The branch line to Curityba descends from this plateau to Paranaguá on the coast, the first-class coach bringing up the rear of a daily afternoon train as mixed as the passengers it carried. We creaked laboriously through heavy forests toward a fantastic mountain sky-line far to the east, some of the vistas as striking as if we had been approaching the Andes. Headlong streams and panoramas of tangled hills awakened the vagabond spirit within and tempted me to cast aside ease and respectability and plunge into the wilderness out of sight and sound of jangling civilization. For a time we followed a rivulet, our little wood-burning Baldwin spitting showers of sparks and cinders back upon us; then all at once there opened out down a great gorge the first vista since I had crossed the Andes from Chile of what might unhesitatingly be called scenery. Far below lay a vast, rolling, heavily wooded, almost mountainous world, little white towns here and there contrasting with the distance-blue of the greenness, while farther off faintly seen lagoons were backed by other densely blue-black hills.
Suddenly the stream we had been following dropped headlong down a great face of rock at a speed we dared not follow, breaking itself into white cascades that repeated themselves a score of times before it disappeared in the chartless wilderness. The train crawled cautiously along the edge of precipices, circling slowly in vast curves in and out of the wooded mountain that grew ever higher above us. Through tunnels and rock-cuttings, across viaducts and lofty iron bridges, around constricted loops where the train seemed to be pursuing its own tail, like a frolicsome puppy, along stone-faced bottomless precipices we pursued our descent, with the infinite caution of extremely old people. A softness crept into the breeze; the feminine breath of the tropics caressed our cheeks; the intense respiration of the jungle took to droning in our ears. The vast, blue, wooded world far below, with its white towns, its mirroring lagoons, its mysterious hazy recesses, gradually yet imperceptibly climbed to meet us, while the breakneck cliffs grew up beside us into sheer walls that seemed utterly unscalable. It surely needed a man of vision to stare up at that precipitous mountainside and decide that he could climb it with a railroad.
The short but decided descent of three thousand feet ended at length in the somber, velvety valleys of Paranaguá, and the train calmed down from its nervous tension into a mood more in keeping with the indolent, tropical-wooded, sea-level world. It had suddenly become stickily warm. Clothing that had often felt too thin on the plateau above grew incredibly heavy, and as final proof that we had entered the real tropics there fell upon us a sudden languid indifference to progress, and we loitered about each station doing nothing for an unconscionable length of time. Old women and boys, dressed in a few odd scraps of garments wandered about with baskets of oranges, tangerines, and bananas, but acted as if it were not of the slightest importance to them whether the stuff was sold or not, as the baby did not need a new pair of shoes anyway and it would be much less of a bore if school did not keep at all. What a different philosophy of life the tropics bring even to the man from temperate climes, and how quickly! Up on the plateau I had become almost gloomy over a hole that had begun to appear in the sole of a shoe; down here it seemed of so slight importance that all memory of it quickly drifted out of my mind. There came a sunset like a dozen pots of assorted paints kicked over by a mule, and dense, humid, tropical night settled swiftly down upon us like an impenetrable pall.
Paranaguá, a typical tropical seaport, is not on the sea at all but on the narrow neck of one of those many lagoons stretching along the coast of southern Brazil. For some time I wandered about town, barely able to see the next footstep before me in the clinging, crape-like darkness. I had a letter to a once well-known New York newspaper correspondent who had reformed and gone to raising bananas, but he was not in town, and though I talked with him by telephone I did not deliver the missive. For it would have required twenty-four hours of travel by launch, canoe, and ox-cart to reach the plantation where he was holding open house for the vice president of the state and other solemnities, my evening clothes had long since been misplaced and ... and anyway what’s the use of doing anything in the tropics? It is so much easier to let things drift along until it is too late. Finally, in the back room of a café, I ran across several American residents engaged in the universal tropical pastime of mixing whiskey with soda water. One of them headed the electric light and bathtub syndicate of Paranaguá, neither of which improvements on primitive society seemed to require his exclusive attention, for he had time to cultivate genuine hospitality. Much talk, whiskey, soda, and local beer had been consumed, however, before I managed to get in a hint containing the word food. The Americans led me to the thoroughly tropical establishment of a “Turk” who had once graced the United States with his presence and who had there learned to concoct real ham and eggs—with the slight exception of not soaking the salt out of the ham and of frying the eggs to a frazzle. Here the consumption of words continued until it was discovered that all the hotels, which were unspeakable places anyway, had closed, and that I would do much better to put up with the hospitable bathtub man. We waded through the dense humid night, not to mention many acres of loose sand and veritable streams of dew, to the outskirts of the sand-and-woods scattered town, where I was soon introduced to an enormous double bed in the plantation house of slave days which my fellow-countryman was guarding for the absentee owner.
Seen by daylight, Paranaguá has a very ancient stone customhouse, now a barracks and once a Jesuit monastery, with the customary tradition of an underground passage from it to an island a few miles out in the shallow lagoon. There was one statue in town, a bronze bust among magnificent royal palm-trees of “our dear Professor Sulano, who taught us all we know and died in 1904, erected by his grateful pupils.” My own memory is treacherous, but will some bright pupil kindly name the American cities which have busts of the high school principal in front of the municipal group? Dugout canoes full of oranges were drawn up on the beach, and fish of every imaginable size, shape, and variety were offered for sale. The population was of that mongrel sort that I was due to find throughout Brazil wherever European colonists have not appeared in any great number. It was not until ten that the sun had drunk up the vast banks of cheese-thick mists that hang often over this corner of the world, and then the humidity remained to help the despotic red sun that burst upon us emphasize the advantage of a bathing-suit over customary garb. Yet even the American residents insisted on wearing full Broadway dress of heavy black suits with vests, topped with derbies! To appear in less, they explained, would be to disgrace their native land and to lose all dignity in the eyes of the natives, though such garb was probably one of the reasons why they seemed so lifeless and could under no provocation be enticed into the crushing sunshine.
By mid-afternoon the train began to wind itself back up to the Brazilian plateau, the air taking on a refreshing coolness the moment we began to climb. Next morning, when I was pulled out of bed in Curityba in time to catch the 5:30 train back to the main line, on which a broken nap in an uncomfortable seat was chiefly dreams about icebergs, I would have given anything within reason for one of those scorned hours in Paranaguá. At every station where we stopped for more than an instant all passengers tumbled off to partake of coffee. For a woman or man of the vicinity was sure to have a table in the shade of the station, with many little white cups that were filled with thick black coffee as the travelers deluged upon them. The Brazilian who is not permitted to drop off at least once an hour and drink from one to four such cups at a tostão (a hundred reis) each, and rush back to the train again as the warning bell rings, would feel that he was being cheated of his birthright.
My next stop was at a houseless siding just south of the boundary line of São Paulo state. Here is the “Fazenda Morongava,” where the railway and its attendant corporation runs a model ranch in charge of a Texas Scotchman, a central point of the ten million acres it owns in Brazil and Bolivia. An official telegram had ordered the conductor to set me down there, when I discovered that the private car hitched on behind us was filled with guests of the company, and was due to be sidetracked at the same spot. It was after midnight that I awoke to hear the porter carrying out his instructions to tell the switchman to show me up to the fazenda buildings, more than a mile away over rocky hills—and to note with dismay that my newly appointed guide had a wooden leg! But a huge form loomed up out of the brightly moonlighted night and I was soon rolling away over the hills with a Colorado cattleman in a two-wheeled gig toward a huge farmhouse built half a century ago in slave times and now surrounded by several other and more modern buildings.
The private-car party was already scattered over the landscape from breakfast-room to champion-pig sty when I awoke, to be at once invited to wage battle with a genuine American breakfast ranging all the way from honest-to-goodness bacon, made on the fazenda, but unknown in Brazil at large, down to hot cakes. Unfortunately I had so long before lost both the habit and the opportunity of battling with American breakfasts that I was quickly floored, in spite of being cheered on by the genuine American housewife in charge. But my lack of endurance was fully made up for by the last of the private-car party to leave the table, a man who had been sent down by a Chicago packing-house to start a similar establishment in São Paulo. In all my travels I have never met his equal at mixing the flesh of “hawgs” with eggs and hot biscuits and butter and coffee and hot cakes, whether the feat be considered from the point of view of quantity or speed. During his championship exhibition he bemoaned the fact that, though he was barely forty, he had suffered greatly in walking up the hill from the car that morning, and for the life of him he could not understand how he had become so fat, since as a farm boy twenty years before he had been “lean as a rail.”
In addition to this exhibit our “house party” included a French chairman of the board of directors of the railways of southern Brazil, who had run over for nine days to learn all about them before going to Persia on a similar mission. Besides his staff, several uncatalogued hangers-on, and the family of the manager, there was the American ranch personnel, ranging from the fat and jolly fazenda doctor who drove constantly about the estate in a sulky behind racing mules, to a score of boss cowboys who shocked the Europeans and Brazilians by addressing everyone, be he manager, packing-house expert, or chairman of the board of directors, in exactly the same manner,—“What, ain’t you fellers been down to the barn yet? Y’ ought ’a shake a leg an’ see them there new heifers we jes’ got in.” Now and then we caught a fleeting glimpse of the real servant body, the native laborers, cattle herders, and gauchos, who “knew their place” in the European-Brazilian sense and whom the manager had cured of the time-honored custom of alternating three working days a week with four days of drunken festivity by “firing” on a moment’s notice and establishing the fixed rule that “if there’s to be any dhrinkin’ on this ranch, I’ll do it myself.” The peons and native cowboys were paid from fifty to a hundred thousand reis a month, and “found,” and with local prohibition in force and gambling scowled upon—to their mind inexplicable “gringo” idiosyncrasies—they were often hard put to it to get rid of their money.
Not being overwhelmingly interested in “hawgs,” I accepted the invitation of a boss cowboy and rode nearly all day among the hillside pastures. The degenerate tropical animal under it was not exactly my idea of the noun equus, but the Texas saddle was all a saddle should be, and a great improvement on others I had bestridden in South America. The cattle included crosses between native cows and zebu bulls, which had turned out lanky and of poor butcher’s quality, though they withstood the heat and ticks better than pedigree stock. We saw several fleet deer, visited a great canyon with a waterfall, the striking of which on a ledge of rock hundreds of feet below gave an intermittent sound like that of a compound engine puffing up a stiff grade, and had a native dinner, at an isolated American cowboy’s shack, of rice, black beans, and farinha (a coarse meal made of ground mandioca, used to stiffen soups or eaten dry all over Brazil), topped off by coffee and hot biscuits. Magnificent panoramas rolling away into blue distances opened out as we jogged up and down over the great folds of earth. Though it was midwinter, it was so only in name, and the climate could scarcely have been improved upon. The hottest that had ever been recorded here was 84 degrees, and 70 was the lowest of a winter day, while the fresh cool nights required a blanket the year round.