At Marcellino Ramos a big bridge carried us across the River Uruguay, which not only rises in Brazil but forms the boundary between its two southernmost states. Through trains had been operated on this line for less than a year. Before that the overland traveler from Montevideo to Rio had to stop six times overnight on the way and had often to be poled across dangerous rivers. Then one crossed the Uruguay at Marcellino Ramos in the darkness on a crazy launch operated by a crazier Brazilian who let go the steering-wheel to roll cigarettes and who generally succeeded in drowning some of the baggage, if not the passengers. The launch landed its cargo at the foot of a steep muddy slope more than a hundred feet high, at the top of which travelers fought for the privilege of paying a fortune for a plank to lie on and for such stuff as the predatory keeper of what he miscalled a hotel saw fit to provide for stifling their appetites.
Here we left the enormous “gaucho state” behind and struck off across the narrow state of Santa Catharina, through which we followed the placid Rio do Peixe, or Fish River, for a hundred and sixty-five miles, passing several waterfalls. The wooded serra of Santa Catharina rose slightly into the sky, and on all sides the world was thickly clothed with jungle, though there were occasional small clearings with clusters of crude new shanties. In places the palm grew close beside the parasol-pine. Groups of ponies under clumsy native saddles were tied to posts or wooden rails before the armazem inside which their owners were drinking away their Sunday. Blonds predominated at the rare stations, tow-heads covered by kerchiefs peered from every doorway of the houses, with their concave shingled roofs. Most of them seemed to be Poles, and as all the way from Santa Maria northward the soil had been a rich dark-red, domestic animals, children, and the garments of the peasants themselves were dyed in that hue. Some of the dwellings were like the plans of old Nuremburg brought to the tropics and set down in the midst of the wilderness. There is a great difference between living conditions in this region, where land is rarely more than five dollars an acre, and Illinois, for example, with its schools, roads, and community interests, yet settlers found much the same pioneer conditions as this in Illinois when land was five dollars an acre there, and in addition winters of snow and ice.
In my sleeper, which had not had another passenger since it began its journey at the Uruguayan boundary, the porter seemed to be hurt that anyone should intrude upon his privacy. But if there was room to spare in my car, the second-class coaches were sufficiently packed to make up for it. Brazilian railway rules require that persons without shoes or coats shall not ride first-class, hence it may have been something more than price that made the wooden-benched cars so popular. Even the first-class passenger-list had grown more and more shady and there was something absorbing in the sight of pure white waiters serving and kow-towing to mulattoes and part-Indians in the swaying dining-car. To strangers, or at least to “gringos,” the waiters always brought the change in 200-reis nickel pieces and in silver milreis, which look almost exactly alike, carefully laid face down on the plate in the hope that a natural error would increase their tips.
I was aware of our being frequently stalled on some slight grade during the night, yet when I finally awoke, to a cold clear sunrise, we had crossed the River Iguassú into the state of Paraná, with an intertropical vegetation and many serrarías, or sawmills. Nearly all the morning we passed what I at first took to be small wild orange trees, some ten feet high and set in rows and trimmed, with very dark green leaves not unlike those of the elm in shape. Toward noon I learned that this was the herva matte, known to us as “Paraguayan tea,” and the most important product of the states of Santa Catharina and Paraná, as cattle are of Rio Grande do Sul and coffee of São Paulo. The gathering season was now at hand, but had not begun because the woods were full of revolutionists, an argument between the two matte-growing states having given a good excuse to several hundred bandits whom the pusillanimous central government showed no ability to cope with during all my stay in Brazil.
The herva matte is an evergreen shrub of the holly family, averaging twelve feet in height, which has its habitat exclusively in the temperate regions of eastern South America at an elevation of from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet. In Paraná alone it is distributed over 150,000 square kilometers, and it is found in six other states, as well as in Paraguay and northeastern Argentine. It grows wild, and the only cultivation it needs is the cutting away of the jungle about it. Each bush produces annually some two hundred pounds of leaves and branch-ends, which are reduced to about half that amount in the “factory.” Here the sacks of dried leaves and sticks that come in from the sertão go through a stamping-mill that beats them almost to a powder, after which the product is wrapped in hundred-pound lots in wet, hairy cowhides that shrink as they dry until the bundle is stone-hard. Great numbers of these deceptive looking bales may be seen at the warehouses and stations in the matte states.
The descendants of the conquistadores acquired the matte habit from the Guaraní Indians, and it has become not merely an antidote for an excessive meat diet but a social custom all the way from the coffee-fields of Brazil to Patagonia. In former years herva matte was called “Jesuits’ tea,” for the same reason that quinine was introduced to Europe as “Jesuits’ bark,” because the disciples of Loyola first taught the Indian to gather it for trade purposes. About it has grown up a complete system of etiquette and throughout all rural southeastern South America the matte bowl is the cup of greeting and of farewell; not to offer it to a visitor, even a total stranger, upon his arrival, is as serious an offense as for the visitor to refuse it. The bowl is a dry, hollow gourd about the size and shape of a large pear, into the open top of which is thrust a reed or a metal bombilla. Through this each person sucks the somewhat bitter brew as the gourd passes from hand to hand around the circle, amid aimless gossip in keeping with the mañana temperament of the drinkers, every third or fourth person handing it back to the servant—who is not infrequently the taciturn woman of the house herself—silently waiting with a patience possible only among Latin-Americans or real Orientals to proceed to the kitchen and refill the gourd with boiling water. Matte is cheaper than tea, for though more leaves are needed for an infusion, they can be several times re-steeped without loss in flavor and strength. Narcotic in its influence, it has none of the after-effects of tea or coffee, but has on the contrary many medicinal properties, being a blood purifier, tonic, laxative, febrifuge, and stimulant to the digestive organs. The per capita consumption of matte in the state of Paraná is ten pounds a year, vast quantities being exported; but, strangely enough, it has never made its way outside South America, though foreigners who have lived there come to demand it as loudly as the natives.
The stations were usually mere stops at the foot of knolls on which were larger or smaller clearings and a few paintless new shanties among the scanty trees and charred logs that marked the beginning of man’s hand-to-hand struggle with the rampant wilderness. Line after line of the dark green parasol-pine-trees lay one behind the other to where they grew blue-black on the far horizon. The increasing density of the jungle was but one of many signs that we were gradually approaching the real tropics. Each night the sun sank blood-red into the boundless sertão, the symmetrical pine-trees standing out against the still faintly blushing sky after all else had turned black, the moon a silver blotch through the rising mist, out of which the sunrise broke each morning and spread swiftly across the still trackless wilderness.
One afternoon there appeared along a densely green tree-topped ridge in the midst of rolling half-prairie the reddish-white town of Ponta Grossa. Here the railway broke its rule and carried the train up to the place, instead of leaving the climbing to the passengers themselves. Vast brown vistas opened up as we rose to the level of the town, picturesque with those brick-and-mud buildings and tile roofs which appear so quickly wherever forest and lumber die out. Somewhere I had acquired a letter of introduction to a merchant in Ponta Grossa. I found him a lady-like little old man with evidences of some Indian ancestry, who had traveled in Europe and was in close touch with the affairs of the outside world, courteous and cultured, yet who still clung to the Moorish-Iberian custom of considering his home a harem. For though I should much rather have had a glimpse of Brazilian family life, he permitted me to dine at the hotel and then insisted on spending thousands of reis for a carriage in which to drive me about town. No Turkish seraglio is more jealous of its privacy than the average Brazilian household; the brief explanation that “there are women there” is considered ample excuse for any apparent lack of hospitality to men. When we had visited the sawmills, the matte “factory,” and the waterworks-to-be of Ponta Grossa, my outdoor host insisted on driving me down to the train, asserting that the scant half-mile was too far to walk, and saw me off even to the extent of buying a platform ticket and dismissing me with an embrace and a basket of tangerines from his own garden.
This time I had taken the branch line that runs a hundred and twenty miles eastward to Curityba, capital of the state of Paraná, with an elevation of nearly three thousand feet. It had all the earmarks of an up-to-date city,—electric-lights and clanging street-cars, automobiles and uniformed policemen, a large brewery to emphasize the German element, though other Europeans were more conspicuous. Shops and offices opened late, the dusting being barely commenced by nine, while schools, as everywhere in Brazil, began at ten-thirty, a splendid training in indolence for after life. It is often asserted that the predominance of the white race is some day assured in southern Brazil, that all the country below São Paulo bids fair to become a land of blonds. It will scarcely be a pure white race, however, though the mixture that is constantly going on makes it difficult to guess what the final amalgam will be. Curityba certainly had no color-line prejudices. Here a coal-black negro girl and a rosy-cheeked young Swedish woman lolled in a doorway gossiping and laughing together like bosom companions; a Pole with a negro wife showed off his mulatto children as if he were proud of their quaint mahogany complexions; tow-headed Polish brides on the arm of jet-black grooms stared proudly out upon the passer-by from the windows of photograph galleries. Attractive blond girls of twenty strolled the streets in bare legs and slippers as nonchalantly as the slovenly race among whom they had been thrown; women from eastern Europe, their heads covered with kerchiefs and driving little wagonettes filled with country produce, halted to pass the time of day with African street loafers; once I passed a girls’ school in which a teacher who was almost an albino had an arm thrown affectionately about another who would have been invisible against a blackboard.
Nearly half of Brazil consists of an immense plateau between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, falling abruptly into the Atlantic and gradually flattening away northwestward into the great Amazon basin. Though it is somewhat larger than the United States without its dependencies, Brazil has almost no mountains except an insignificant range along the coast, and almost no lakes. Many of its rivers rise very near the Atlantic, but instead of breaking through the low coast range they flow inland, those in the southern part of the country finally emptying into the Plata and those beyond the divide into the Amazon.