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.