Soon we came to a muddy igarapé that our animals refused for a long time to cross, and finally, toward what was perhaps midnight, the barking of a pack of curs drew our attention to a hut and corral and announced us to their unwashed owner. He invited us to swing our hammocks inside, gave us each a nibble of miserable native cheese, and eventually, a discussion of the news of the day having been exhausted, let us fall asleep. The chief item of interest which Antonino had brought with him was that a youth known to himself and our host had resorted to the plan, still usual in those parts, of stealing a woman, but who this time happened to be a widow. The hut-owner refused to believe it, saying in a surly grunt that “of course Pedro is old enough now to hunt him a woman, but whoever heard of stealing a widow!” The scorn in his tone is inexpressible in words. Long before daylight we saddled again, drank a glass of foaming milk still warm from the corral, and struck out across bushy campo, rather sandy and very dry. An unusual danger on these great savannahs is that wild horses, especially stallions, roaming the plains attack mounted animals, sometimes biting mouthfuls out of them, if not out of the rider. Several pursued us, and one big black brute would not give up his nefarious project until I had fired my revolver over his head. About seven we came upon another hut, where the usual limp handshakes and mutual inquiries as to the health of families—for, of course, Antonino knew everyone in the region—was followed by the exchange of local gossip until coffee had been made and served. An hour later there was a similar halt at a similar hut. Life in Brazil is just one black coffee after another. Here there was a branch of the Takutú, to be crossed in a canoe, swimming our horses and re-saddling them, after which a long and fairly swift trot brought us at last to the home of Antonino.
It was by no means as sumptuous a place as his choice of language had led me to picture, but at least it was more comfortable than the mud hut in which we had spent part of the night. There was a large thatched and once whitewashed adobe house standing forth on a big bare spot at the top of a slight bluff above the Takutú, and three or four smaller huts and a corral, all of which, with several hundred dry and sandy acres about them, Antonino had inherited six years before from his mother-in-law. The site was on the extreme edge of Brazil, where the Takutú makes an almost complete turn and the Mahú flows into it, and it would have been easy to throw a stone from Antonino’s door over onto British territory. I had looked upon my companion as almost a youth, yet his wife, younger than he, was already old and gray, and his daughter of thirteen was in the physical prime of life and visibly longing for a husband. These, a son, and Antonino’s brother, dying of tuberculosis, made up the household, though there was the usual swarm of Indian or half-Indian servants.
Our batelão loaded cattle at sunrise from the corrals on the banks
The captain of my last Brazilian batelão, and his wife
Though families are rare, there is no race suicide along the Rio Branco
After a swim in the boundary and a mammoth, though rough, dinner, I was led to the “chaletsinha,” a small mud-and-thatched hut reserved for visitors, for even here it would have been scandalous to lodge a male friend in the same house with one’s women folk. The floor was of unleveled earth and there were a dozen hammock-hooks, between two of which I napped for a couple of hours. Meanwhile the fifteen-year old son had been sent over into British Guiana to summon the “Americano.” Ever since I first met him Antonino had insisted that a compatriota of mine lived just across the boundary from his fazenda, but I had so often found in South America that men reputed to be my compatriots turned out to be Italians, Syrians, negroes, or something else as un-American, that I had given little attention, and no faith, to his assertion. My surprise, as well as my delight, was all the greater, therefore, when there suddenly walked in upon me a magnificently built, handsome type of outdoor American in the early prime of life and the visible pink of condition, his ruddy health in striking contrast to the chalky faces of the indoor Brazilians. He was Ben Hart from South Dakota, who had gone first to Panama, then to the Madeira-Mamoré, later had prospected for gold around Sorata, and finally had come to British Guiana eight months before with an American partner to start a cattle ranch. The partner had an English wife, however, and when the war broke out he had gone to London to enlist and left Hart alone. I was the first “white man” he had seen in half a year, and though he could not assure me that I could reach Georgetown, never having been there himself, he did “hope I would come over and stay a few weeks with him.”
On the last day of May we walked a couple of kilometers over bushy campo and dried bogs to a fringe of woods on the edge of the Mahú, across which Hart hallooed to his Indian boys about a newly thatched hut visible on the opposite bank. They soon appeared in an aged dugout, the gunwales of which were under water, but with boards nailed above them, a precarious craft that would have filled in ten minutes; but luckily the trip lasted only three. Thus I was removed bag and baggage from Brazil eleven months to a day from the time I had entered it from Uruguay. That day I was firmly convinced that nothing short of penal servitude would ever again get me back into the mammoth land of the imperial palm and political corruption; but time cures most lacerations of the skin and nothing is so disagreeable at a distance as it is close at hand. The Brazilian bubbles over with faults. As my old friend, Professor Ross, puts it, “he much prefers the lollipops of compliment to the pungent olive of truth”; yet there is something fascinating about both him and his gigantic, wasted national domain. Long after his grafting politicians and his un-trounced men and boys have become the dimmest of memories, his magnificent palms, swaying beneath peerless skies, his incomparable capital and the songs of his sabiás remain vividly etched in a crowded recollection; and when, on a dark and dreary winter day in the Puritan-weighted North, I read again some of the swinging, color-flashing lyrics of Casimiro d’Abreu, nothing but the Portuguese word saudade expresses the longing that comes over me to behold again those marvelous days and luminous nights of which he sings.