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.
The site on which Bahia was founded
Not much is left of the clothes that have gone through a steam-laundry of Bahia
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.”