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!