah!” There was also a Chinese greeting from the plantation -shopkeeper. The estate was cut up by little irrigation ditches, with -small poles as bridges, and we had many splendid chances to fall to the -waist or neck in their slime. Cacao was the most important crop; after -which came coffee, with the trees shaded and the Liberian berries large -as plums. There were a few rubber-trees, tapped in the Oriental style, -quite different from the Brazilian, and instead of being smoked into -balls, the sap was set out in pans and treated with citric acid, after -which the “cream” is skimmed off in a pancake of the finest rubber, -called “plantation biscuit.” Quassia wood, of bitter taste, was once an -important export to Germany, where the importers claimed it was used to -clear the hop-fields of bugs; but since the combined disasters of war -and a cable from Milwaukee reading, “We are not allowed to use quassia -in making beer in the United States, as is done in Germany,” the stuff -had been piled up for cordwood. - -[Illustration: Along the road in Dutch Guiana] - -[Illustration: A Mohammedan Hindu of Dutch Guiana] - -[Illustration: A Chinese woman of Surinam who has adopted the native -headdress] - -[Illustration: A lady of Paramaribo] - -The problems of a Surinam estate are legion, with that of labor heading -the list. Javanese are somewhat cleaner than the Hindus, and they will -do whatever they are ordered; but they are by no means model workmen. -The method of recruiting them in the crowded Island of Java (with a -population of 32,000,000!) is to secure a few pretty girls of the town -and, exhibiting them in the larger cities, entice men away on a -five-year contract, their fare paid and a certain sum of money advanced -to them for their last spree in their native land. Obviously, this -brings the scum of Java, both male and female. The plantation owner who -wishes to hire these imported laborers pays the government 183 gulden -for each one, which gives him the right to his indentured labor for five -years. But that is only the beginning. He must pay the government doctor -five gulden a year per coolie for periodic examinations, and buy any -medicine he orders. There is a five gulden yearly head-tax on each -laborer; they must be furnished dwellings after a design fixed by the -government, with new improvements every year. If there are fifteen or -more children on an estate, the owner must build a nursery and provide a -nurse for each fifteen, or fraction thereof, who shall wash each child -twice a day and see that it gets the specified government diet; if the -children are old enough, he must also provide a school and a -teacher—generally a black Dutchman. The employer must have hospital beds -for ten per cent. of his laborers, and must furnish them a specified -diet when they are ill and lose their time as workmen. If a laborer goes -to jail, the duties of and loss to his employer are similar; there have -been cases of men sentenced to long terms a few weeks after being hired -from the government, making their cost to the plantation owner a total -loss. If an indentured laborer runs away before his five years is up, he -can be brought back by force, though the government is ordinarily remiss -in pursuing him. The women are contracted in the same way as the men, -though children may not be indentured. Men and women work seven hours a -day in the fields, or ten under roofs, at “task work” which must pay -them at least sixty Dutch cents—a quarter or a shilling—a day. - -Though their original cost is somewhat less, East Indian coolies, whom -the government started to replace with its own subjects some twenty -years ago, are more troublesome, particularly because they are British -subjects under direct care of the British consul, to whom they complain -at every imaginable opportunity. They do not mix with the Javanese, but -live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth, -as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and -superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot -be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits, -but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other -troublesome heathenish notions. The East Indians lose some of their -caste nonsense in the colony, permitting their brass drinking-vessels, -or even their food to be touched by alien hands without throwing it -away; yet they still prepare their own meals in accordance with their -peculiar religious scruples. The Hindus “cast spells” upon their -enemies; but the Javanese, and in some cases the negroes, take the more -effective revenge of mixing deadly concoctions, and even the educated -people of Dutch Guiana are more or less afraid of being poisoned by -disgruntled employees. There are twenty-three coolie holidays a year -which the plantation manager is obliged to observe, besides Sundays and -a number of Dutch and Javanese holidays, so that he must keep a -complicated calendar and lay plans far ahead in order not to have his -crops rotting in the fields when they should be picked. - -I attended the weekly pay-day on Saturday afternoon. The Javanese -laborers had from forty to seventy Dutch cents left of their week’s -wages, the rest having already been taken out in advances. When the -amount was very low, the manager kept it and bought food for the man to -whom it was due, so that he could not gamble it away. But he is almost -as likely to gamble away the food or his garments, or—as frequently -happens—his wife. In marked contrast to their Hindu sisters, the -Javanese women never wear jewelry, because their men lose it all in -games of chance, and their apparel habitually consists of a loose -jacket, barely covering the breast, and a square of gay cloth wrapped -about the waist and tucked in, showing a few inches of the abdomen and -reaching a bit below the knees. The Hindu workmen and women, on the -other hand, received as much as four gulden ($1.60) each, and grasped it -like misers, raising their voices to heaven if it seemed to be a cent -short. With one people the most inveterate of spendthrifts and the other -penurious beyond words, it is not strange that the two races do not find -each other congenial. But there are other important differences. The -Hindus fight among themselves and frequently indulge in veritable riots. -They are exceedingly jealous of their women and quick to revenge any -slight to their domestic honor, though the women are not particularly -chaste. The white manager of a neighboring estate only a short time -before had been cut up into nearly a hundred pieces for dallying with -the wife of one of his East Indians. One day a coolie came running to -the manager of “Nieuw Clarenbeck” and said that he had caught his wife -in company with another man and had locked them both in his house. The -manager gave the male intruder a sound thrashing and hoped the matter -would be dropped; but the moment he got a chance the outraged husband -attacked his wife with a cutlass, gashing her breasts, both wrists and -both ankles, slashing her several times across the forehead, and all but -severing a foot and a hand. She was in the plantation hospital, never -able to work again, and the man was in jail—while the plantation was out -the money it had paid for their five years’ services. The Javanese, -however, instead of being stern in their marital relations, are -virtually devoid of conjugal morality. It is a common thing among them -to trade wives for a day or a week, to gamble away their wives, or to -borrow the wife of a friend if their own happens to be out of reach. The -man who becomes enamored of a Javanese woman does not sneak about in the -night seeking a rendezvous; he goes to the woman’s husband and gives him -a small coin, or carries her off without personal danger, so long as he -sends her home again with fifteen or twenty cents for her husband to -hazard in his games. This point of view of the betel-nut chewers is more -or less that of the whole colony, except among the Hindus and the -whites; families have considerable difficulty in getting domestic help, -but an unmarried man may have his choice of a hundred youthful -housekeepers. - -When their five-year term is up, the indentured laborers may become -independent planters, or they may hire out again for from one to five -years. Many of the coolies acquire land, which is so easily done here -that many come from both British Guiana and the Island of Trinidad to -settle down, and plantation owners complain that they are constantly -being forced to send for new laborers. If the coolie hires out again, he -does so at his old wage and a bonus at the end of the year. Not so the -Javanese; he demands an advance equal to several months’ wages, and -gambles it away in a single night. The manager pointed out to me one of -his laborers, the gay cloth worn by all men of his race about his brow, -his teeth jet black from betel-nut, who had been paid a month’s salary -and a bonus on the night that his five-year contract ended. He lost that -in less than two hours, came back and signed for five years more, -receiving an advance of a hundred gulden; returned at ten in the evening -to borrow fifty cents with which to buy food—and gambled that away! - -Yet the Javanese are the most docile of all the conglomeration of races -in Dutch Guiana, with the coolies next, though the protection of the -British consul is likely to make the latter somewhat uppish. The negroes -are haughty, as well as lazy; the Chinese are proud, but try to be “hail -fellows” and even learn “taki-taki” for the sake of trade—for, with rare -exceptions, they are shopkeepers. The government regulates even the -stores on the plantations, and not only does an immigration commissioner -speed about the country in a swift launch, inquiring whether laborers -have any complaint to make against their employers, but a paternal -government inspector tells each plantation just how much it can charge -the Chinaman for the privilege of running the estate store and exactly -what prices he can demand of the laborers. No one knows what moment the -inspector may drop in, perhaps to carry off samples of stock for -examination by the government chemist, perhaps to condemn a barrel of -flour or a keg of meat and order them thrown into the river. At “Nieuw -Clarenbeck” the Chinaman paid sixty gulden a month for rent and store -rights—and was rapidly getting rich, sending his money back to China. -The Celestial is so much brighter than the Hindu or the Javanese that -even when he mingles his blood with the negro his descendants are more -reliable and business-like, having the commercial instincts of the -father and at the same time being more sociable fellows. The cross -between the negro and the coolie, on the other hand, is surly and seldom -worthy of the least confidence. - -There is a little railroad from Paramaribo to Dam—a place one is sure to -mention twice: once in asking for a ticket, and again after hearing the -price of it—called the “Coloniale Spoorwegen.” It is a government road -of meter gauge, a hundred and eight miles long, and one pays a fare of -fifteen gulden, or six cents a mile, for the privilege of sitting on -hard wooden benches in box-like little cars of European appearance and -lack of convenience, on a single train that goes up-country every -Tuesday and comes down again on Wednesday. We screeched through one of -the main streets of the capital and only city in the colony, containing -more than half its population, into fertile flatlands which soon turned -to wooded country with occasional board and thatch hamlets or isolated -huts, then to almost snow-white sand that did not promise any fertility, -even with irrigation. Black policemen in blue uniforms and carrying -short swords came through the cars and took a complete biography of -everyone on board, even to one’s religion. The train stopped at every -bush station of three or more huts, usually to unload men, or their -junk, who struck off through jungle paths toward placer mines. Some of -these are important establishments, with thatched villages housing fifty -or sixty black workmen and stamp-mills through which a whole hill is -passed, to come out a marble of gold and amalgam that can be held in the -hollow of the hand; some are the private and individual diggings of -“pork-knockers.” Lone prospectors, mainly West Indian negroes, who by -law may wash for gold even on the concessions of others, are so called -because, often setting out with insufficient supplies, they soon come -knocking at doors and asking for something to eat—“a little pork or -anything.” Even the verb, to “go pork-knocking,” has become an accepted -one in the popular language of Dutch and British Guiana. English was -more often heard on the train than Dutch; everyone seemed to speak it, -or at least to find it near enough the native “taki-taki” to catch or -express an idea. The white roadbed became painful to the eyes, and white -men long resident in the colony asserted that this glare from much of -its soil in time proved permanently injurious. - -In the afternoon we came to the Suriname River again, here far narrower, -but swift and deep. The buttresses of a bridge had been built, but the -few remaining passengers crossed in a cable-car, like that to the top of -the “Sugar Loaf” in Rio, a hundred feet or more above the water. -Naturally, a weekly schedule that requires two trains and a cable -station to make its run must charge fabulous passenger and freight -rates. We spent more than an hour getting our cargo—largely oil products -and flour from the United States—into the little three-car train on the -other side; then the conductor put on a new kind of cap, and we were off -again. Here the soil was reddish and looked more fertile, and we seemed -to have risen to a slight savannah with a cooler wind, though for the -most part we were surrounded by the same monotonous jungle that had -hemmed me in almost incessantly for weeks past. But here it was -enlivened by what to me was the most interesting of the many races that -inhabit the Guianas,—the _Boschneger_, or “Bush Negroes.” - -In the early history of the colony her African slaves, said to have come -from more warlike tribes than most of those brought to the New World, -revolted and, but for the help of the Caribs and a patched-up truce, -would undoubtedly have driven the white planters into the sea. In -British Guiana they were eventually conquered and driven out. The Dutch, -on the other hand, made peace with them, not only acknowledging their -independence, but promising to pay them tribute, which they do to this -day. The descendants of these black insurgents, unlike the “maroons” of -Jamaica, have gone completely back to savagery and live like wild -Indians, or like their ancestors in the African bush, wearing only a -loin-cloth, dwelling in grass huts, eating cassava and other jungle -products, and talking a corruption of Dutch and several other languages -with which they have come in contact, which the Dutch themselves cannot -understand. It is estimated that there are eight thousand of these wild -negroes in Dutch Guiana, divided into three principal tribes, Saramacca, -Becoe, and Djoeka, each ruled over by its “gran man” (“a” always as in -“far”), and its tribal elders, while several thousand more, known as -“bonis,” inhabit French Guiana. - -A few of these black children of nature had appeared before we crossed -the Suriname; now they burst forth frequently from the surrounding bush. -The only evidence of humanity, except the railroad, was an occasional -sheet-iron station building; yet we halted now and then where the dark -mouth of a path broke the dense wall of forest-jungle on either side to -unload rice, flour, and oil for the placer miners and “balata bleeders” -back in the bush. In some places wild negroes had come down to act as -carriers. They were splendid physical specimens, tall and more -magnificently built than any race I had yet seen in South America, fit -to arouse the envy of any white Sandow—except that, being paddlers of -dugouts rather than walkers, their shoulders and arms were overdeveloped -in proportion to their legs. Erect and haughty as Indians, without a -hint of the servility we commonly associate with negroes, they were -proof that the African who has returned to his natural state in the -wilderness is preferable to the negro who has reverted to his natural -state in the cesspools of cities and the rags of civilization. Though -noticeably smaller, the women and girls—naked except from waist to -thighs—who came down to peer out of the forest and see the train pass -were equally fine specimens of the human animal, the young ones with -plump, protruding breasts, shapely waists, and more often than not a -naked baby astride one hip. The men had earrings, bracelets, rings even -on their forefingers, charms of shells and the like about the ankles, -and so many adornments, in contrast to the females, as to suggest that -they forcibly took them away from their weaker sisters. Such cloth as -they wore was of gayest color and crazy-quilt pattern; their short hair -was done up in “Topsy” braids sticking out in all directions and tied -with many-colored ribbons; about arms and legs, just below the knees and -above the elbows, they wore tight rings or cords, evidently believing, -like the Indians of Amazonia, that these protect them from the ravenous -_piranha_; and the abdomens of both men and women were tattooed, or, -more exactly, pricked into relief figures resembling countless black -warts. More superstitious than the wild Indians, and just wise enough to -know a kodak by sight, they were not to be caught unawares for a -“por-trait´,” as the word remains even in “taki-taki.” - -Dam is most succinctly described by adding an “n” and an exclamation -point. It consists of the end of the railroad line, which some day in -the distant future hopes to go on to the Brazilian border. The only -white men left since crossing the river were the little Dutch engineer -and myself. I went with him and the rest of the train crew to a clean, -well-screened little bungalow, where we pooled our lunches, but the -assertion of the dusky conductor, whose English was “picked up,” that he -was “snorking too much” proved only too true, and I soon carried my -hammock out into the night. After some search I swung it from the -switch-post to the back end of our first-class car, diagonally across -the track, and turned in again. There was, of course, the danger that -another train might dash around the curve into me, but as the company -would have had to order it made in Holland, carry it piecemeal across -the river by cable, set it up, and run the thirty miles from the cable -station, the risk was not great. - -At least there was a fine collection of “Bush Negroes” in Dam. A hundred -or more of them, including whole families among whom there was not cloth -enough for a single garment, had come down the river, which here forms a -rocky falls, to carry back into the bush in their canoes the supplies -brought by the weekly train, and they had hung their hammocks under a -long sheet-iron roof on poles provided by the government. All of them -had the air of being as ready to fight as Indians on the war-path; yet -they were childish in many ways, too, jumping upon the train every time -it moved a foot in switching and acting in general like boys of ten. -They were the exact antithesis of Indians in showing, rather than -hiding, their feelings, and had all the African’s gaiety and boisterous -laughter. In their encampment now feebly lighted by weird torches, they -were indulging in music, chatter, and apparently in dancing, until one -might have fancied oneself in the heart of Africa. They seemed to be -more contented with their lot than the Indians, as if they still had -memories of the slave days of their ancestors and realized that much -more fully what freedom means. - -On the return trip we picked up much gold. At every station, and at some -mere stops, negroes, clothed and usually English-speaking, handed the -conductor small packages wrapped in scraps of paper, but sealed with a -red seal, the name of the owner crudely written on each. I soon learned -that these contained gold-dust, and for every one of them the conductor -had to make out a report, which the negro certified with a seal he -carried, after which the conductor put the package in his tin box. Some -of them weighed several pounds. Before we were halfway in the conductor -had more than $12,000 worth of gold, for all of which he was -responsible, though he received not a cent extra for the trouble above -his scanty wage of thirty dollars a month and a gulden as expense money -on each trip. No wonder he said something about “one hand washing the -other” and gave me no receipt for the fare I paid from Dam back to the -cable-station. - -When we came to Kwakoegron every person on the train had to get off to -be searched for gold. All passengers and employees, carrying their -hand-baggage, were herded into a big chicken-wire cage, where they were -examined one by one by black policemen. Personally, whether out of -respect for my nationality or because I looked too simple to think of -smuggling, the officer who stepped with me into one of the alcove -closets opening off the enclosure was satisfied with patting my pockets -and making me open my kodak; but many travelers are compelled to strip -naked while black policemen examine even the seams of their garments. -There is a negress on hand for similar examinations of her own sex, and -several times I heard of an English woman resident who, having once been -caught smuggling gold, was forced to strip every time she passed through -Kwakoegron on her way to town. Even minor surgical operations are -sometimes performed on suspects, not always without results. Not merely -the passengers and their bags, but the entire train from end to end was -examined with meticulous care. Gold has been discovered hidden away in -every imaginable place on the cars, even stuck on the trucks or inside -the wheels. The packages in charge of the conductor are also examined, -and if a seal is found broken he is held in jail until it is proved that -none of the gold is missing. The negro policemen get a percentage and -promotion for finding stolen gold, or for detecting attempts to smuggle -it, and are said to be so proud of their jobs that they seldom succumb -to temptation. - -[Illustration: Javanese women tapping rubber trees after the fashion of -the Far East] - -[Illustration: Javanese and East Indian women clearing up a _cacao_ -plantation in Dutch Guiana] - -[Illustration: Javanese celebrating the week-end holiday with their -native musical instruments] - -[Illustration: Wash-day in Dutch Guiana] - -The gold fields of Dutch Guiana are above Kwakoegron, and the purpose of -the barrier is to prevent gold from getting out without paying the seven -per cent. ad valorem tax to the government. Miners are said to favor the -method, because it does away with stealing by workmen. Yet it is -scarcely worth while to try to smuggle gold into town, for it must be -sold secretly to “fences” who seldom pay as much as honest gold brings -after going through the government process. Arrived in Paramaribo, the -packages held by the conductor are turned over to the police, examined, -and the next day the owner comes and pays his tax and then sells his -gold to a registered dealer. It is even unlawful for the man who dug it -to bring his own gold to town with him. Government officials who handle -the yellow metal are reputed to be honest, but not so much can be said -for the government itself, which accepts gold stolen in French Guiana, -merely charging a higher tax and keeping an official record of it. -Naturally, the government of Cayenne retaliates. - -I saw and heard much more of the “Bush Negroes” before I left Surinam. -Scattered all over the colony between the well-settled coast and the -Indians at the southern end, they constitute the chief interest of Dutch -Guiana, as the white convicts do in the adjoining French colony. The -government makes no attempt to rule them, no pretense of trying to bring -them out of their savagery; indeed, it protects them in their wild state -and gives them privileges not enjoyed by white residents,—as, for -example, the right to carry firearms without a license. They have no -schools or other civilizing influence, except a few missions of the -Moravians. It may be that they are better off under this plan; certainly -they are finer specimens of manhood than the average domesticated negro. -All those I saw were jet black, but there are said to be rare cases of -their mixing with the whites, the offspring of such mixture almost -invariably losing his “bush” instinct and drifting to town. Descended -from some of the hardiest tribes of Africa, many of them still have -traditions of belonging to the wealthy class in that continent, their -ancestors owning many cattle and having been captured by trickery. The -men make good carriers and bush guides, but are incredibly heavy eaters. -Their principal commerce with the outside world is bringing wood to -town, paddling their hollowed-out tree-trunks, often forty or fifty feet -long, in and out of the network of rivers. The men clear a different -patch of jungle every year, and the women plant cassava, rice, bananas, -and plantains, and do all the manual labor about the camp. Polygamy -prevails, and the relations of the men are rather free, though the women -are held strictly to account. If a domestic misdemeanor is discovered, a -conclave is held and both the man and the woman are beaten, but the -latter usually carries her marks the longer. When a “Bush Negro” dies, -his body is placed on an elevated platform for eight days, and every day -the men come and rub their bodies with the juice, if it may be so -called, of the corpse, for the double purpose of adding to their own -strength and insuring the entrance of the dead man into their heaven. -They have many of the superstitions, strange primitive rites, and -Mumbo-Jumbos of their African ancestors. Any mark called a charm or -curse before a door will keep them from entering it. Though very -suspicious of strangers, those who have won their confidence find them -staunch friends, gay and good-hearted, but ready to do anything for rum -or tobacco, which there is no law against giving them. Never having been -subdued, they fear no one, and live under their own tribal laws, -punishing even with death those who disobey them, without government -interference. A few years ago four West Indian blacks stole a “Bush -Negro’s” canoe along the Maroni River and left him to struggle back to -his village through the jungle. Nearly a year afterward the West Indians -returned from their gold prospecting in the interior, passing down the -river in the same canoe. The owner recognized it, raced back to his -village and, collecting a group of his fellows, overtook the thieves -farther down, killed them, recovered the canoe, and stood the heads of -the four up on a rock jutting out into the river. The British Government -was still demanding punishment for the deed, but the Dutch were showing -no intention of doing anything about it. - -The “Bush Negroes” have no color-line, but treat clothed blacks just as -they do white men or Indians, and do not hesitate to make slaves of -French convicts who fall into their hands. Not only do they pay no taxes -or dues of any kind to the government, but the latter, ever afraid of an -outbreak among them, pays them annual tribute. Once or twice a year the -“gran man” of each tribe comes to town in frock-coat and silk hat, but -bare feet, wearing a great bronze coat-of-arms of Holland across his -chest and followed by an obsequious valet, to call upon the governor and -receive greetings from Queen Wilhelmina, a letter renewing the treaty -between his tribe and the Dutch, and a small sum of money or some -trinkets to distribute among his tribesmen. Of late years the “Bush -Negroes” have been required to wear clothing when they enter the -capital, but they interpret this demand not into shirts and trousers, -but into a multicolored, silky strip of cloth which they drape about -their naked bodies in an ornamental rather than concealing manner. A bit -of contact with urban civilization makes them crafty. One day in -Paramaribo I drifted down to the river where, among lumber piles, a -whole colony of “Bush Negroes” was stopping while they exchanged the -wood they had brought for useless finery. I offered a Dutch quarter to -one of them in fancy drapery to pose before my kodak. He only agreed on -condition that he could be taken with one hand on a camp chair, -evidently for the same reason that some of our countrymen prefer -backgrounds of skyscrapers, since he had certainly never owned, and -probably never sat in a chair in his life. No sooner was I done with him -than another man, better built and more joyfully dressed, stepped out, -offering to pose for a similar sum. Then a still more gorgeous one put -in an appearance, and the procession evidently would have continued -indefinitely, as nicely graded as the characters in a Broadway musical -comedy up to the climax of spotlighted heroine, had I not professed -myself out of Dutch quarters. - -“Bush Negroes” form new words onomatopoetically. Thus, when the first -motor-boat approached their retreat, one of them, putting a hand behind -his acute ear, said, “Hah! Packapacka walkee disee way,” and -“packapackas” they have been ever since. Their language is the -“taki-taki” of all the uneducated natives of Dutch Guiana, though they -use many words, chiefly African in origin, not familiar to their -clothes-wearing brethren. The basis of “taki-taki” as its name suggests, -is English with considerable Dutch and traces of all the languages that -have seeped over the borders of the colony during its long and checkered -history, all mixed together in the same concoction, in keeping with a -childish intelligence, and spoken with negro slovenliness. It was my -privilege one Sunday to hear a sermon in “taki-taki” in one of the -wooden churches of the Moravians up a coastal river. While the -congregation did not consist exactly of “Bush Negroes,” it was of a -similar grade of intelligence; and the same missionary preached on -alternate weeks in a village of wild blacks, using the same language, -though not quite so many Dutch words. Canoe-loads of negroes appeared -from up and down the placid river soon after the bell had rung out from -the steeple of the home-made church, standing out incongruously against -the great green forest. Those who lived near were already in their -Sunday best; the rest stopped in the bush above or below the church to -change their clothes. Three rooms in the minister’s house had been set -aside for that purpose, but they prefer the outdoor dressing-rooms. My -host and I were the only white men in the congregation, and we were led -to special benches beside the pulpit and facing the rest. There were a -hundred or more negroes in the church, almost all of them jet black; the -sexes were separated, with the children on the front benches. What we -call Moravians, but who call themselves “Brüdergemeinte,” must be -married, and in this case the burly, bearded, German missionary stalked -in followed by his cadaverous, Quaker-looking wife wearing the approved -sour expression of many Protestants engaged in the business of saving -heathen souls. She was wearing drab black and a little monkey-like cap, -and took her place on a platform in front of the female half of the -church, where she remained absolutely motionless throughout the long -service. A black Dutchman, who taught a class of negro children in the -mission school during the week, tortured a little melodeon from time to -time. Greater solemnity could not be imagined; the place was full of -sanctimonious, breathless negroes with pillar-of-the-church -expressions—who, according to my companion, were past masters at -stealing anything they could lay their hands on outside it. The dialect -used in the sermon has been reduced to writing by the Moravians, which -is the reason a printed page of the “taki-taki” Testament or the -“Singi-boekoe,” does not look more familiar to those of us whose native -tongue is its basis. For, being Germans, the translators have given -German or Dutch values to the letters, so that while the word “switi” -might not be quickly intelligible to us, we would have no difficulty in -understanding it as “sweety.” “Joe,” “wi,” “bekasi,” and “Loekoe!” are -simply Dutch-German ways of spelling “you,” “we,” “becausee,” and -“Looky” or “Look ye!” “Hij wan bigi man,” as it appears in the -“taki-taki” Bible, would be readily recognizable if written “He one -bigee man.” “Mama” has the same meaning as in all languages, but -“father” is “tata,” as among the Indians of the Andes. “Pikien” for -“child” may have come from the African “piccaninny,” from the Spanish -_pequeño_ or the Portuguese _pequeno_. “Masra Gado” was “Lord God,” the -“a” always retaining the broad open-mouthed West Indian form. Both in -vocabulary and grammar “taki-taki” shows the most primitive, childlike -minds at work and the spoken language suggests nothing so much as a -group of negro children on a Southern plantation trying to express -themselves in the language of their elders. Thus the word “switi” means -“good” in any of its forms,—in taste, quality, condition, or character; -“Hij maki wi” may mean anything from “He makes us” to “He would have -made us.” The text that day was St. Luke, Chapter XVI, Verse 25: - -[Illustration: An East Indian woman of Surinam] - -[Illustration: A Javanese woman of the Surinam plantations] - -[Illustration: A gold mining camp in the interior of Dutch Guiana] - -[Illustration: Pouring out the sap of the bullet-tree into the pans in -which it hardens into “balata,” an inferior kind of rubber] - - Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki: - Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben - habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe - ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben - habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem - kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina. - -Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught -crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth -in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang -forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently -the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the -faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble -of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language. - -A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the -second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more -inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was -a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood, -stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms -and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded -streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of -both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be -empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep -out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the -river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes -and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a -battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first -cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September. -The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or -merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden -heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green -stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal -palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing -the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they -were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red -stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid -air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these -iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that -before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to -load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few -English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom -complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over -the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie, -where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and -retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal -tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate. -Here a white _déporté_ who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a -burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather -than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists, -send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of -Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu -fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut -out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could -see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I -passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the -children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they -reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were -dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful _gamalong_ floating by -on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had -already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the -slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding -them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam -had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable -of producing a hundred fold what it does now. - -The launch _Ella_ finally left for Springlands, across the boundary, -with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed -in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the -yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded -shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of -distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew -toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were -eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed -in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous -British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality -about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an -Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but -carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a -document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in -Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I -should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward -along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie -boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came -to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed -out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile -called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in -this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable -negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the -track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the -road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty -minutes ahead of its schedule. - -To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday -and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday. -Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but -to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted -mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British -manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of -fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in -getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was -in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the -blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the -laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half -holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in -hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer -Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the -streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of -link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures, -speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but -to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the -goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those -in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies -lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in -makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking -irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of -which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday -morning. - -An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,” -to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along -a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the -country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old -negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before -she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter, -and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps -to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road -all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and -negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had -shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a -thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from -Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a -thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and -shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with -bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging -but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my -progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats -and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway -itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles, -countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South -America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the -pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of -Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089 -inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety -per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its -British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed -even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least -one can telegraph anywhere. - -[Illustration: A ferry across the Surinam River, joining two sections of -the railroad to the interior] - -[Illustration: A Bush Negro family on its travels. Less than half the -dugout is shown] - -[Illustration: A Bush Negro watching me photograph our engine] - -[Illustration: A “gran man,” or chieftain of the Bush Negroes, returning -from his yearly visit to the Dutch governor of Surinam, with his -“commission” from Queen Wilhelmina, and followed by his obsequious and -footsore valet] - -Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British -Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark -from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite -greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South -America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a -glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep -from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on -almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their -real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with -such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not -that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an -advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African -chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous -travelers. - -Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue -tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had -almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every -description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on -Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger -ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the -proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly -ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit -Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with -thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like -road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink -from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of -whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks; -but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I -stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent -of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a -draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze -from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I -could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of -it. - -Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it -no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring -of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate, -“’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.” - -“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which -extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a -cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally -became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It -seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal -we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of -nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it, -topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day -did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for -the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he -asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too -much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the -whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors. -“Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence. -“Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’ -you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we -use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to -whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?” -meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su -gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most -imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and -excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn -demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many -detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law, -and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was -still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a -half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his -mongrel race. - -The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered -huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough -sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From -mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the -landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and -there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting -to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched -together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in -them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a -patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time. -This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient -laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness, -stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for -themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in -Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long, -green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with, -“Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of -the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions -as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West -Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment -seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole. - -I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate -of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were -the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing -bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on -legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married -employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered -away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter -of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman, -and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly -named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been -allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an -hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down. -Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face -when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation, -as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already -grasping him by the throat. - -“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I -had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was -delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after -all. - -Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar -plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage. -It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of -strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in -which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid -actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door, -and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving -to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense -and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the -piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed -children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess -without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager -himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in -life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such -occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of -the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he -descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog. -But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight. -Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what -they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to -risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways -until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was -not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him -that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and -once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent -to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably -good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his -generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that -of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a -tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though -explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see -the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal -business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town, -they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter -entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was -evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be -cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates. - -I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along -the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun -was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the -head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’ -barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be -allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as -soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I -would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared -in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no -way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took -far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable -person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a -judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject, -“By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The -head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at -length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial -history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour, -whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish -mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a -“swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush, -the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of -rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being -over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs, -where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age, -were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause. - -Here we “swizzled” several times more, and then went in a body to a -dining-room on the ground floor under the manager’s house, where -fourteen of us sat down to dinner about a large table. The deputy -manager was at the head and the head overseer at the foot; the rules of -caste, of course, did not make it possible for them to eat with the -manager. It was not a luxurious meal, though plentiful and most formal. -During the course of it a ledger in which the manager, or his secretary, -had written out each man’s orders for the next day passed from hand to -hand. To an American, the rather faint and easily satisfied ambitions of -these not particularly prepossessing young men was striking. They gave -an impression of intellects of modest horse-power rarely speeded up into -high gear, with slight interests or knowledge outside their routine work -of bossing coolies in the fields, in which each had his particular task -or section, without opportunity, or apparently desire, for personal -initiative. Some of them might, indeed, almost have been suspected of -light-mindedness, except on the one point of keeping up the good old -English forms, prejudices, and social superstitions. Nearly all of them -had come out on three-year contracts. If they remained five years, they -got a six months’ trip home—at the company’s expense if and when they -returned; after ten years as overseers the more clean-cut ones might -become head overseers, and years later, deputy manager. Then, if the -latter made no slips on the glabrous British social ladder, he might -finally, in twenty or twenty-five years, work himself up into managerial -timber, a rank at which there are few openings compared with the number -who come out as overseers. The fixed rules of behavior were surprisingly -paradoxical. The overseer might, and it was tacitly implied that he -commonly did, “keep” a native woman—Hindus seemed to be -preferred—without jeopardizing his ascent, so long as he made no public -display of the fact; but he must not, of course, be without a dinner -jacket and evening dress, or ride second-class, or do any of those other -things which a Britisher of his class “simply doesn’t do, don’t you -know.” Yet this distant and uncertain goal seemed quite sufficient -incentive for these half-hearted chaps, many of them younger members of -“best families” and “public school” men, to whom the vision of perhaps -some day becoming manager of an estate, dwelling in the big bungalow -amid servants and secretaries and with stern authority over everything -in his immediate vicinity, seemed the nearest to paradise on earth to -which men of their class could aspire. In keeping with their general -point of view was the calm assurance, almost worthy of a Latin-American, -with which they waited for “the government” to win the war, without ever -dreaming of personally losing a meal or missing a “swizzle.” Contrasted -with the strenuous exertions of the young Germans I had seen trying to -get home from Brazil, the manner of these rather inane young gentlemen -toward a conflict that was just then going heavily against them, yet of -which they seemed almost as supremely indifferent and ignorant as of -geography, was astonishing. - -The overseers get up at five o’clock, meet for “coffee” and instructions -from the manager, and at seven ride off on mules to their tasks, -generally an hour or two from the plantation center. Here they spend a -couple of hours superintending coolies, who for the most part work by -the “task,” and ride back for tiffin, or breakfast, at eleven. They are -out again at one o’clock, five days a week, and home soon after four, to -have tea and play tennis, or to prepare for the coming gymkhana, the -estate horse-races. There was a commodious billiard-room in the -barracks, though apparently no shower-bath. No doubt each man kept his -own private tub in captivity. All evening the head overseer was most -formally obliging, but seemed in constant fear of my contravening the -manager’s orders in some “cute Yankee” manner. - -I was awakened at dawn by the Hindu “boy”—who was past forty—bringing me -“coffee”—which was tea ruined by the addition of milk and sugar—and two -diaphanous slices of bread. The autobus was not due for some hours, so I -abandoned the contested territory as soon as possible and rambled away -along the diked highway. There was somewhat less travel than the day -before, but the shops were open. So cool and constant was the sea breeze -that I did not have occasion to take off my coat during the whole -fifteen miles, everywhere flanked by canebrake. Men in flowing robes or -mere loin-cloths, with caste marks on their foreheads, coolie women with -arms laden with silver bracelets, their thin and silky, though not -always newly laundered, draperies wrapped gracefully about them, little -Oriental temples standing out against the flat horizon, all carried the -mind back to another land halfway around the globe. There was an amazing -contrast between the lithe, slender Hindus in their loose garb, some of -the younger girls almost beautiful, if one could overlook their -nose-rings and a certain hereditary dread of soap, and the gross, -rowdyish, tinsel-minded negresses. Yet though the East Indian was once -civilized and the negro never has been, the result is in some ways -astonishingly the same. - -Coolies were “plowing” old cane-fields with pitchforks, their women, up -to their waists in slime and water, were cleaning out trenches and -irrigation ditches or turning up brush laid over newly sprouted shoots -of cane. This lasted until ten in the morning, when a procession -starting from the fields merged together and wended its way toward the -center of the estate, the Hindus disappearing in long communal, -barracks-like structures, the negroes squatting down to breakfast in the -shade of their makeshift hovels. The latter were greatly in the -minority, for they are prone to work a week and loaf two, or go to town -to squander their earnings in gay garments and automobile rides at the -height of the cutting season, and planters prefer the more dependable -race. The first laborers brought over after the freeing of the slaves -were Portuguese from the Madeira Islands. Then came the Chinese, -generally without a repatriation clause in their contracts, so that they -gradually drifted into shopkeeping, and to-day a few of them are among -the big business men of the colony. Finally the great reservoir of -British India was tapped, the coolies, male and female, coming out at -government and plantation expense, indentured for five years and -entitled to free passage home again. Many preferred to take a premium -and remain, some to rehire, some to plant their own plots, a few to -become men of importance, especially money-lenders with all the popular -traits of the Jew. There is no question that the Hindu coolie is better -off in British Guiana than he is at home, and that those born here are -in a much more favorable condition; yet the call of the fatherland is -strong in all races, and many return, taking with them enough to live in -what to them is comfort. Considerably more than half the population of -the colony are East Indians, but very recently all existing indentures -were cancelled, the Indian Government having forbidden the signing of -new ones some time before, and a scheme is now being worked out for -Hindu immigration and colonization. - -During all my walk I did not see a white man, except the sheltered ones -at the estate. Many of the signs along the way were worth reading. “Dr. -Moses Fraser, Dentist and Veterinary Surgeon” made it unnecessary to ask -the “doctor’s” color. Ah Sing, Kandra Babu, and Percival Stuart -Brathwaite kept shop side by side, the importance of their -establishments decreasing in the order named. The autobus, resembling -those along New York’s Riverside Drive, passed me on its outward trip; -but if this packing above and below was typical, I preferred to walk. -Here were the same silly caste rules as in the street-cars of Chile, and -though it was infinitely finer on top, Englishmen had to swelter inside, -because the imperiale was second-class and therefore given over to -negroes and occasional Hindus. There were marsh birds by hundreds along -the flooded flatlands, flocks of pinkish flamingoes now and then rising -in flight. Before noon I had drifted into New Amsterdam, also known by -the name of the county of which it is the seat, Berbice, second city of -British Guiana and not much of a city at that. A chiefly negro -population, though with many Hindus, completely swamped the rare whites, -living in entirely shingled wooden bungalows amid luxuriant yards of -palms and mango-trees. - -From New Amsterdam there is a daily ferry and train to Georgetown, sixty -miles away. To take the one across the River Berbice, distinctly wider -than the Hudson at its mouth, in time to catch the other, meant early -rising. For a time there was much bush along the track, the stations -generally being mere stopping-places. Bananas, cassava, corn, and -cocoanuts were the chief products. Then came Hindu men and women up to -their knees in reeking mud, which discolors their ragged nether -garments, setting out rice plants or kneading the soil about them. At -Abary a group of Americans had established a big rice plantation and -begun to work it by modern methods, but they were already in sad -straits. The old-fashioned coolie hand-labor seems to be the only one -offering sure returns. Here and there were rice-fields that had gone -back to pasture, the light and dark grasses still showing where the -paddy-dikes had been. As we neared Georgetown the rice plantations of -independent East Indians became numerous, with oxen as well as men and -women wading along in them, while the houses and sleek cattle showed -prosperity, however biblical might be their methods of husbandry. - -[Illustration: The main street of Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, -with its row of often mortgaged mahogany trees in the background] - -[Illustration: An East Indian and an escaped Madagascar prisoner from -Cayenne cutting down a “back dam” on a Surinam plantation in order to -kill the ants that would destroy it] - -[Illustration: Javanese workmen opening pods of _cacao_ that will -eventually appear in our markets as chocolate and cocoa] - -The settled portion of British Guiana extends from the west bank of the -Essequibo River to the east bank of the Corentyne, two hundred miles -distant, with a few islands at the mouth of the Essequibo and some ten -miles up the Berbice and Demerara Rivers. Of the hundred thousand acres -under cultivation—an area in proportion to the entire colony as is his -forefinger to a human being—eighty per cent. is planted in sugar. A -century ago the cultivation of cotton, coffee, and cacao gave way to -this, and even alternating of crops is unknown. Year after year, often -for half a century, sugar-cane has been produced on the same ground. -Behind the plantations, which rarely extend more than three miles from -the shore, the soil is a kind of peat, with here and there an island of -sand. In front is the seashore or river, with its protection of almost -impenetrable mangrove roots, then a dike with openings in it for -irrigation ditches, the great wheel-operated gates of which are opened -to let the water run out at low tide, but closed against the sea or -river at their height, for salt on the land is fatal. Back of this dam -is the public road, kept up at the expense of the plantation and, with -the two canals beside it, constituting a second dike. Here is a -mile-wide strip of land that is used as pasture, for the sugarmill, the -manager’s house, overseers’ quarters, laborers’ villages, behind which, -with a third dike, a draining engine, perhaps a little railway, and the -“kokers,” or sluices to let out surplus water, are the interminable -cane-fields, protected from the rainy season floods of the higher and -uncultivated interior by a “back dam.” Canals are everywhere used for -transportation—as well as irrigation—in iron punts drawn by mules. The -secrecy which hangs like a pall over all of the estates, however, I -never succeeded in penetrating. Perhaps it was merely to prevent some -“clever Yankee” from learning how cane is turned into sugar! - -Nickerie was once washed away by the sea, and Georgetown is saved from a -like fate by a massive sea-wall. Down here where one must look up at the -ocean the only way to fill a hole is by digging another, and there can -be no real sewer-system where sewage would only float back into the city -at high tide. Various systems are used for getting rid of Georgetown’s -waste matter, none of them entirely satisfactory. Its water is brought -in from the savannahs by the Lahama Canal, but this is yellow with -vegetable matter and cannot be used for cooking, drinking, or even -laundry purposes. Every building of any importance has a rain-water -tank, some larger than those along our railroads, and as there is little -dust or smoke in the city, water thus stored is clear and of good taste. -Yet for all her natural handicaps, Georgetown is a comfortable and -sightly city of wide, well-shaded streets, often with a canal flanked by -rows of trees in the center, and broad green lawns so inviting after -years of grassless Latin-America that I was tempted to sit on each of -them in turn. From the sea-wall to the last negro shacks of the town is -a distance of some two miles, with ample elbow-room and light wooden -structures that make poor fire risks. - -The city swarmed with hulking, ragged negroes leaning serenely against -the many posters bearing the appeal “Your King and your Country need -you. Enlist now!” In fact, it is unpleasant, at least for a white woman, -to walk down Water Street among scores of ragged black loafers who seem -to take pains to put themselves in one’s way. On the other hand, there -are cheap public carriages, which, I suppose, would be the British reply -to such a criticism. With plantains and eddoes plentiful, the mass of -negroes are of lazier temperament than their ancestors, the slaves, who -were forced to acquire the habit of work. They have so much power in the -colony, however, that the man who must live there permanently cannot -keep clear of them, and the visitor who inadvertently touches or even -threatens some impudent lounger may be “summoned” and fined. It should -be noted that in British colonies it is not so much the color-line as -the caste-line which divides society. A man drops out of the highest -class by having African blood in his veins, but so he does even when he -is pure white for many other reasons, such as poverty or violation of -any of the Englishman’s punctilios of social etiquette. Hindus are less -in evidence in the capital than on plantations; Indians one almost never -sees there. Every possible mixture of white, negro, Chinese, and East -Indian may be found in the average crowd, however, though as a whole -this has an Anglo-Saxon demeanor. Most of the pure whites are pale and -thin, the women angular; even the young men are sallow from lack of -exercise, manual labor being impossible and the principal -gathering-place a “swizzle” club. The death rate is decreasing, but was -still more than twice that of New York, thanks partly to the fact that -even the English doctors in many cases still believed that “this -mosquito theory is a lot of bally Yankee rot, don’t you know.” - -The white population, exclusive of the Portuguese, who are not strictly -so, own about three-fourths of the property, and the Portuguese much of -the rest. Besides Chinese and unnaturalized Indians, there are 172,000 -Hindus, nearly all of whom are alien or property-less non-voters. This -leaves the few negroes owning property as the real rulers, to a limited -degree, of the colony. In financial matters, including taxation, this is -largely autonomous. The governor is sent out from England and is one of -eight appointed members of the legislative Court of Policy; but there -are also eight elective members, and the governor has the deciding vote -only in case of a tie. Those who have had occasion to deal with it -complain that the government is smothered in red tape. “If you wish to -address the head of your department,” a man certainly in a position to -know put it, “you write a letter to the next man above you, he adds a -note and sends it on to the next, and so on up ten, or a dozen, or a -score of rungs of the official ladder, and the answer comes down again -the same way, so that when you get it back you buy a trunk and pack the -stuff away and save it to read during your vacation.” - -But there are excellences in British government which offset some of its -precedent- and caste-loving stupidities. I went one day with the deputy -head of the Department of Lands and Mines, who is also “Protector of the -Indians,” to the recently established “Aboriginal Indian Depot.” The -aborigines are a simple, good-natured people whose chief fault is a -liking for rum, and not only do none of them live in town, but they -cannot cope with urban dangers during their rare visits there. -Principally by the use of liquor, laws to the contrary notwithstanding, -the riffraff of Georgetown made it their business to rob the Indian men -and lead the Indian women astray whenever they came to town; now the -visitors have an official refuge, surrounded by a sheet-iron wall, which -no outsider may enter without formal permission. There are one long and -two short rooms extending the length of the building, and the Indians -had swung their indispensable, home-woven hammocks side by side, just as -they do in their own wilderness shelters. The large room was for -ordinary Indian men, one of the smaller ones for married couples, and -the third for “captains,” certified river-pilots, and other personages -of importance—for your Englishman never forgets caste, even among -aboriginal tribes. Here any Indian has the right, and is expected, to -come and stay, free of expense, while in Georgetown, buying his own food -and cooking it himself in a simple kitchen behind the building. The -Depot was erected with funds accruing from “balata” gathered by the -Indians, one-third of which is turned into the colonial treasury and the -rest into an Indian reserve fund for just such purposes. - -Not only in her grassy lawns and wooden houses, her stern morality and -her altruistic treatment of the aborigines, does Georgetown remind the -Anglo-Saxon wanderer that the differences between his own and -Latin-American civilization are many, significant as well as trivial. -Here he will find again that love of nature, or of outdoors, which is so -slight in the rest of South America. By seven in the morning even the -well-to-do are parading the sea-wall. Though there is no lack of -carriages and automobiles, all classes go much on foot—the mere sight of -well-dressed people habitually walking seems strange to the man more -familiar with the rest of the continent. Latin-Americans of that class -may stroll up and down a fashionable promenade of a block or two at a -certain hour of the evening, but it will be rather to indulge in mutual -admiration than for exercise. Here one will see again, with a start of -surprise, white women not only abroad at an early hour, but pushing -baby-carriages. In all the rest of South America it would be unseemly -for a lady to pass her threshold in the morning, except to go to church -and possibly to shop, or to be fully dressed and powdered before -mid-afternoon, and even if she knew of the existence of perambulators, -she certainly would not condescend to propel one herself. Another -English touch is the sight of all classes riding bicycles, from the -negro postman to dainty, veiled young white ladies—conduct which would -be instantly ruinous to any feminine reputation elsewhere on the -continent. People no longer hiss to attract attention; one is no longer -a sight to be stared at from one end of the street to the other; no -human wrecks come pestering one to buy sudden fortune in the form of a -dirty rag of a lottery ticket; money is worth its face value again and -is accepted at that rate without question—even though the newcomer may -get hopelessly entangled in a confusion of reckonings in shillings, -dollars, cents, and pence. It is true that traffic turns to the left and -that audiences sit stiff and motionless as wooden images at band -concerts, but this little patch of England in South America has fine big -school buildings, instead of droning choruses of children packed -together in noisome old hovels. Where there are many negroes there are -apt to be beggars, but they are by no means so numerous and certainly -not so pestiferous in Demerara as in Brazil. The street-cars are not -divided into classes, and one may ride irrespective of the shape or -condition of one’s collar; though castes are recognized in a different -way, for the negro-Hindu motormen and conductors, speaking what is -fondly supposed in the West Indies to be English, have a different -vocabulary for each class. To a black fellow-laborer they say in a -kindly, familiar tone, “Get off, mahn; heah yo street;” to a negro -market-woman, impatiently, “All right, get on, ef yo goin’!” but to a -white man of any standing, in a totally different tone and timbre, “Oh, -yes, sir; this street, sir; all right, thank you, sir.” - -[Illustration: A landscape in Hindu-inhabited British Guiana] - -[Illustration: Indentured East Indians enjoying a Saturday half-holiday -before one of their barrack villages] - -[Illustration: Prisoners at work on a leaking dam in Ciudad Bolívar on -the Orinoco] - -[Illustration: The trackless _llanos_ of Venezuela] - -Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees, -Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen, -Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of -these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman -has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come -to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their -descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South -America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the -“pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef, -mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up -during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native -peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective -but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the -unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map -as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness -and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from -Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of -a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left -standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown. -In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the -automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to -come in the not far distant future. - - - - - CHAPTER XXII - THE TRACKLESS LLANOS OF VENEZUELA - - -Men have been known to make their way directly from British Guiana to -Venezuela; but the effects of the World War were widespread and only by -taking an ocean liner to Trinidad and transferring to an Orinoco -river-steamer could I begin the next and last stage of my South American -journey, a tramp across the Land of Bolívar—and Castro. By an -extraordinary stroke of luck the _Apure_ of the “Compañia Venezolana -Costeira y Fluvial” was returning that very day, after a month of -repairs in Port-of-Spain, to her regular run on the upper Orinoco, so -that in less time than it takes properly to fulfill the protracted -consular formalities required of those entering Venezuela I was on my -way as the only passenger across the Bocas in just such a frail, -two-story, side-wheel craft as that by which Hays and I had crawled up -the Magdalena into South America three years before. - -There was little new along the lower Orinoco to one who had seen every -large river of the continent. Here and there a canoe paddled by naked -Indians nearly as light as a sunburned white man crept along the lower -fringe of one or the other mighty forest wall. A few huts, mostly -abandoned, on the right-hand bank we almost constantly hugged, with now -and then a cornfield chopped out of the forest, were the only other -evidences of humanity. Where we stopped for firewood, groups of Indian -men and women, some of them wearing clothes and all of them showing in -their degenerate, vicious faces evidence of having made the acquaintance -of what we proudly call civilization, lounged in the edge of the jungle -watching our slightest movements. Their huts were only four poles -holding up a thatch roof, but every person had his own hammock, covered -by a _mosquitero_ reaching to the ground. Gradually hills closed in on -us, low, thickly wooded, with great granite outcroppings. Two old yellow -forts appeared, the one on the higher hill already a ruin, the other -flying the yellow, blue, and red flag of Venezuela, with quite a village -of huts below it for the half-Indian soldiers in khaki and their -slattern women. These “Castillos de Guayana” were built by the Spaniards -to protect the entrance to the Orinoco, and it is mainly pride which -causes their feebler descendants to keep up the fiction. For the -authority of Caracas is little more than theoretical in that half of -Venezuela called Guayana which lay hidden in densest wilderness on our -left. - -As we neared Ciudad Bolívar, white-winged boats more comfortable than -the wall-less dwellings along shore, each with a huge number painted on -its sails, came down the light-brown river among the small floating -islands it had torn off far above. The typically “Spig” city lay piled -up over a knoll on the southern bank, scattered portions of it spilling -over the rolling and marshy country roundabout. A few feet from shore we -were ordered to halt and await a “visit,” and it was hours later that -the languid, futile formalities were ended. The chief excitement in town -was “the dike,” a great wall built to keep back the water from the -flooded campos, now leaking until the great lagoon which always forms at -the foot of the town during the rainy season was driving out the -dwellers in the lower fringe of huts. Half the city had come out to see -prisoners from the _cárcel_, under even more evil-eyed soldiers from the -_cuartel_, strive to stop the leaks by letting cowhides over the side of -the wall and tamping apathetically here and there with their clumsy -tools. But it is the Venezuelan custom for jailers to steal most of the -rations to which their charges are entitled, and the prisoners were in -no condition to accomplish their task, even had they had any incentive -to do so. I was startled to hear a voice behind me say, “I fear we all -go’n’ get de wash-out, sah.” - -At least it gave one a sense of not being entirely cut off from the more -orderly world to hear English-speaking negroes in the streets of Ciudad -Bolívar, and their presence made other foreigners less subject to -constant open-mouthed scrutiny. Hackmen, chauffeurs, nurse-girls, and -servants in general were commonly Guianese or West Indian negroes, so -that my native tongue often sounded in my ears. The rest of the -population was that of almost all Spanish-American cities,—few pure -whites and fewer full Indians, but every possible mixture of the two, -with a goodly dash of African blood thrown in to complete the -catastrophe. - -Whatever beauty Ciudad Bolívar has is indoors. No green lawns or -flower-gardens cheer the eye of the passer-by, though now and then a -glimpse through a doorway along the deadly line of dirty stucco walls -reveals a patio filled with blossoms and tropical shrubbery, with -perhaps a fountain. Even inside is no patch of Eden. Parrots, as well as -all domestic fowls, contest the average patio with dogs, pigs, naked -urchins, and adults. It is in conformity with his other cruelties to -dumb brutes, his total lack of compassion, that the keeping of caged -animals is an inherent trait of the South American. Back of the city -lies an extensive swamp from which come great numbers of mosquitoes, the -same swamp that the people were struggling so energetically to have -their jailbirds hold in check. It is often hot by day, but at night a -cool breeze sweeps in from the broad Orinoco and the town casts off its -torpor. Lights spring up, gaudily dressed and heavily powdered women -lean on their elbows behind the heavy wooden window-bars, the band plays -along the waterfront Alameda, the streets are filled with a roving crowd -of carnal-minded men and boys, and Ciudad Bolívar seems for a space -almost a wide-awake city. - -The Venezuelans refused to take my proposed walk across the country -seriously, so that it was doubly difficult to get trustworthy -information. The llanos were said to be flooded at that season, and the -overland journey to Caracas was reputed to be 180 leagues, a mere 540 -miles! I dared not send myself forth on any such unnecessary stroll as -that, for I had solemnly sworn to be home at all costs within four years -of my departure, and it was already the end of July. But at least I -could tramp straight across to the Atlantic, and find swifter means of -transportation to La Guayra and Caracas. There were worse stories of the -dangers of a lone “gringo” wandering through Venezuela than in any other -South American country. Revolutionists had for months infested the very -territory in which I proposed to risk my life—but I remembered the tale -of the Venezuelan colonel sent with his regiment to wage battle over the -range, who came hurrying back at the head of his troops, to report, “My -general, just over the summit we met two drunken Americans, and they -would not let us pass!” Besides, the war in Europe had made it difficult -for bandits and revolutionists to get arms and ammunition. “But at -least,” cried the natives, “you must have a mule and a saddle!” and a -kind man offered to sell me such an outfit, “all ready to mount”—for a -thousand _bolívares_! True, a _bolívar_ is no more than a franc, but a -thousand of them was more than I was depending upon to set me down in -one of our north central states. - -[Illustration: An Indian family at eastern Venezuela] - -[Illustration: Lopez, the hammock-buyer, and the charm he always wears -on his travels] - -[Illustration: A Venezuelan landscape] - -I was reduced, therefore, to my usual common denominator,—engaging my -own instincts as guide and hiring my own feet to carry myself and my -belongings. A certain reduction of the latter was imperative. The most -effective accomplishment in that respect was the trading of my heavy -Ceará hammock—though it was like dismissing an old friend, for I had -slept in it since long before Carlos died—for one made of _curagua_ by -the Indians of the Orinoco. This was a mere grass net, being woven of -the fibrous leaf of a small wild plant related to the pineapple; but it -weighed only forty ounces, ropes and all, and is capable of holding me -comfortably in its lap to this day. As I was taking leave of the -native-born American consul, my attention was drawn to great blocks of -yellowish stuff in his warehouse that were sewed up in sacking and -stenciled for shipment to the United States. It turned out to be chicle, -the milky juice of the _sapodilla_ tree, which flourishes along the -Orinoco, boiled down and dried for use in the one land that appreciates -so doubtful a luxury. The consul gave me a piece, very light in weight -and of the size of my fist, and the wisest thing I did in Venezuela was -not to throw it away—not simply because it was pure chewing-gum, lacking -only the sweetish flavor, but because it saved me many a thirsty hour in -my tramp across the arid country. - -The Orinoco sweeps swiftly past Ciudad Bolívar, formerly called -Angostura—the “Narrows”—a big rounded rock breasting the current in -midstream. I crossed it in one of the little sailboats with numbered -sails, speeding along before a stiff breeze that seemed to whip us -swiftly forward, until a glance at the shores showed that we were really -moving backward downstream, so swift was the current. Only gradually did -we make the opposite bank, and it took nearly an hour to pole our way -back to Soledad, just across from where we had started. One could -scarcely blame this hamlet, justly named Solitude, if it looked -unwashed; only the day before a boy of twelve had stepped into the river -for a bath and an alligator had walked off with him for its Sunday -dinner. Still, the place had children to spare. Staggering ashore under -my bagful of assorted junk, I at once struck out along the “camino -real,” a mere trail which first climbed to a slight plateau with a view -back on Ciudad Bolívar, then broke into thinly scrub-wooded pampa or -sandy llanos covered with tuft-grass as far as the eye could see. As the -“royal road” showed a constant tendency to split up into many paths that -lost themselves in the heavy grass, I had to trust mainly to compass and -instinct. At noon I stopped at a mud-hole fringed with cattle-tracks to -eat a square yard of cassava-bread washed down with handfuls of muddy -water. The sweat poured off me in streams under my big, awkward burden, -and it soon became apparent that I must still further reduce my load. -Then and there I gave my leather leggings to a passing half-Indian -horseman, who, to prove his aboriginal blood, did not so much as thank -me. Three Indians in hats, loin-cloths and pieces of jackets, with an -old rifle each, loping noiselessly past, aroused my envy. - -The sun was still troublesome when I came to a miserable village of half -a dozen mud-and-thatch ruins, before which ragged men sat in deep -silence, now and then heaving a long sigh and relapsing again into -silence. I coaxed one of them to row me across the La Piña River, and -plodded on. What time it was when I reached a ranch called “El Orticero” -I cannot say, for the crystal and minute-hand of my aged tin watch had -succumbed to the day’s struggle, and the rest of the contraption -functioned only intermittently. I pressed it upon my old but artless -host, and a chicken died in consequence. But the fowl was evidently both -young and slender, for the entire dinner consisted of a thin soup with a -few scraps of chicken in it and a bowl of milk. No wonder these people -have no energy; this to them was a gala meal. - -The considerable wait from dawn to sunrise was scarcely worth the small -cup of black coffee, or rather, _guarapo_, which the brewing of last -night’s coffee grounds yielded. Passing the cow-yard as I set out, -however, I got a bowl of foaming milk with which to wash down another -shaving of cassava. In the middle of the morning a strong fever came -upon me, forcing me to lie down in scrubby shade on the sand and -tuft-grass for an hour or more. When I could endure my raging thirst no -longer, I crawled to my feet and stumbled on across the blazing, choking -semi-desert in a for a long time vain quest for water. At last I came -upon a red-hot sandy bed, along which crawled a stream half an inch deep -where I scooped out a hole and, when it had somewhat cleared, inhaled in -one breath a good quart of the lukewarm water. A reasonable man, -recognizing the trip I had laid out for myself as a mere “stunt,” would -have given up and returned to Ciudad Bolívar and Trinidad; but I was -born bull-headed. I staggered on, and at length sighted a countryman’s -thatched hut—an _hato_, they call it in Venezuela—where I was welcomed -with bucolic but genuine hospitality and motioned to a seat on a -whitened horse-skull. I swung my hammock instead. When this had reduced -my weariness, I took up the imperative question of doing the same for my -pack, absolutely refusing to stagger farther under such a load in such a -climate. I threw aside my heavy shoes, thereby taking the weight of the -low city ones off my shoulders, following them with a pair of wintry -trousers and a workingman’s shirt I had seldom worn. The shoes and -several odds and ends I bequeathed to the woman of the _hato_, for her -absent husband; the trousers and shirt went to a visiting neighbor, who -promised to guide me in the morning to the next hamlet. I threw away the -tin cans that protected my exposed kodak films, all but the quinine I -should need for the next fortnight, almost all my other medicines, -two-thirds of my soap, most of my ink in the bottle I had carried from -Quito, and I even cut in two my tube of dental paste. The woman and her -visitor accepted all these things with labial thanks, but my strongest -hints produced nothing to appease my appetite. The sun was casting its -rays in upon me under the thatch roof before we sat down before a little -plate of fried mango, a kind of armadillo stew, and little bowls of -coffee—well enough, but just one-tenth as much as I could have eaten -myself. - -“_Por aquí son la gente muy amigos al interés_,” said my ungrammatical -guide, when the woman was out of hearing; “Here people are friends of -their own interest. If you had no money to buy food, or if you had not -given her all those fine things, you would not even have got this, but -might have starved before her eyes.” - -The truth is that the country people of Venezuela have almost nothing to -eat themselves, much less anything to share. They have not the energy to -grow much of anything, no one has the energy to bring things to sell -from town; and under such a blistering sun I do not know that I blame -them. More disheartening still is the government of unenlightened -tyrants under which they live. This woman and her husband—their story is -typical of thousands—once had more than a hundred head of cattle, and -other possessions in proportion. Came Castro with his fellow-rascals and -stole or ate the whole herd. One has little inspiration to pile up -possessions by rude labor under a tropical sun for the advantage of the -next passing band of ruffians. These poor, sequestered people in their -tucked away _hatos_ were typical of all the campo, with its stories of -oppression, tyranny, treachery, and stark brutality, all told in a -gentle, uncomplaining voice and manner, avoiding any direct reference to -the chief tyrant, as if even the palm-trees had ears, and replying to -all pertinent questions with that helpless, hopeless, irresponsible, -non-committal “_Quién sabe?_” - -Somewhat reduced in load, though still overburdened, I set out again -next morning. A tiny cup of black coffee was what I was expected to -start on, but I managed to beg two half-ripe mangos. In my light shoes -and reduced pack I spun along splendidly—so long as I had any road to -spin on. Just there was the rub. Don Augustín, the _hato_ visitor, had -left with me, carrying the shirt and trousers I had given him to guide -me to the next hamlet. But when, some four or five miles on, we had come -upon an Indian hut and bought two _patillas_, a kind of watermelon, for -ten cents, he announced that he was going a league westward to his own -house to get his hammock, and that I was to go “straight ahead” along -the road he pointed out, until he caught up with me. Both he and the -“Caribes,” as Venezuela calls the aborigines of this region, assured me -that I could not possibly go astray—yet I had not covered two hundred -yards of that sandy, coarse-grassed pampa before another “road” led off, -just such a narrow path as the one I was on. Then came fork after fork -in swift succession, until I was involved in a network, an absolute -labyrinth of trails, any one of which was as likely to be the “royal -road” as any other. I took one after another, only to have the path -dwindle and fade from under my feet in the high grass and be gone. -Several led to the charred remains of an Indian hut; one finally brought -me out before such a hovel still standing, where half a dozen Indian -women, all but stark naked, squatted and lolled on the earth floor, -three of them suckling cadaverous and filthy brats, and all languidly -engaged in scratching their leathery bare skins. They spoke little or no -Spanish, but seemed to imply that I should take a road down into a -valley. I took it, lost it, again found pieces of it, or some other -path, lost those, brought up in a stream that soaked me to the thighs, -and seeing worse ahead, as well as evidence that this was not the right -direction, I scrambled my way back to the Indian women. But they were -just as naked and ignorant as ever. I gave up, though it was still -morning and I was anxious to push on, and swung my hammock under a roof -on poles beside such road as there was, got into pajamas so that I could -spread my dripping garments in the sun, snatching them in again for -several light showers and hoped against hope that some one with human -intelligence would come along and give me information. - -Hope having died and my clothing being nearly dry, I harnessed up again -and went back once more to the Indian hut. This time the man was there. -He gave me in fluent Spanish verbose directions concerning a “road” -alleged to lead directly to “El Descanso,” which was close by, without a -chance of my missing it. Simple as his directions sounded to the fellow -himself, I offered him money to take me there; but he replied that he -was a consumptive with fever—and he looked it. Within a quarter of a -mile that “direct” road forked into at least twenty similar paths, every -one of which looked as direct as the others. Catching sight of a hut -down in a valley, I made for it through sticky mud—and found it open and -quite evidently inhabited, but with only a squalling infant in a hammock -within sound of my voice. I waded back to more trails upon trails across -swamps and through tangled undergrowth, saw another hut on a hill, -climbed to it and found it abandoned, saw another across a swampy valley -and struck out for that. This time it was a large house or collection of -houses with solid mud walls, instead of mere reeds, the shaggy thatched -roof “banged” at the doorways, and other signs of affluence and -intelligent information—but every door was padlocked. - -There was no use making any more blind guesses. I swung my hammock under -a tree at the gate, where another ass tied to a post was already dozing, -resolved to stay until my luck changed. For what seemed hours I hovered -on the brink of starvation, when there appeared across the rolling, -weed-grown country what looked like a horseman on a mule. Illusion! It -was only a boy on a jackass. He knew nothing of roads, but he did bring -me the information that I was even then at “El Descanso,” the very place -I had been seeking, and that the people who lived there would be back -“soon.” Also he sold me three mangos, but I had not even a knife, and to -rob a mango of its substance with a small pair of scissors and one’s -teeth is as harrowing as not to be able to find a drop of water after -the ordeal is over. Also in such a climate it is a fine fruit for those -who wish to die young. But at least I was passing the most blistering -hours of the day in breezy shade in a spot appropriately named “The -Rest.” - -It must have been four o’clock, and for two hours I had been enjoying a -fever, not the burning one of the day before, but the languid kind one -almost luxuriates in so long as one can lie still. Not a sound had there -been in all this time except the lazy sighing of the breeze in the -scattered shrubs and an occasional protest from the other hungry donkey. -Then all at once I heard a woman or a boy shout within twenty feet of -me; but when I sat up and called back there was no answer. I had -wandered twice around the house, and the call had been several times -repeated, before I discovered that it came from the family parrot, -perched on the ridge of the roof. Again and again it hallooed across -hill and swamp, in exactly the tone and voice of a South American -country woman, telling some one in clear, impeccable Spanish to come -home at once, that some one was there, and more to the same effect. At -last an answering voice, and then several came faintly across the -valley, sounding steadily nearer, and finally two girls, one already -married, shuffled up in _alpargatas_ and the shapeless loose calico -dresses of their class. The older one seemed resentful, and the younger -frightened, at sight of a man, even out under their gate-tree, and as I -was just then enjoying another wave of fever, I continued to wait, -hoping they would be followed by some one of my own sex. When it began -to grow dark, however, I went to ask the older girl if she could cook me -something. No, there was not a mouthful of anything in the house. Well, -how much for a chicken? Forty cents. I gave it, and lay in my hammock -for another interminable hour. Then she came to ask if cheese would not -do! I told her in a voice one does not customarily use to ladies that I -had paid for chicken, and she shuffled away again; and long after dark -she brought the cooked fowl intact, broth and all, with a bowl of goat’s -milk. But by this time fever had routed my appetite and I could not -drink more than half the broth and a bit of milk, so I wrapped the -chicken in a paper and hung it from a rafter of the empty sheep-pen -without walls, to which I retired rather than keep the timid maidens up -all night by staying in the house. - -The girls had no knowledge that roads ever ran anywhere, and were even -more grouchy and uncompassionate the next morning when I wheedled -another bowl of milk and struck off at random. Troubles never come -singly, and when I took down the chicken I looked forward to feasting -upon later in the day I found that a colony of ants had anticipated me, -and there was barely a scrap of meat left. As it was plainly up to me to -get somewhere, I took the first of several trails leading down into the -valley in a general northerly direction. It showed a few burro-tracks -for a way, but gradually split up into ever dwindling paths, all of -which ended sooner or later in _morichales_, those great bog swamps -filled with every difficulty and danger from entangled roots to -alligators, and densely shaded by the _moriche_ palms from which -Venezuela makes her hammocks. It would be easier to get through a stone -wall. At length I tried a path leading almost southwest, determined to -get around the swamp by a flanking movement, but I barely saved myself -from dropping into a sinkhole of quicksands. Back on dry land again, I -kept to the highlands for miles, at times plodding in exactly the -opposite direction from that in which I was bound, now and then wading a -patch of marsh and finally, crossing the stream near its outlet from the -_morichal_, arriving famished at a hut almost within gunshot of “El -Descanso.” Here the family of the boy who had sold me the mangos the day -before was engaged in the favorite Venezuelan occupation of lying in -hammocks, but the woman had more than the racial average of humanity and -intelligence and for the sum of ten cents she placed before me four -fried eggs, than which nothing had tasted better as far back as I could -remember. Then they directed me to San Pedro, and by some strange luck I -managed to keep the right one of the labyrinth of paths across the -deadly still, sandy prairie, with its coarse, uninviting grass and ugly -scrub trees, to a kind of country store, where two tiny stale biscuits -and a mashed-corn loaf, called _arepa_, gave me the strength to push on. - -Getting careful directions, I set off for Tabaro, and nothing could have -been easier than to find my way across this flat, hot plain, utterly -waterless, so that all the way to that cluster of huts I subsisted on -three small lemons. But I might have known that this easy going was only -a lull before the storm. They sent a boy a little way from Tabaro to put -me on the right road, “which goes straight, straight, without a chance -to lose your way, and anyway you can follow the tracks of this horse, -which just left for there.” Follow his Satanic Majesty! There is not a -human being, unless he knew it already, who could have distinguished -that path from a hundred and fifty others, of cows, horses, mules, and -everything else that goes on four legs in Venezuela. I took the one that -looked most promising, landed in a _morichal_, pulled off my shoes and -waded for some distance in black mud, tore through more tangled -undergrowth, and found myself only at the beginning of the real -struggle. Removing my trousers in the hope of saving enough of them to -escape arrest if ever I struggled my way back to civilization, I -attacked the swamp and jungle with all the force I had left, cutting my -feet and legs, gashing hands and even my face, sinking to my waist in -the slough, watching the sun rapidly setting on a night that I was not -only doomed to spend out of doors without food, but evidently immersed -in mud and without water to drink. Then all at once I burst out upon the -brink of a large, swift river. I had already heard of it, but was -supposed to come upon it at an _hato_ called “El Cardón” and be set -across in the owner’s canoe. There was no sign of human existence, much -less of a farmhouse, and the river was plainly too swift to swim with my -load, even if it were not full of alligators. Besides, the most -important thing just then was rest, for I was weak from fever and lack -of food. - -The red sun sank behind the tree-tops to the east—no, if I could have -gotten my bearings right, I believe it would have proved the west. I -hung my hammock between two scrubs, bathed on the bank of the river, -drank several handfuls of it for supper, and rolled in. To add to the -pleasure of the situation the one book I happened to have with me opened -to a chapter entitled “The English Cuisine!” Being absolutely devoid of -shelter, I had dragged a few fallen _moriche_ leaves together and made a -tiny lean-to beside me under which to shield my scanty possessions. It -was in keeping with my luck in this thirteenth Latin-American country in -which I had traveled that for the first night since I had reached -Venezuela it should rain. I was awakened first by some wild beast nearly -as large as a yearling calf, which dashed out of the undergrowth, -uttered a strange cry at sight of my hammock, and sprang in one leap -directly over me and into the stream with a great splash. I emptied my -revolver after it, but it quickly disappeared. By the time I had hunted -cartridges in the dark and loaded again—for some other heavy animal -seemed to be prowling about in the brush—it began to sprinkle, with -lightning flashes, and then it turned to a real rain. I adopted the -Amazonian means of keeping dry, stripped naked, rolled clothes and -hammock into a bundle I could thrust under the improvised shelter, and -sat down upon the unprotected corner of my stuff and let it rain. -Luckily, it did not continue long, and within half an hour I had rolled -up in my hammock again. - -[Illustration: Hammock-makers at home] - -[Illustration: The palm-leaf threads of the hammocks are made pliable by -rubbing them on a bare leg in the early morning before the dew has -dried] - -[Illustration: Lopez buying hammocks] - -[Illustration: We were delighted to find a rare water-hole in which to -quench our raging thirst] - -When next I woke, in a breeze so cool that I put on my daytime clothing -over my pajamas, the stars were shining. But this was base deception, -for I was awakened later by a veritable downpour, without even time to -strip, and could only huddle over my belongings and keep as much water -off them as possible. Soon afterward dawn came and the next problem -after getting my wet mess together was to decide whether to go up or -down stream. Nowhere was there a sign that man had ever before been in -those parts. I chose upstream, and quickly plunged again into another -_morichal_, such a jungle and swamp, filled with the odor of rotting -vegetation, as only wild men or lost ones attempt to fight their way -through. Plants with sharks’ teeth, sabre cacti with hook-shaped horns -and needle points along the edge, upright sprays of vegetable bayonets, -grappled and pierced clothes and skin. Through this mass I tore and -waded barefoot for perhaps two hours, by no means certain there was any -end to it; but finally, with legs and feet a patchwork of cuts and -scratches, and my shirt in rags, I came out upon another vast, -tuft-grass and sandy prairie. On these immense scrub-wooded plains, -crisscrossed in every direction by narrow cow-paths, but rarely by human -trails, a man might wander until he choked or starved. I followed one -path several miles until it died a lingering death, then fearful of -losing even water I returned to the river, which here almost doubled -upon itself. I tried another path and had wandered at random for I know -not how long when my eye was caught by a thatched roof an immense -distance away at right angles. I dragged my sore feet—they were so -swollen I could not put on my shoes—for miles through the cutting -prairie grass—only to find an abandoned and ruined hut! I was about to -return to the river in despair when I caught sight of another hovel on a -knoll a mile away. At first this also appeared abandoned, but as there -were several chickens about it, evidently it was inhabited, a fact -verified by finding still warm the ends of fagots over which breakfast -had been cooked. Lifting the woven-grass door of that half of the house -with walls, I found two hammocks and a few simple utensils inside, but -not a sign of anything edible, except the chickens, and I had no -matches. There was not even water, and I had to take a big earthenware -jar down to a swampy stream a quarter of a mile away and carry it back -on my head. Then I swung my hammock, got into pajamas, and hung out -everything to dry, determined to stay there until doomsday rather than -strike out into the foodless unknown wastes again. I slept. A shower -woke me just in time to snatch in my clothes. They had been hung out -once more and I was again asleep when, about midday, I was awakened by a -rustling of the grass door outside which I hung, and looked up to find a -woman of the same dirty, grouchy, uncompassionate type of all those -parts. I asked her where I was, and was delighted to learn, even from so -sour an individual, that I was barely a league distant from the _hato_ I -had been trying to reach. The female was returning there at once, and I -could “follow her footprints.” There was no getting her to wait a minute -while I dressed and packed, and well I knew my ability to lose her -footprints within the first hundred yards. I did just that, and should -have been as badly off as ever, had not a half-negro with two babies -appeared on a horse, followed by his woman and older daughter on foot, -likewise bound for “El Cardón.” We waded two swamps, cutting up what was -left of my feet, and when I stopped within sight of the _hato_ to wash -them in a stream, another sudden shower left me dripping at every pore. - -“El Cardón” was a collection of several mud houses in the center of a -large ranch. As usual, the owner was not at home, and the slatternly, -filthy, moralless female in charge seemed to take pleasure in my -condition. Though the place swarmed with chickens and several other -potential forms of food, her stock answer to my repeated offers to pay -well for one was that lie I had so often heard in the Andes—“_Son -ajenos_—they belong to someone else.” “Well, sell me _anything_ to eat,” -I urged, with as much calm dignity as I could muster under the -circumstances. - -“I am not the owner,” she invariably replied, “and I cannot.” - -She could, of course, for she was in full charge of the establishment, -but these part-Indian people of rural South America probably would enjoy -nothing more than to see a man die of starvation in their noisome -dooryards. It is the same spirit which makes the Spaniard shriek with -delight over a disemboweled horse at his bull-fights. It cost me a -struggle even to get water. Here the man with whom I had arrived took a -hand, and at last he got her to open the main room, the only one that -was not filled with fowls, dogs, babies, and pigs rolling in their own -filth, which soon invaded that also. It was a cement-floored place with -only the thatched roof for ceiling, photographs of the owner and his -relatives in all sorts of unnatural postures and some silly English -lithographs of about 1840 scattered around the half-washed walls. -Finally, at least three hours later, this same man induced the stubborn -female to serve me a dish of beans and rice with some scraps of pork in -it, such as she fed twice daily to the peons. - -As the next place was eighteen miles away, by a “road” I was almost -certain to lose, I was stranded until I could by hook or crook get a -guide and food for the journey. I had several times bathed my bleeding -feet and legs in the only disinfectant available, kerosene, which added -to the combined ache of my countless lacerations, while to complete my -superficial misery, swamps, sun, and perspiration had opened anew the -half-healed tropical ulcers and the wound above one elbow where an -English bulldog had bitten me when I had had the audacity to attempt to -deliver a letter of introduction on a sugar estate in British Guiana. At -length a man theoretically in command of the establishment arrived and -after a long argument I was half-promised a guide for mañana—if I would -pay him sixty cents, that is, three days’ wages at the local scale. Then -the woman whose hut I had invaded, returning “donde mí,” as the rural -Venezuelan calls his own house, accepted forty cents for a chicken which -she might or might not send for me to turn over to the unsympathetic -female, who might or might not be induced to cook it. The fowl came, -however, and died at sunset, so that it was long after dark when it -reached me smothered in rice and none too well done, though I had -difficulty in keeping enough of it for the next day’s journey. Another -_capataz_, with as little authority as the other over those supposedly -under his orders, appeared and, with two peons, hung his hammock from -the beams of the family parlor in which I sat. For some two hours they -swung back and forth thrumming rude guitars and singing improvised -couplets. Illiterate and ignorant as they were, they could alternate -unhesitatingly with two-line rhymes on some local subject of the -day—such as myself: - - “Y un blanco ha llega-a-a-o - Con los piés maltrata-a-a-o.” - -These were almost always spiced with some indecent reference to women, -about such remarks as two stallions might make to each other in a -discussion of mares, if they had speech—no, they would be more -dignified. “_Nosotros somos unos brutos_,” said one of the youths, who -at least had a glimmering of his own ignorance, rare in those parts; but -his use of the word “brute” was not what I would have given it. The -peons came twice after I had retired, posing at least as authorized -go-betweens, to ask whether I wished the unspeakable female to share my -hammock with me, a favor which she frankly took turns in showering upon -all the men above the age of fifteen on the place. - -The usual farmyard chorus announced dawn long before it arrived, and -even when it did come I could not strike off alone and unbreakfasted. -But two hours passed before the surly female brought me a cup of black -coffee, and I was about to start alone, whatever the risk, when a negro -named Ambrosio turned up and offered to go with me for forty cents. -Guides are cheap enough, if only you can get them. The female had stolen -more than half the chicken I had left in her charge, leaving me burdened -only with three pieces of it. I overcame Ambrosio’s natural tendency to -put it off until mañana and we struck down across the hot plain to the -river, which we crossed in an old _curial_ attached to a wire stretching -from bank to bank, Ambrosio carrying me ashore on his shoulders—at my -suggestion—to save me the time and trouble of removing and replacing my -shoes. I also bluffed him into carrying the larger part of my bundle. -Luckily, I had not started alone; I certainly should have lost the way -again. So did Ambrosio, for that matter, though like a true -Latin-American his version of it was “se ha perdi’o el camino—the road -has lost itself.” He was an experienced _vaqueano_, however, and -striking across the rolling, loose sand, with some sidestepping he -landed me at noon in La Canoa. - -This was a village of several large huts on a one-wire telegraph line, -the principal one being occupied by the part-negro family of the -telegraph operator. Almost a real meal was prepared for me while I swung -in my hammock above the earth floor of the _sala_, or “sitting-room.” -The toothless old lady with whom I whiled away the delay said it was bad -enough to live in a region where one could get nothing to eat, but “the -worst is that when somebody dies, you can’t even buy candles!” I agreed -with her. A wide, main-traveled trail, always within sight of the -telegraph wire, lay before me, but there were twelve miles to be covered -without a drop of water. I had three small green lemons, however, and -set my fastest pace until I reached the clear river near the end of the -journey, halting to drink it half dry before bathing and strolling up to -three miserable huts on a knoll above. - -Here a part-Indian youth named Lopez, with two asses and a mulatto boy -assistant, had also stopped for the night on a journey in my direction, -and as there were thirty miles without water ahead, I made myself -_simpático_ in the hope that we might join forces. Neither for love nor -money could anything be bought here, except sugar-cane and miserable -cassava-bread. I consider my digestive apparatus above the average in -enduring hardships, but I felt it was entitled to something better than -cold fried sawdust that evening. This ridiculous notion aroused the -mirth of the natives, who gathered around me prophesying disaster while -I tried the effect of boiling a few sheets of the cassava-bread into a -kind of hot pudding. They were right. The stuff tasted like wet calico -and an hour later I was attacked with the worst case of seasickness I -have ever suffered, which lasted nearly all night, the earlier part of -it gladdened by the natives standing about me doubled up with shrieking -laughter. - -[Illustration: Lopez uncovers as he passes the last resting-place of a -fellow-traveler] - -[Illustration: Dinner time in rural Venezuela] - -[Illustration: Lopez enters his native village in style] - -My breakfast consisted of sucking a sugar-cane. These people, though not -exactly savages, have the same improvidence and indolence, not to -mention heartlessness, and are so lazy that they will sit half-starved -or kill themselves early by the rubbish they put into their stomachs, -rather than go out and plant something. They were so lazy that there was -not a drop of water in any one of the three huts until some two hours -after the first complaint of thirst was heard; they live so literally -from hand to mouth that no sooner do they get a bean or a grain of corn -than they eat it raw. Let anything in edible form appear, and there is a -rush of dogs, pigs, chickens, and goats to dispute it with their human -companions; give them meat, and they will sit up all night to cook and -devour it, never beginning their preparations for the next meal until -everything, down to the last water-jar, is empty. - -Lopez offered to put my bundle on one of his donkeys, whether in the -hope of running away with it or from kindness mingled with the -expectation of a tip I did not decide until some time afterward. With -half the morning already gone, we were off at last, under a blistering -sun, everything I owned, including my money and proof of identity, on -the burro’s back, except my kodak, revolver, and a small bottle of -water. We had gone a league when Lopez decided to turn aside to the -_hato_ “La Peña,” as far off our line of march, and, still carrying the -bottle of water, I arrived at the same river from which I had dipped it -up and had to shed shoes and trousers to cross it. Here we squatted for -hours in an earth-floored farmhouse belonging to a man who boasted -possession of thousands of acres, yet who dressed in rags and in whose -house there was scarcely a day’s rations. No wonder people living as -they do in rural Venezuela are only too glad to start a revolution, if -only in the hope of perhaps getting something to eat. - -About noon I discovered that we were waiting while an ass that was for -sale could be found. Whichever way I guessed on this trip, I was wrong. -I had thought that by joining Lopez my progress would be increased; -already it looked as if quite the opposite were the case. At last the -burro was found; then he must be caught; then he proved _malucho_, which -means almost anything in Venezuela, wild, twisted, wrong, mad, not right -in any way. Then there ensued a long Oriental argument about the price, -which was finally settled at eighty _bolívares_ ($16.17). Next Lopez -must have a document of sale on a sheet out of my note-book and written -with my pen—because there was evidently not another one in the region; -then he must undo his pack and take out money enough in silver to pay -the price, after it had been counted half a dozen times on both sides, -and three times by me as confirmation, and finally, at a fine hour to -start on a twenty-seven mile tramp across a desert without water, food, -or shelter, we were off. - -For the first few miles it took the combined exertions of the three of -us to initiate the new donkey, who was young, large, and strong, so that -by the time we were well out of reach of the river again, our tongues -were protruding with thirst. Then we plodded unbrokenly on, hour after -hour across a tinder-dry desert of coarse tuft-grass and scraggly trees, -slightly rolling in great waves, the “road” a dozen untrodden paths -hidden in a grass that tore viciously at our feet. Unless we found a -_pozo_, or hole in the ground, well off the trail at about mid-distance, -by spying an extra insulator on the single telegraph-wire that kept more -or less beside us, we would come upon no water during the whole -twenty-seven miles. I allowed myself two swallows from my bottle at the -end of the first blazing half-hour, and as many at regular intervals -thereafter, having to share my scanty supply with Lopez. With the -typical improvidence of his race he had brought none with him, but being -a true Latin-American, he expected to be protected by those who had -provided themselves. By good luck, rather than for any other reason, we -did catch sight of the white knob on the wire midway between two poles, -and after long search found in the immensity of the desert an irregular -hole in the ground where water is said to be always clear and good. My -bottle filled again, but with my maltreated feet shrinking at every -step, we plodded on toward the next water, fifteen miles away. During -the last five of them I chewed chicle incessantly, and without it would -probably have been capable of drinking the blood of my companions. At -last, with dusk settling down, we sighted a good-sized house on a ridge, -but as this was a telegraph office, Lopez did not wish to approach it, -having the lower-class Venezuelan’s dread of coming into unnecessary -contact with the government in any form. - -We hobbled on until dark, when I caught sight of a hut some distance off -the trail and forced my tortured feet to carry me to it. It proved to be -the most miserable human dwelling I had yet seen, inhabited by a -yellow-negro male and female without a possession in the world worth a -dollar. There was not a scrap of anything to eat, no light, and not even -a roof over most of the house. But casually, during the course of the -fixed formalities of greeting, the man mentioned that back at the -“office” where Lopez had refused to stop the weekly steer had just been -killed! It was the first time since leaving Ciudad Bolívar that there -had been a possibility of buying meat. I offered the mulatto a cash -reward to go back and get me two _bolívares_ worth, an offer which he -accepted with what passes in Venezuela for alacrity, first showing me on -the way his “well”—two small holes in the ground on the edge of a -_morichal_. There I sat and poured gallons of water on my aching feet, -at the same time drinking my fill. Hobbling back to the hut, I had the -woman put on the kettle at once, and the water was hot when the man -arrived, strangely enough bringing what was probably the whole forty -cents’ worth—a great slab of beef nearly two feet long. Unnecessary -delay being painful, I myself cut it up and soon had it stewing. -Meanwhile I sent our colored friend to a neighboring hut to buy -_papelón_, which proved to be my old companion _chancaca_, _panela_, -_rapadura_, or crude sugar of solid form, in a new disguise. By the time -he returned I was drinking beef broth, to the astonishment of all -beholders, for these foolish people, who are always on the verge of -starvation and ready to eat the most inedible rubbish, boil their beef -and then throw away the broth! They seem, too, to prefer their miserable -cassava to meat, though in this case the family was still devouring -their share of the feast when I turned in at what must have been near -midnight of a day that I only then recalled had been Sunday. - -The most persistent of roosters, a few feet away from me, began his -false report about three and kept it up unbrokenly until daylight really -broke. This time we loaded the big new donkey, but the sun was well up -before we had found and captured the other two. The old canvas cover of -Lopez’ pack showed faintly the words “U. S. Mail,” but this would have -meant nothing to him, even had I called attention to it, for geography -is a closed subject to the rural Venezuelan. Those to whom I mentioned -that I came from the United States were sure to make some such remark -as, “Ah, United States of Venezuela?”—evidently thinking those two parts -of the same country. Lopez asked me one day, in an unusual fit of -curiosity, whether the money he had been using all his life was not -minted in my country, because it said “Estados Unidos de Venezuela” on -each coin. He was typical of the soul of the common people of that -misruled “republic,” harassed by fate, the government, the climate, the -difficulty of making the most meager living, and his faint, almost -unconscious longing for light, scarcely daring to mention his views on -politics even to a footsore foreigner, so dreaded are the tyrants whose -names are spoken by this class, if at all, only in whispers. Outwardly -many of their manners and opinions are ludicrous, but one comes to learn -that these little brown people have their own ego under their -comic-opera looks and actions. - -At the very next house we stopped for an hour while Lopez bargained for -_chinchorros_, his trade being that of _chinchorrero_, or buyer of the -grass hammocks that serve as beds to most Venezuelans. Vespucci found -the Indians of the Orinoco sleeping in the tops of trees, at least in -flood time, and named the country “Little Venice.” Their descendants -still sleep in tree-tops, though now woven into hammocks. _Chinchorros_ -are made of the tender center leaf of the _moriche_ palm, which men and -boys climb as material is needed, turning it over to the weavers, who -almost invariably are women. It is either a fact or a persistent -superstition that the finer grade of hammocks can only be woven by women -and in the early morning or late evening when the dew gives the air a -proper humidity; so at those hours one may come upon a girl or matron at -almost any hut in this region diligently rolling the split palm-leaves -into twine against her bare leg, for which there is believed to be no -effective substitute. Whether both delusions have not been deliberately -nurtured by the men for their own advantage is at least a reasonable -question. - -The heavier and cheaper grades of hammock, however, can be made under -less picturesque conditions, hence are astonishingly low in price. At -two neighboring huts Lopez bought a dozen for the equivalent of $7.70, -but the sun was high before they had been paid for and loaded. He hoped -to sell them in Barcelona on the north coast for about $10, also the -recruit donkey for a similar advance over its cost. A few miles beyond -we crossed by a narrow pass another great _morichal_ and the River -Tigre, where we swam and drank our fill in spite of the prevalence of -alligators, for another waterless nine leagues lay before us. In such -situations endurance depends mainly on the power of detaching oneself -from one’s surroundings, and I found that by picturing to myself in -detail the approaching arrival home to which I had so long looked -forward, I could banish even raging thirst into the dim background. Thus -I managed to plod fully half the distance on my tortured feet before -opening my bottle of water. We set the swiftest pace of which we were -capable in order to have the ordeal over as soon as possible, but bit by -bit the water and then the few small green lemons we had picked up at -the last house were consumed, and still the shimmering, withered desert -crept up over the horizon. To save my soles from the gridirons of -purgatory I could not increase my pace in proportion to my raging -thirst. The sun beat down from sheer overhead, began its decline, peered -in under my hat-brim, and still the painful, choking, unbroken plodding -continued. Lopez judged the hour by his shadow, and I by a toss of the -head till the sunlight struck my eyes, a gesture that had become second -nature during my long tramp through South America. Yet there was a -fascination about traveling with these primitive _llaneros_, enduring -all their hardships, entering bit by bit into their taciturn inner -selves, to find them, after all, different, yet strangely like the -generality of mankind. - -[Illustration: The hammock-buyer in the bosom of his family] - -[Illustration: Policemen of Barcelona, and a part of the city -waterworks] - -[Illustration: A glimpse of the Venezuelan capital] - -[Illustration: The statue of Simón Bolívar in the central plaza of -Caracas] - -At last there appeared, far ahead, a slight ridge, at the base of which -Lopez promised the River Guanipa. As we neared it two horsemen, the only -fellow-travelers we had seen in days, called to my companions from under -some scraggly trees, but I had not their aboriginal endurance in the -matter of thirst and stalked on until I could throw myself face down at -the edge of the river. We had intended to push on to Cantaura, eight -leagues farther, but it was already mid-afternoon, we were sore and -weary, and there was unlimited water close at hand. Moreover, the -horsemen, with whom I found Lopez hobnobbing when I hobbled back, -reported that a “revolution” was raging in Cantaura. - -The day before, three hundred bandits, or patriots, according to the -political affiliations of the speaker, had taken captive the local -government, looted the shops, and were now camped on the edge of town. -It was admitted that they were unlikely to molest foreigners; the -ordinary citizen, in fact, is little affected by such “revolutions,” -carried on by a small part of the population and disturbing the general -stream of life less than do our presidential elections. But there was a -possibility that the band might need hammocks, or even wish to add to -their ranks so lusty a youth as Lopez. We therefore swung our -_chinchorros_ under the scrub trees, which gave time not only for a swim -but for a general laundering and, most important of all, a chance to -nurse my lacerated feet. Our new companions were white enough to pass -for Americans, yet they were as ignorant of anything outside their -immediate environment as jungle savages. They did not know, for -instance, that water separated their country from the warring “towns,” -as they called them, of Europe—which they took to be a single small -country from which came all “gringos,” or white foreigners. To them the -great war of which they had heard faint rumors was merely another -“revolution” similar to the one in the nearby village; yet it was plain -that, for all these frequent uprisings instigated by ambitious leaders, -the Venezuelan country people were as peace-loving as they are, like -Spanish peasants, intelligent even though illiterate. - -With water at hand and a cool breeze sweeping across the sandy plains, I -looked forward to a comfortable night at last. But it was the first one -in Venezuela when mosquitoes and gnats made me regret abandoning my -_mosquitero_; moreover, Lopez, having decided to push on at midnight, -spent the interval incessantly chattering with his new friends, the -conversation consisting mainly of a similar but much stronger expletive -than “Caramba!” At midnight he decided to go later, when the stars came -out, and renewed the profane prattle; then we could not find one of the -donkeys, and I got at last a little sleep. When I awoke the stars had -abandoned the sky and the birds in the trees were beginning to twitter. -There was a classical sunrise that morning, for the rays streamed out -fan-shape on the clouds, as from the throne of God in old religious -paintings, no doubt modeled from this very phenomenon of nature. Long -after this was dissipated, we were still wandering the countryside, -looking for the lost donkey. When at last we were off, I had not -finished redressing my tender feet after fording the river before we got -a “_palo d’agua_,” a sudden heavy shower that drenched us through and -through. In the unladylike words of my companions something or other was -always “_echando una vaina_,” which is the nearest Venezuelan equivalent -to “raising hell.” - -We marched four leagues in sand and cutting grass, with muddy pools to -wade here and there, all very slowly because a sick donkey was unable to -keep a fast pace, even though “stark naked.” I arrived, therefore, at a -sluggish river in time to swim and get dressed again before the others -overtook me; but here Lopez left his negro assistant to bring in the -ailing burro, and we covered at our old pace the four leagues remaining. -The country changed completely from sandy _llano_ to stony hills, in -which a well-marked road cut zigzags. Worn, hot, and hungry, we came in -the early afternoon to Cantaura, a flat, quadrangular, silent town in -sand and weeds, of several thousand inhabitants. There were five by -seven solid blocks of mud houses, every corner one a shop with the -counter aslant it and scanty custom or stock-in-trade. It was an -incredibly languid town, much given to the crime of bringing into the -world children who could not be properly cared for, so that no woman who -could by hook or crook have an infant in arms was without one, and they -swarmed everywhere in spite of a naturally, perhaps fortunately, high -death rate. In fact, it was incredible how many human beings were -vegetating here, doing nothing but a little apathetic shopkeeping and -hammock-making, with the silence and inertia of the grave over -everything. - -All sorts of odds and ends of humanity were tucked away in the -rambling old adobe houses, in one of which we at once made ourselves -at home, tethering the donkeys in a patio filled with weeds and bush, -and swinging our hammocks in the monasterial old _corredor_ -surrounding it. Here we gave the slatternly woman of the house thirty -cents with which to buy beef and rice and make us a stew, she no more -thinking of charging us for the cooking than for room to hang our -_chinchorros_. Eggs were three for five cents; a large corn biscuit, -or _pan de arepa_, was one cent; “wheat bread,” as a tiny, dry ring of -baked flour of the size and shape of a bracelet was called, cost -something more than that; native cheese, _papelón_, even milk, though -probably from goats and certainly boiled, could be had by persons of -wealth. It was not long after our arrival, therefore, that Lopez and I -might have been seen squatting beside a makeshift table, eating in a -Lord-knows-when-I’ll-get-another-meal manner, with a crowd of dirty -women and children hovering about us and the kitchen, waiting to -snatch any scraps we might leave. One of the former passed the time by -feeding black coffee to a hollow-eyed baby some eight months old. -These people disregard the most commonplace principles of health, -wealth, and marriage—though certainly not with impunity. The town had -no water supply except a sluggish creek two miles away, to which I had -been forced to hobble even to wash my hands. Asses brought two small -barrels of it to a house for five cents, but even they were lazy, and -many people had no such sum, so that not only do the people almost -never wash, but a thirsty man must often canvass several families -before he gets a drink of water in which newly dug potatoes appear to -have been soaked. Like the political atrocities which long experience -has made seem unavoidable, these torpid people endured these things -without complaint or the thought of a possible remedy. - -The “revolution” two days before had been much less serious than the -telegraph, a strictly government organ, had reported to the outside -world. It was the first anniversary of the organizing of a revolt -against the national tyrant by a man highly favored in this region by -all except the political powers. That date had to be celebrated by a -“gesture” that would be heard even in Caracas; besides, the -revolutionists were hungry. On the other hand, they did not wish to -antagonize the generally friendly metropolis of Cantaura. The three -hundred, therefore, had camped nearby and sent a delegation of thirty -men into the town, to take the _gobernador_ prisoner—merely as a sign of -disdain to the hated tyrant who had appointed him, for that evening he -was released at his own _hato_. No shot had been fired, all food had -been paid for, and nothing stolen. It is not the revolutionists whom the -people of the _llanos_ fear, but the government soldiers, who enter -houses, attack women, and carry off anything that takes their fancy. In -Venezuela the government picks up men of the lower classes wherever it -can find them and impresses them into the army. It is not only the -favorite depository for criminals, but fully two thirds of their thirty -cents a day is stolen from the soldiers by those higher up, hence, -though they are rarely men enough to revolt against their oppressors, -they are quick to pass their misfortunes on to the population. In this -case, as in many others, the knightly deportment of the revolutionary -leader was not matched by the tyrant in power, for less than a fortnight -later he and a score of his staff were given no quarter when the -government troops surrounded them. - -Lopez bought four dozen more hammocks in Cantaura, and I a bag of food -to share with him in return for the privilege of loading it on one of -his donkeys, though the favor would have been granted me in any case, -for I had gradually found that there was a moderately kind heart beneath -the taciturn, part-Indian exterior of the _chinchorrero_. An older man -in the selfsame two-piece cotton garments, peaked hat of coarsest straw, -and bare feet thrust into cowhide sandals, had joined us, making our -party four men and as many donkeys. We plunged at once into a country -quite different from that I had so far seen, becoming involved in a -series of foothills which gradually rose higher and higher until the -ranges seemed to be climbing pellmell one over another in a vain effort -to escape some unseen terror. They were covered with thick woods, and at -first the well-marked trail of hard earth promised comfortable, shady -going; but soon that other curse of the foot-traveler descended in -torrents that almost made the drought of bygone days seem preferable. -Pounds of mud clung to every step; the earth grasped the heels of my low -shoes as in a clamp, requiring the full force of each leg to set it -before the other. I dared not drop behind; luckily, the others could not -go much faster than I, their only advantage being that they could wash -their bare feet or sandals in any stream without stopping, while I must -carry the mud on. - -Toward noon the country opened out once more, with fewer woods and lower -hills, and we were dry again by the time we finished the day’s toil at a -weed-hidden village. The next night’s stopping-place was, I believe, the -most horrible in all South America. Two old huts covered with ancient -reeds and completely surrounded, inside and out, with every filth of man -and beast, were inhabited by a fully white and well formed man, who -stumped about on legs completely hidden under many layers of the foulest -contamination. This had invaded everything, including the slatternly -blond mother and her half-dozen of what seemed beneath the mire to be -tow-headed children, the whole family rapidly going blind from some -disease resembling ophthalmia. Yet they seemed to have no inkling of -their abominations. The man chattered politics as if he might at any -moment be called to the presidency and handed me a foul liquid as if it -were the finest drinking water. The next day was laborious, though not -thirsty, Lopez leading the way along single-file paths and short cuts -over hill and dale through dense low woods. Now and then we broke out -upon a hot, bare stretch, where my companions sometimes threw themselves -face-down to drink liquid mud from some hollow in the ground. During the -afternoon the “road” was full of loose rocks of all sizes, which -tortured my maltreated feet almost beyond endurance. We reached the mud -village of Caripe before sunset, but Lopez had relatives farther on, so -we followed the “camino real” and a telegraph wire for several more -toilsome, up-and-down miles, the hammock-buyer now and then repeating a -cheerful, “We are almost at the door of the house.” Presently we left -the main trail and plunged off into the wet, black, silent night, -through hilly woods and head-high weeds, through knee-deep mud-holes and -past frog-chanting lagoons, to come at last upon two miserable huts -swarming with gaunt and savage curs and harboring vociferous, unwashed -people without number. They gave me scant greeting, and when I insisted -on having something hot to eat for the first time in three days, Lopez -explained that my stomach was “delicate.” By admitting this calumny I -obtained a soup made of two eggs, after which seven of us men swung our -hammocks in the open-pole kitchen. Water was so scarce that I had to -wait until all the others were audibly asleep before filching two tiny -canfuls from the mouldy kitchen jar to pour on my burning, itching feet -and legs. - -Being now only four leagues from his native El Pilar, Lopez left his -hammocks and asses to be brought in by the others, and saddling the new -donkey, which he had reduced in a week from a fine animal to a wreck, -and putting on a five-dollar velour sombrero for which he had spent in -Ciudad Bolívar his earnings on the trip before he earned them, he rode -away through the wet, early morning woods almost faster than I could -limp along behind him. But his plan of making a triumphal entry into his -native town met with poor success. The trail was so rough and rocky, so -up and down and hot and endless, that the animal all but dropped, and -Lopez had to get off and drive him. Such was his haste to get home that -I should certainly have been left far behind had he not every little -while met a friend on a donkey or a horse and paused to give him the -limp greeting customary to the region and to exchange the latest local -gossip. The invariable term of endearment was “chico,” rather than the -“ché” of the southern end of the continent, and to every man he met -during this last part of the journey Lopez gave the mild _abrazo_ of -rural Venezuelans, who do not shake hands, but stand at arm’s length and -touch each other on the shoulder. Finally we got into a pocket of -heavily wooded, low hills, everywhere choked with weeds, though there -were some cornfields, the ears broken half off and left hanging to -ripen. When it appeared at last amid such surroundings, El Pilar proved -to be the usual collection of ancient and decrepit mud huts set in a -tangle of jungle and weeds. Just at the edge of town Lopez mounted, and -with his new velour hat set at a rakish angle and his bare feet armed -with cruel spurs, to say nothing of the cudgel in his hand, he forced -the gaunt and worn-out donkey to prance into town like an army charger. -But again his plans came to grief. For the misused brute, not being -accustomed to the roar and hubbub of towns, effectually balked, and for -a hot and sweaty half hour the returning hammock-buyer had the -ignominious task of beating, pushing, dragging, and cudgeling the animal -through the gaping village to his own house. I meanwhile being reduced -to the necessity of carrying my own bundle. - -During the journey Lopez had never failed to raise his ragged straw hat -whenever he passed any of those crude shrines that mark the last -resting-place of those of his fellow-travelers who have succumbed to the -perils of the _llanos_ trails; and he had been diligent in keeping in -constant sight a charm in the form of an embroidered red heart worn -about his neck. Now it was evident that he had reached home and that -danger was over, for he hung the charm carelessly on the adobe wall, and -passed the local cemetery without so much as noticing it, though his -parents and grandparents lay buried there. He lived with several sisters -and a brother in the usual mud hut opening on a baked mud yard, with an -open-pole kitchen in which even stray pigs were not considered out of -place; but at least his sisters were quiet and outwardly cleanly, almost -attractive, and when Lopez, with a princely gesture, threw a peso down -before them and commanded “a huge hot meal,” such as he had learned -would win my approval, they obeyed his orders almost with alacrity. -Meanwhile I went up into the woods to a stream that had left pools of -clear water among rocks, and sitting down with a calabash, poured it -over me like a Hindu performing his sacred ablutions at Benares. I was -probably more soiled and ragged than I had ever been in a long career of -vagabondage, but at least this promised to be the last South American -mud village in which I should ever sleep. When I had put on my newly -washed pajamas and hobbled back to the house, a great chicken-stew -awaited us. Lopez and I made entirely away with it, together with a kind -of baked squash and several _arepas_; and when it casually leaked out -that eggs cost one cent each in El Pilar, I produced a _bolívar_ with -the request to get me twenty of them, half of which I shared with Lopez, -while ordering the rest prepared for supper and breakfast. When, in -addition to all this, we did away with a whole watermelon, the wonder of -the family and the village was complete. Having taught the hammock-buyer -the meaning of a real meal, I assumed for a moment the unaccustomed rôle -of missionary and strove to show his relatives why their customary diet, -with its miserable coarse cassava and stone-cold _arepas_, was not -conducive to longevity. - -“Now I am a dozen years older than Lopez,” I began. - -“Impossible!” interrupted his sisters, looking from his face to mine. - -“Yet both his father and mother, like the fathers and mothers of many -countrymen of Venezuela as young as he, have been dead and gone for -years.” - -“And yours?” inquired the girls. - -“Still quite young and lively, thank you,” I replied; “and my -grandfather....” - -“What—your _grand_father!” cried the astounded family of El Pilar. - -The peep of dawn saw me bidding Lopez farewell—and promising to send him -dozens of the many photographs the family had insisted on my taking, or -pretending to take, of them. I led the sun by more than an hour into the -jungle valley through which a stony and mountainous trail lifted me to a -summit, where, across wave after wave of blue wooded hills, appeared the -Caribbean, as a signal that I had at last walked South America off the -map. Huts were fairly thick among hills that grew ever lower and then -less stony, the way several times following the gravelly beds of dry -streams, until at last it broke out upon a perfectly level flat country -of cactus and dry, thorny bush. Here there was for a long time total -silence, except for the wail of the mourning dove, so characteristic a -sound in this sort of landscape. Then abruptly, without warning, I -emerged upon an absolute desert, bare and sandy looking as the Sahara. -Instead of the deep sand I expected, however, the soil proved to be -mud-flats, now dried and checkered in the sun, and good smooth going, -with a telegraph wire for guide—though a bit of rain would have made it -almost impassable. Soon I was surprised to hear the roar of breakers, -and when I was high enough to look over a sort of natural sand dike, -there lay the whole blue Caribbean, with what I had taken for another -range of hills rising out of it in the form of rocky islands—and, -confound my luck if, hull-down on the horizon and spitting black smoke -scornfully back at me, there was not a steamer racing in full speed in -the direction of La Guayra! - -The mud-flats alternated now and then with deep sand or patches of -thorny bush and cactus, a most miserable setting for what I at last made -out to be the church-towers of Barcelona, fifth or sixth city of -Venezuela, with some 15,000 apathetic inhabitants. But as if fate would -give me one last slap before we parted, an arm of the sea appeared when -I was almost inside the city and drove me and the trail miles back into -the thirsty bush, scrambling through cactus, springing across mud-holes, -forever limping painfully onward. Then at last I emerged upon a cement -sidewalk on an otherwise dirty, tumble-down, earth-floored town of flat -gridiron formation, inhabited by a ragged and uninteresting population -conspicuously Latin-American in all its manifestations, even to -striking, upon the appearance of a stranger, an attitude in which to -enjoy so rare a sight at ease and to the full as long as he remained -visible. - -[Illustration: A bread-seller of Caracas] - -[Illustration: The birthplace of Simón Bolívar of Caracas, the -“Washington of South America”] - -[Illustration: A street in Caracas] - -[Illustration: The Municipal Theater of Caracas] - -It was evident that my luck, if I ever had any, had completely deserted -me. Six hours before my arrival, the lonely little train of Barcelona -had left for Huanta, whence the steamship _Manzanares_ would have set me -down in La Guayra the next morning at a cost of thirteen _bolívares_. -Now, thanks to that half day of loafing in El Pilar, I might wait two or -three weeks for another steamer. There were, to be sure, small -freight-carrying sailboats advertised to leave from time to time; but -their agents in Barcelona seemed to have little interest in passengers, -particularly a mere “gringo.” For two days I pursued captains of such -craft from rosy dawn to the last note of the evening concert in the -central plaza, with no other gain than the rather sullen information -that there might be a boat leaving mañana. Meanwhile my slender funds -were going for corn-bread, and my patience was oozing away in the -monotony of the sand-paved, donkey-gaited mud town where not even a book -was to be had. Then one morning the captain of the sailboat _Josefita_ -agreed to let me sit on his deck from Huanta to La Guayra for only twice -the steamer fare, and I bumped away in the ridiculous little train to a -port consisting mainly of mud huts, cocoanut-trees, and an elaborate -stone customhouse. Here a long formality and the payment of half a dozen -government fees were required for a “permission to embark”—from one -miserable port to another of the same country—and I was ready to intrust -my future existence to the equally capricious ocean winds and Venezuelan -temperament. - -The _Josefita_ was a large covered rowboat with a sail, on which was -painted in huge figures the number required by Venezuelan law on all -such craft. The captain took on a few extra beans for the benefit of his -solitary passenger; but I played safe by filling my own sack with -corn-buns, native cheese, and _papelón_, and by some stroke of luck I -picked up a Spanish translation of Paul de Kock with which to pass the -time. Besides the captain and myself there were four ragged sailors, -neither old nor young, and, strangely enough, wholly free from African -taint. We were loaded with a few hundred native cheeses in banana-leaf -wrappings when we began crawling across the bay to take on mineral water -at Lajita. A rocky, half-perpendicular coast with scanty tufts of green -vegetation sloped down into the blue Caribbean in which I trailed my -rapidly healing feet. At four o’clock we drifted up to a beach and a -thatched village that we seemed to have passed by train that morning, -where we anchored while the captain and half the crew rowed ashore. -There they were gone for hours, evidently helping nature run down the -mineral water, for toward sunset there came from the land the sound of -boxes being nailed up. Meanwhile nature had produced considerable water -on her own account in a long series of thunder-showers that fell with an -abrupt whispering sound all around the boat. Most of this delay I spent -swimming over the side, trusting to my eyes to detect in time any -sharp-toothed danger in the clear, azure sea, then retired to the tiny -cockpit, where the so-called cook brought me a plate of plain rice and, -evidently as a special concession to first-class passengers, the front -end of a boiled fish. - -When the sun burned out again through the mists, we were speeding along -in a spanking breeze after a night in which a heavy sea had tossed us -constantly back and forth on the stone-hard deck, shipping water to soak -us wherever the rain had not done so already. Lest we might have dozed -in spite of all this, the ragamuffin at the wheel had broken forth every -five minutes in a howling wail of extemporized “song” which was meant to -encourage the wind and perhaps to scare off the evil spirits that ride -the darkness. The wind soon died, however, and at noon we were still -flapping with idle canvas in a calm, unbroken sea. The book I had picked -up was too silly for words; my five companions were utterly devoid of -human interest; our miserable fare, concocted by a “cook” who did not -know enough to boil water, was strongly scented with kerosene; and most -of the day was spent in a dispute between the captain and the singing -sailor, who, it seemed, could not read the compass and had taken us far -out to sea, when our safety depended on keeping within sight of land. -The crew had almost nothing to do but tack two or three times a day, and -spent the rest of the time sleeping on the bare deck, except the cook -and steersmen, who were lazily engaged at their tasks most of the time. -The sea, of the deepest possible blue, as if all the indigo trees of the -tropics had spilled their product into it, rose and sank in its endless -unrest without our advancing a yard. Well on in the afternoon a puffing -breeze developed, and on the far port horizon appeared a few stenciled -mountains. Gradually we drew near enough to see that they were clothed -with forest to the very sea’s edge. With anything like a fair wind we -could have made La Guayra that evening, but the breeze was genuinely -Venezuelan. At sunset a school of dolphins surrounded the boat so -closely as almost to graze its sides, and for an hour indulged in -athletic feats, like a crowd of schoolboys showing off, not only diving -entirely out of water so near that we could almost have put out a hand -and touched them, but giving themselves two, and even three, complete -whirling turns in the air, like somersaulting circus performers, before -falling back into the sea with a mighty splash. - -Dawn found us crawling close along a shore of sheer bush-grown mountains -lost in low clouds, lame with constant rolling on the hard deck and -disgusted with the monotony of existence. With La Guayra almost in sight -at the far point of this range, called the Silla de Caracas, we tacked -all morning against a head wind without seeming to advance a foot along -the roaring rocky mountain wall. Life on the ocean wave may sound -romantic on paper, but in a dirty and hungry sailboat off the coast of -Venezuela it calls for other descriptive adjectives. No doubt I needed -this final, post-graduate course in patience before leaving a -patience-training continent. Once we anchored to keep from losing the -little we had gained, and all day and the following night we rolled and -tossed in the selfsame spot, the man at the rudder trying alternately to -charm the wind with his raucous voice and to scare it into motion with a -vociferous “_Viento sinvergüenza, caramba!_” Now and then during the -night the snapping of canvas and the rattling of blocks above gave the -sensation that we were really moving at last, but when morning broke we -were off the very rock beside which we had lain down the night before. -Gradually, however, the breeze increased with the rising sun, and we -began to move swiftly through the water; but so strong is the current -along this coast that we seemed to remain for hours opposite identically -the same peak of the Sierra de Avila. Then we rolled for hours within -plain sight of La Guayra in a sea as flat as if oil had been poured on -it, without even a man at the rudder, so hopeless was everyone on board. -I had nothing to read; there was not a foot of space in which to walk; I -could not swim because of sharks; there was not a person of intelligence -within sound of my voice; even our miserable food was virtually gone; -there was only a bit of filthy, lukewarm water, full of all sorts of -sediment, at the bottom of the barrel, and still we flopped motionless -on a windless sea under a grilling sun. I understood at last what it -means to get oneself into a boat. - -By taking advantage of every faintest puff of breeze, our leather-faced -old salt coaxed us along during the afternoon, until a stiffening wind -overtook us at last and we slipped ever more rapidly along the great -mountain wall. Tiny villages here and there clung far up on little knobs -of land; great shadowy valleys and sun-defying corners; a town here and -there along the base, all seemed to bake in the tropical sun, and -certainly to sleep. By four o’clock La Guayra lay before us, its bathing -resort of Macuto just off our port beam; yet so Venezuelan was the wind -that we did not know whether we could reach harbor in time to be allowed -ashore. I might have landed and walked into town long since, were it not -illegal for passengers to enter Venezuela except at a regular port with -a customhouse. It is a splendid arrangement for politicians, but of -small advantage to becalmed or shipwrecked sailors. I shaved, however, -poured sea-water over my maltreated body, put on the only clothing I had -left after pitching my rags overboard, and presented the captain with -the old felt hat that had protected me from the sun in fourteen -countries. This last act may have induced his ally, the wind, to waft us -in behind the breakwater while the sun was still above the horizon. - -However, being in port in Venezuela is not synonymous with going -ashore. Once at anchor, almost within springing distance of a stone -wharf, I had to wait while the captain went to report my existence and -set in motion all the formalities, including the payment of fees, that -were required exactly as if I had been landing from a foreign country. -To tell the truth, no sane person would be eager to get ashore in La -Guayra, unless it was in the hope of immediately going elsewhere. A -parched and thirsty town, in spite of the brilliant blue sea beating -at its feet, with rows of unattractive houses, all alike except in -slight variations of color, and even those in pastel shades lacking -vividness, strewn irregularly, singly, in groups, and in one larger -mass, up dull-red and sand-colored hills which piled precipitously -into the sky, it plainly had little attractiveness except as a -picturesque ensemble from a distance. Trails climbed straight up this -sheer mountain-wall, as if in haste to escape the hot and ugly town at -its feet, while a carriage-road and a railway set out more decorously -along the shore for the same destination,—Caracas. - -A brass-tinted, supercilious official with a prejudice against shaving, -who was lolling beneath a regal awning, had himself rowed out at last to -ask me a score of absurd questions and set my answers down at length in -a book, after which he went ashore again to advise the government -whether or not I should be granted an “order of disembarkment”—without -which I must continue to sit out here in the blazing sun even though the -“_Caracas_ of Wilmington, Delaware,” across the harbor were about to -sail and I eager to take it. By and by a yellow negro rowed out to ask -if I had a visiting-card to prove my respectability, saying the -_prefectura_ was “making some question” about my landing. Another hour -passed, and at last a boat was sent to take me ashore, where I applied -at once to the collector of customs for the baggage I had intrusted to -the purser of the Dutch boat that had dropped me at Trinidad. Luckily, -the latter had carried out instructions, or I should scarcely have dared -venture up to Caracas. Meanwhile, one of the men who had rowed out for -me was dogging my footsteps with a want-a-tip air. He was, it turned -out, collector for the _corporación_, the foreign company that built the -docks of La Guayra, and which exacts forty cents for every passenger who -lands—or sixty, if he comes from a boat not tied up to the wharf. But -instead of collecting it in an office, or in an official way, he -followed me about like a bootblack and then tried to squeeze an extra -“commission” out of me on the ground that he had been forced to follow -me about. - -This “corporation,” which is English, holds what is rated “one of the -finest grafts” in South America, having the right for ninety-nine years -to charge for every person, every pound of merchandise, every trunk, -valise, and even handbag, which embarks or disembarks in La Guayra, to -say nothing of heavy fees for every ship that enters the harbor. Yet so -overrun is it said to be with native employees forced upon it by -politicians that the “graft” is by no means so splendid as it sounds. -Venezuela is notoriously in the front rank of political corruption in -South America, and La Guayra is its greatest single fleecing-place. From -the instant he enters this chief port the stranger is hounded at every -turn by grasping, insolent officials and political favorites permitted -to indulge in the most absurd extortions, a spirit which pervades the -entire population down to the last impudent, rascally street-urchin. -Taxes, dues and customs duties have frankly been made not only as high -and onerous but as complicated as possible, in order to mulct the -taxpayer or importer to the advantage of swarming loafers in government -uniform. A most intricate system of fines and penalties is imposed, for -instance, by the customs regulations, for the slightest errors in -invoices. The collectors receive meager salaries, but the discoverer of -any “violation” of the elaborate statutes pockets one half the fine -imposed, with the result that there is an un-Venezuelan zeal in looking -for flaws, and fines are assessed even for the omission of commas, the -faulty use of semicolons, and for abbreviations. - -One can scarcely blame a man forced to live in La Guayra, however, for -taking it out on his fellow-man. Piled up the sheer, arid mountain-wall -with only two streets on the level, and with the sun baking in upon it -all day, it feels like a gigantic oven; certainly it was the hottest -place I had ever seen in South America. Nor was it the stirring, -endurable heat, tempered by a constant breeze, of most of the continent, -but a sweltering, melting temperature that not only left me drenched -with perspiration within a minute after I had stepped ashore, but which -made it impossible even to write because one’s hands soaked the paper, -which set one to dripping before he sat down to early morning coffee. -Everyone in town had a wilted, unshaven, downcast air, as if hating -himself and the world at large for his uncomfortable existence. To add -to my disgust, it was Friday, and the penetrating stink of fish pervaded -every corner of the organized squalor, pursuing me even into the highest -room of the dirty negro _pension_ which posed as a hotel. The only -endurable place in town was a little piece of park and promenade along -the edge of the sea; but the bestial habits of the populace had sullied -even the ocean breezes. - -The “Ferrocarril La Guaira á Caracas,” built in 1885 by an English -company, takes twenty-four miles to cover an actual distance of about -eight, with a fare of ten cents a mile and a train in each direction -twice a day. So often had I climbed by rail abruptly into the clouds in -South America that this was no new experience. Moreover, the climb is -much less lofty than several others, though there is much the same -sensation as one goes swiftly up from sea-level in vast curves around -the reddish desert hills, with an ever-opening vista of La Guayra and -its adjacent towns along the scalloped shore. Then the train squirms in -and out of Andean ranges, at times utterly barren, at others green, past -dizzy precipices and mighty valleys, the stone-faced cartload climbing -in vast turns in the same general direction. At the halfway station of -Zigzag we passed the down train, after which we rumbled quite a while -across a plateau country among mountain heights, until finally there -burst upon me the last South American capital—striking, but not to be -compared with the first view of several others. - -Caracas has “some 11,000 houses and 80,000 inhabitants,” including its -suburbs, partly because the constant revolutions have driven the -population to the national capital for protection. A tyrant can do -things out on the lonely _llanos_ which he would not dare do in the -shadow of his own palace. Being but three thousand feet above sea-level, -it lacks many of the unique features of lofty Bogotá, Quito, or La Paz; -yet it is high enough to have a cool mountain air that quickly fills the -traveler in the tropics with new life. Seated in a mountain lap twelve -miles by three in size, the Sierra de Avila cuts it off from the sea and -high hills enclose it on all sides. The site is uneven, especially -toward the range, its upper part covered with forest, over which climb -the same direct trails one sees scrambling up the far more precipitous -mountain face from La Guayra. Here and there the town is broken up by -_quebradas_ and several small streams, of which the Guaire is almost a -river; yet Caracas in its lap of green hills is not itself hilly, but -merely undulating, its streets rolling leisurely away across town, with -a considerable slope from north to south, so that every shower washes -the city, and the tropical deluges to which it is sometimes subject make -rivers of the north-and-south streets. The Venezuelan capital has little -of the picturesqueness of several west-coast capitals. There are no -Indians with their distinctive dress, no paganish street-calls, no -quaint aboriginal customs. On the other hand, it is well put together, -with good pavements and sidewalks, instead of cobbled roads with -flagstones down the center, and has a more up-to-date air, as if closer -in touch with the world than the loftier cities to the west, and it is -at least a pretty city from whatever hillside one looks down upon it. - -The houses are wrong side out, of course, after the Moorish-Spanish -fashion, the streets faced by ugly bare walls, with the flowery gardens -and the pretty girls within. It has by no means so many churches per -capita as some of its neighbors, though many priests are to be seen, -sometimes standing on the corners smoking cigarettes and “talking girls” -with their layman fellow-sports. The cathedral houses a fine painting, -unusual in South American churches, an enormous “Last Supper” by a -Venezuelan who died while engaged upon it, so that portions are merely -sketched. Beside the National Theater there is a bronze statue of -Washington, erected during the centenary of Bolívar in 1883. He has no -cause to feel lonely, even so far from home, for Caracas swarms with -national heroes—in statues, the only muscular, full-chested men in town, -unless one be misled by the splendid tailor-made shoulders in the plazas -and paseos. No other city of its size, evidently, was the birthplace of -so many great men. Nearly every other house bears a tablet announcing it -as the scene of the first squall of “Generalisimo” Fulano or of “the -great genius” Solano. Not all of these, however, are mere local -celebrities; two simple old houses bear the tablets of Andrés Bello, the -grammarian, whose fame reached to Chile and to Spain, and of Simón -Bolívar, “the Liberator.” - -Somehow, when one has been out of it for a time, the Latin-American -atmosphere is almost pleasing—when one is in a mood for it. Here I found -myself enjoying again the hoarse screams of lottery-ticket vendors, the -cries of milk-dealers on horseback, their cans dangling beneath their -legs, the bread-man with his red, white and blue barrel on either side -of the horse he rides, the countless little shops where refugees, -huddling under the protection of the capital, strive to make both ends -meet by trying to sell something, content at least to be no longer at -the mercy of government as well as revolutionists out on the little -farms that have long since gone back to jungle. Caracas rises and begins -business later than La Guayra, where the heat of noonday makes a siesta -imperative; it is a bit less foppish than Bogotá or Quito, perhaps -because of its greater proximity to the world. Here, too, are ragged men -and boys who soften their incessant appeals by using a diminutive “Tiene -usted un fosforito?” “Dame un centavito, caballero?” “Regálame un -regalito, quiere?” It is easier to comply now and then with such -requests in a city where prices have not leaped skyward, as in most of -the world. At the “Hotel Filadelfia” my room and food cost four -_bolívares_ (almost eighty cents) a day. True, I found my hammock more -comfortable than the bed, though the nights were somewhat chilly in it; -and the impudence, indolence, and indifference of the _caraqueño_ -servant is notorious. Ask anyone, from manager to the kitchen-boy, to do -something, and the reply was almost certain to be a sullen, “That’s not -my work,” nor would they ever deign to pass the word on to whosoever’s -work it was. Evidently they belonged to a union. As in Ecuador, hotel -guests were forbidden to talk politics. - -Some of the principal streets were lined with gambling houses of all -classes, from two-cent-ante workmen’s places to sumptuous parlors with -pianos playing and the doors wide open to all, even to a penurious -“gringo” who came only to watch the heavy-eyed croupiers and the other -curious night types who make their living by coin manipulation. Though -“the cheapest thing in Caracas is women,” they are seldom seen on the -streets. Illegitimacy, like illiteracy, is more prevalent than its -opposite, but it is not the Spanish-American way to flaunt social vices. -American influence is more in evidence than in any other South American -country; Caracas is the only city on that continent where I saw native -boys playing baseball. Germans control much of the commerce and the -longest railway in the country, from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, but with -these exceptions the English hold most large enterprises, including -electric-lights, telephones, and street-cars, and are reputed to be -clever in keeping out American competition. - -Like Santiago de Chile, Caracas has a limited number of “best families,” -who form the “aristocracy” and to some extent an oligarchy, though -intermarriage has produced among them some of the ills of European -royalty. There are good-looking, not a few pretty, and even occasionally -beautiful women in this class, though the casual visitor sees them only -behind the bars of their windows or promenading in carriages and -automobiles around El Paraiso across the Guaire on Sunday afternoons, -and at the evening band concerts in the Plaza Bolívar. On the whole, -this so-called higher class is more corrupt and worthless than the -workers, especially those of the _llanos_, who at least are laborious -and long-suffering, even though ignorant, superstitious, and often -victims of the same erotic influences as the rich and educated. It is -natural that the political power in Venezuela should have been wrested -from this weak “aristocracy” by hardier types from the interior. - -The most notorious of these, the chief founder of that military -dictatorship which to this day holds Venezuela in a tighter grip than -any other country in South America, was Castro. Charles II of England -would have felt at home with this fallen tyrant, a degenerate who made -use of his power and government riches to corrupt the maidenhood of his -native land. His subordinates, especially the governor of the federal -district, were chosen less for their ability as rulers than for their -success in coaxing young girls to visit the tyrant in a house across the -Guaire, where he carried on his amours almost publicly. In those days -Caracas was overrun with saucy little presidential mistresses in short -skirts. Force, or anything else likely to lead to public scandal, -however, was not included among Castro’s amorous weapons—for there was a -Señora Castro before whose wrath the highest authorities of Venezuela -were wont to flee in dismay. The terror which Castro himself still -evokes among the masses of the country is such that his name to this day -is almost never openly spoken. In Ciudad Bolívar I sat one evening, -reading an exaggerated tale of the tyrant’s lust, a book proscribed in -Venezuela but stacked up in the book-stores of Trinidad, when the -hotel-keeper paused to ask in a trembling voice how I dared have such a -volume in my possession. - -“Why not?” I asked. - -“Ah, it is true,” he answered, turning away, “in the great United States -there are no tyrants to make a man fear his own shadow.” - -Aside from his patent faults, however, Castro was a man of strength and -native ability; though this was offset by his provincial ignorance, a -misconception of the unknown outside world which led him to believe he -could easily thrash England, France and Germany combined, so that he -took pains to alienate foreign governments. It is an error into which -his successor has been careful not to fall. - -General Juan Vicente Gomez is an _andino_, like Castro—that is, a man -from the mountainous part of the country near the Colombian border, with -considerable Indian blood and a primitive force that overwhelms the -soft-handed “aristocracy” of Caracas which once ruled the country. Like -Castro, he is ignorant, strong, coarse, and shrewd—fond of young women, -too, though with strength enough to put them into the background when -they interfere with more important matters. Years ago he mortgaged his -property to help Castro, but the latter treated him like a peon, even -after appointing him vice-president. Gomez, however, knew how to bide -his time. By 1908 his dissipations had left Castro no choice but to go -to the German baths or die, and he delegated his power to the obsequious -vice-president and went. A few days later Gomez set out at four in the -morning for a round of the military barracks, called out the commanders, -thrust a revolver into their ribs, and requested them henceforth to bear -in mind that he was president of Venezuela. This was his first -“election.” During his seven-year term he brought about some -improvements, particularly in roads and the army, not to mention -acquiring immense properties, while the exiled Castro was losing his to -former victims who were suing him in the Venezuelan courts. The -constitution stated that a president could not be elected to succeed -himself. Toward the end of his term, therefore, Gomez nominally -resigned, put in a temporary figurehead, and had congress “elect” him -again. At the same time he had a new constitution made in which there is -no mention of reëlections, with the understanding that it was to come -into force when he took the oath of office. - -This he was to have done some months before, but, being a cautious man, -as well as preferring country life, “the elect”—never did I meet a -Venezuelan who dared mention him directly by name—remained on his own -ranches in Maracay, a hundred miles out along the German railway, -leaving one of the minor palaces occupied by a tool called “provisional -president.” Castro himself, however, never attained such absolute power -as the new tyrant, who puts recalcitrant congressmen in jail, personally -appoints state, municipal, and rural authorities, and in general smiles -benignly upon the helpless constitution. Not the least amusing contrasts -in Venezuela were the private opinions of its chief newspaper editors -and the slavish attitude of the sheets themselves, the entire front -pages of which were taken up day after day with photographs of the -“President-Elect of the Republic and Commander-in-Chief of the Army” in -this or that daily occupation, followed, to the total exclusion of any -real news, by obsequious telegrams from his henchmen in all parts of the -country, from misinformed foreigners or foreign governments, often from -imaginary sources, congratulating him and his countrymen that “the -greatest man of the century has again been chosen as their leader by the -great and free Venezuelan people.” Even over-altruistic or subsidized -American periodicals with a South American circulation frequently hold -up the present tyrant of Venezuela as an example of the progressive -constitutional ruler. Many of the best people of that country would -prefer even American intervention to the illiterate tyranny which makes -it dangerous to speak their real thoughts above a whisper; but there is -a strict censorship, and Gomez, wiser than Castro, professes great -friendship for all great foreign powers, particularly the overshadowing -“Colossus of the North.” - -In the long run a people probably gets about as good a government as it -deserves, and a stern dictator, on the style of Diaz of Mexico, is -perhaps the ruler best suited to Venezuela. But from our more -enlightened point of view such rule would not seem to promise social -improvement. The country is bled white to keep up the army and several -other presidential hobbies, to the exclusion of schools and other forms -of progress. Every cigarette-paper bears a printed government stamp -alleging that it pays duty in benefit of “Instrucción Pública,” a source -yielding more than a million dollars a year; yet it is years since the -students of the University of Caracas struck because Gomez spent the -legal income of the schools on the army, and at last accounts it had not -yet been reopened. The dictator himself can read, but not write, except -to sign his name. Every morning at four he was at his desk in Maracay, -the business of the day laid out before him,—first his private affairs, -next his hobby, the army, then politics and the country in general. -According to a genuine authority on the subject, he laboriously spells -out all the correspondence himself, then calls in a shrewd and trusted -uncle, a man too old to have ambitions to succeed him, and together they -concoct the replies. The present government of Venezuela is truly a -family government. General José Vicente Gomez, the son whom the dictator -is evidently grooming to be his ultimate successor, is Inspector General -of the Army; General Juan Gomez is governor of the federal district; -Colonel Alí Gomez is second vice-president; two other sons are -presidents of states—the dictator, by the way, is a bachelor—and so on -through the family. Like many another Venezuelan of numerous -descendants, “the elect” never married; but of his scores of children by -many different women he has legitimized the few most promising and -lifted them to his own level—a practical, man-governed form of survival -of the fittest. - -With the white mists still clinging to Caracas and its sierra, I -strolled out one morning along the “Highway of the West” through the -flat, rich vega to Dos Caminos and Antimano, where the German railway -breaks out of the lap of hills and squirms away to Valencia and Puerto -Cabello. A private way through deep woods with coffee bushes brought me -to the little country home of Manuel Diaz Rodríguez, and at the same -time reminded me that all is not tyranny, sloth, and hopelessness in the -mistreated Land of the Orinoco. For here, amid stretches of light-green -sugar-cane that seems destined ultimately to bring material prosperity -to the country, lives one of South America’s greatest contributors to -modern Spanish literature. - -I had planned to say farewell to South America by walking up through the -“Puerta de Caracas” and over the mountain range to La Guayra. But on the -last evening a tropical deluge roared down upon the capital, and I dared -not tempt fate to prevent me from reaching home within four years of my -departure on my Latin-American pilgrimage. The last day of August dawned -brilliant and cool. In my pocket was a ticket to Broadway and just -enough ragged Venezuelan money to carry me down the mountain and through -the swarming grafters of La Guayra to the steamer. Cheery with the -thought of home-coming, I lugged my own baggage—to the disdainful -astonishment of the Venezuelan crowd—out onto the platform and stowed it -away under a second-class bench. I had no sooner stepped back into the -waiting-room, however, than a gaunt and coppery _caraqueño_ slowly -mounted a chair in front of a blackboard over the ticket-office, and -with nerve-racking deliberation began to write, in a schoolboy hand -which required some ten seconds for each stroke and fully fifteen -minutes for the entire announcement: - - _NOTICE_ - - _On account of landslides there will - be no morning train. Notice will be - given if the afternoon train - descends._ - -I had felt it in my bones! Fate did not purpose that I should ever -escape from this unattractive continent! This was the first train that -had failed to run in eight months, and of course it must be the very one -I had depended on to get me down in time for the steamer. It was too -late to walk—and with my baggage I could not run. Automobiles, quick to -scent trouble, were already raising their price for the trip from $20 to -$30 and $40. At last I found a Ford that would carry me and two other -Americans down for a hundred _bolívares_—which was about ninety more -than we owned among us. But by some stroke of fortune a thoroughly human -minister had been accredited to Caracas by our enigmatical State -Department. I regret to report that we routed him out of bed, and ten -minutes later were dashing full-tilt along the pool-filled and broken -highway to the coast. On the outskirts of the capital there were -innumerable lethargic donkey trains to dodge and pass. Then we were -twisting and turning along the mountain road, with thousands of feet of -loose shale piled sheer above and sudden death falling away directly -below us. The heavy rain had brought down rocks larger than dog-kennels, -and in places had heaped up loose stones and earth until the road was -practically blocked. At one such spot a big, aristocratic automobile -stood eyeing in despair a sharp V-shaped turn it could not make. Our -unpretentious conveyance scampered up on the slide, slipped to the very -edge of the deadly abyss, then climbed down upon solid road again and -sped on. Higher and higher climbed the serpentine _carretera_, -constantly whirling around turns where the slightest slip of the -mechanism or of the doubtful nerves of our very Venezuelan chauffeur -would have ended our journeyings for all time, tearing blindly around -sharp-angled curves with a bare six inches between us and instant death, -and that six inches likely to be treacherous sliding shale. Far up among -the reddish barren hills we passed the summit, then began to descend by -the same perilous highway, where we seemed ever and anon to be riding -off into the bluish void of infinity, suddenly coming cut on a view of -the coast and indigo sea far below us, and for a long time thereafter -winding and twisting incessantly downward, with no certainty that all -our efforts had not been in vain. Then all at once La Guayra appeared, -and out along the breakwater still lay the steamer, tiny as a rowboat -from this height, but plainly in no mood to move until we had time to -comply with the irksome Venezuelan formalities and scramble on board. -But it was a painful anticlimax to the life I had led in South America -to be rescued at the last by a Ford! - -Of several hours’ struggle with swarming official and unofficial -grafters, with strutting negroes in uniform and “generals” who signed -with the only word they could write my permission to depart from their -fetid land, of the final cupidities of the “corporation,” I will say -nothing, lest I again be betrayed into language unbefitting a homeward -journey. Suffice it that at last I clambered dripping wet up the -gangway, at the foot of which an ill-bred youth in a Venezuelan uniform -snatched the “permission to embark” in pursuit of which I had spent -perspiring hours, and soon black night had blotted out from my sight the -variegated but not soon to be forgotten continent of South America. - - - THE END - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - - - - - TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES - - - 1. Changed “flies of an army” to “files of an army” on p. 73. - 2. Changed “With out feet” to “With our feet” on p. 258. - 3. Silently corrected typographical errors. - 4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. - 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Working North from Patagonia, by -Harry Alverson Franck - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKING NORTH FROM PATAGONIA *** - -***** This file should be named 55455-0.txt or 55455-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/5/4/5/55455/ - -Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive) - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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