In fact, the drought was broken that very night. We had halted again at Senador Pompeu—where the sertanejos refused to pay more than a milreis each for hotel accommodations and slept out in consequence—and I had at last fallen asleep in spite of the incessant rumpus of my fellow-guests when I was awakened by a heavy downpour. With daylight the domes and sugar-loaves and heaps of granite hills among which the train picked its way stood forth ghost-like through a blue rainy-season air with an appearance quite different from that under a blazing sun. Heavy showers continued throughout the day, and as the last rain had fallen ten months before, joy was freely manifesting itself. Everywhere people were congratulating one another, showing perfect contentment whether they were forced to keep under shelter or to wade about in the downpour, talking of nothing but the rain, the sound of which on his roof is to the Cearense the sweetest of music. It was remarkable how nature, too, responded to the change. I could not have chosen a better four days in which to make the trip to Iguatú, for these had given me both the drought and the resurrection. The whole region, dry, brown, and shriveled three days before, was already a sea of bright green. Leaves opened up overnight as they do only in a month or six weeks in the temperate zone, giving the effect of seeing midwinter followed by late spring in a single day, a jungle magic reminding one of the Hindu tricksters who seem to make plants grow in an hour from seed to bloom before the eyes. Rivers bone-dry on Thursday were considerable streams on Sunday, with natives wading like happy children in water where they had shuffled the day before in dry sand. No wonder these poor, misguided people of the jungle lose heart when their world dries up, and become suddenly like another race when the clouds again come to their rescue.

All day long joyful cries of “Eil-a chuva!” (There’s the rain!) sounded whenever a new shower burst upon us. Life at best is rigorous in this climate, under the life-giving but sometimes death-dealing sun, and only the hardy or the helpless would have remained here to endure it. No wonder the Cearense who can by hook or crook do so becomes a lawyer without idealism or a shopkeeper without human pity. The aspect of nature changed so magically that it was hard to judge what this light, half-sandy soil might be able to do under proper rainfall or irrigation, so that my first conclusion that northeastern Brazil was doomed to remain a thinly populated semi-desert may have been too hasty. Between showers the breeze gently moved the fans of the palm-trees, the graúnas, or singing blackbirds of North Brazil, flitting in and out among the carnaubas. At Baturité all the Amazon-bound travelers old enough to own a few coppers bought mangos and quickly made the car look like a bathroom by their furious attacks on a fruit that has been fitly described by a disappointed tourist as tasting “like a paint-brush soaked in turpentine.” As the negro blood and light sand marking the coast strip announced our approach to Fortaleza, I turned to the brakeman on the back platform with a fervent, “Well, we are getting back where we can sleep in beds again.” He gazed at me with a puzzled-astonished air that caused me to put a question. I had forgotten the native Cearense’s devotion to the hammock; the brakeman had slept in a bed once in his life—when he had a broken leg.

I had installed myself again in the “Pensão Bitú” and was just starting for the theater when I was held up by another downpour. When I finally entered the “Cinema Rio Branco” I found it almost empty; but it would scarcely have been fair to curse the first rain that had troubled us since early January in Victoria, especially one which meant almost the difference between life and death to thousands of our fellow-men. We had done poor business during my absence, due mainly to the fact that the ten-day engagement forced upon us by the steamer schedule was too long for Ceará. At Maranguape my three companions had lived in an old hammock-hotel up in the hills where a natural spring furnished splendid swimming, and where there was no charge for rooms, but merely for meals. On Friday the performance was a “Benefit for the Santa Casa de Misericordia,” or nun’s hospital, for which I had sold our part of the show at 300$ to Vinhães, who in his turn had contracted with the nuns to furnish everything for 500$. But when it was all over the religious ladies had refused to pay, so that in the end Vinhães was the loser. I relieved “Tut” by running the second session myself to a handful of people, while the rain drumming on our sheet-iron roof all but drowned out the phonograph, and pocketed one eleventh as much as I had the Sunday before in this gamble known as the show business.

My last duties in Ceará were mainly of a personal nature, for to Vinhães fell the task of buying the tickets and getting the outfit on board. The Brasil arrived about noon and we were down at the wharf by two, only to have our leisurely boatmen nearly cause us to miss the steamer and squat in the sand another ten days. The whistle had long since blown and the sailing-hour was well past before we even started out from the wharf. Then we lost our rudder, which was rescued by a negro rower who sprang overboard and was washed up on the beach with it, while the heavy boat with all our possessions, not to mention the four of us, threatened at any moment to capsize. There followed a long struggle between time and white-capped swells, with the lazy negro oarsmen as referees, and we were off at the very moment that the last of our trunks went into the hold.

CHAPTER XVIII
TAKING EDISON TO THE AMAZON

When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orleans in quest of adventure, and before another chance came he met an old Spanish wanderer who advised him by all means to remain in the United States. It would probably be difficult to write on one page what humanity owes that unknown Spaniard. Later, when his inventions had begun to make him world famous, the former trainboy sent a man to search all the Amazon region for materials to be used in his experiments—and it was our privilege to take the finished product back to the land which the inventor himself had never reached in person.

The Brasil is one of the three smaller and older boats of the government line—which is the reason we had much more space in our two staterooms and considerably better attendance, for these boats are not popular with “deadhead” politicians and their families. The cabin passenger list was made up of the usual conglomeration of every human color, nationality, social and moral standing, from priests to several of the most repulsive old adventuresses—treated outwardly with complete equality even by mothers of corruptible daughters—from clean-cut young Englishmen to licentious, shifty-eyed Brazilian mulattoes. But the real sight was the steerage quarters on the three decks in the nose of the ship. Here men, women, and children—the thirty-four latest refugees from the interior among them—bound for the rubber-fields were so packed together that individual movement was impossible. Such a network of hammocks—above, across, under, over one another, the bottom of one sleeper resting on the belly of his neighbor below, scantily clad women crisscrossing men who had discarded all but a single short garment—as one could not have believed possible filled all the space, disputing it with the animals and fowls the ship carried as food. Sheep and pigs wandered among the no less frankly natural passengers; six zebu bulls on their way to improve the native stock at the mouth of the Amazon occupied stalls in the midst of the turmoil. One venturesome fellow had as a last resort hung his hammock from the roof above these animals, so that whenever one of them moved he was lifted hammock and all. There was a very exact description of the scene in the Cearense novel “O Paroara” with which I was whiling away my time, and as that was published sixteen years before, conditions have evidently long been the same.

Early in the afternoon of the second day we picked up a pilot along the sandy coast and went over a sandbar into the wide bay of Tutoya, port of the State of Piauhy, only a little point of which touches the sea. I had at one time planned to go up the Parnahyba River to Therezina, the capital, but inquiry proved that this would not be financially advantageous, so that I contented myself with this brief glimpse of the state. Many Piauhyenses came on board from the montarias, or ludicrous native rowboats in which they were transferred from the giaolas (literally “bird-cage,” but “river steamer” in Amazonian parlance) that were waiting to carry passengers back up the river, and we had at least a vicarious acquaintance with them.

When I awoke at dawn we were already close to the winking lighthouse known among British mariners as “Maranham,” and soon afterward there appeared a town rather prettily situated on a low ridge. We anchored far out, and it was more than an hour before sailboats brought the authorities to examine us, but that was a small matter to a man with a deck-chair and a passable novel. In fact, there was no hurry about going ashore, for five days would probably suffice to exploit the interest of São Luiz in the Kinetophone, and the rest of the State of Maranhão was virtually inaccessible. More than that, when the local manager came on board through the dingy gray water to pay us his respects he reminded me that this was Wednesday of Holy Week and that it would be foolish to spoil the effect of our estrea by attempting to compete with the priests before Saturday.

In 1612 a Frenchman named La Ravadière founded on an island near the mouth of the Amazon a city which he called Saint Louis in honor of King Louis XIII. Two years later the Portuguese drove out the French and the city became the capital of the province of Maranhão—aboriginal name of the Amazon—which then included all northern Brazil from Ceará to the Andes. The island, which is small, is known as Ilha de São Luiz, and the city is officially São Luiz do Maranhão, though, like most capitals along this coast, it is better known to the outside world by the name of the state. Its harbor is shallow, with much tide, so that when one lands, by launch, rowboat, and finally a negro’s shoulders, the whole raging sea seems beneath one, and six hours later the place is a sand-field, with steamers sitting high and dry and barefoot crab-hunters wandering about on it, as if someone had pulled the cork out of the bottom of the ocean.