Harry Alverson Franck

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”