I really began to feel rather nervous, with all those orders grunted at me. I wondered at the strange people who must visit the palace to have to be instructed to such an extent before entering. I also stopped for a moment to ponder whether I had taken off all that was necessary to enter a palace where so much etiquette was required.
The moment I entered things were different. I was ushered into an ante-room, where I had to go through a short cross-examination by some police officers. Then, when they had made sure of my identity, they immediately led me before the Presidente.
The Presidente greeted me with effusion. He was a most polished and charming gentleman from Rio de Janeiro, had travelled extensively in Europe, and could speak French and English. He roared heartily when I told him of my experience outside his palace.
"They are all savages here," he told me; "you must not mind. The sentry has orders to keep everybody away from the palace, as people come in the afternoon and squat under my windows to jabber, and I cannot sleep. Those orders, I assure you, were not meant for you. You will be my guest all the time you are in the city, and I can accept no excuse."
The Presidente placed a small house near the palace at my disposal, and insisted on my having all meals with his family—most refined, handsome, exquisitely polite wife and daughters.
I presented the credentials I possessed from the Minister of Agriculture in Rio and the Brazilian Ambassador in London, requesting the Presidente to do all in his power to further the success of the expedition—I, of course, paying all expenses. The Presidente, like most other Brazilians of a certain age, was blasé beyond words. Nothing interested him except his family, and life was not worth living. He believed in nothing. He was an atheist because he had not been as successful as he wished in the world, and attributed the fault to God. He cared little about the future of his country. If his country and all his countrymen went to a warmer place than Heaven, he would be glad to see them go that way! As for going exploring, mapping unknown regions, studying the country and the people, building roads, railways and telegraphs, it little mattered to him, but it seemed all nonsense.
"Instead of coming to these wild, deadly regions, why do you not go and spend your money enjoying yourself in Paris or Vienna?" was his advice to me.
"Perhaps I need a change occasionally, and I enjoy things all the more by contrast when I return to Europe."
The Presidente was evidently not in good health and spirits. He was a Senator of the Republic, and a man formerly of great ambitions, which were more or less shattered when he was elected Governor of Goyaz Province, with its population of corpses, and at a salary of £40 a month—very little more than I paid my head muleteer—so that little could be expected from the Governor of such a Province.
It was thus that the State of Goyaz, one of the naturally richest in Brazil—it contained pasture lands unique for their beauty, forests with valuable woods, plenty of water and great navigable rivers draining it both north and south, of which it was sufficient to mention the magnificent Araguaya River, the Rio Tocantins and the Paranahyba (or Parana)—was instead one of the poorest. In the very heart of Brazil, Goyaz was geographically and politically the centre of the Republic. With an area of 747,311 sq. kil. (288,532 sq. miles), the Province had an estimated population of some 280,000 souls, or less than one to every square mile.