The second purpose of the institute is to breed and distribute the mussurama. This is a native black snake sometimes reaching eight feet in length, entirely harmless to man but which feeds exclusively on other snakes, venomous ones by preference. Within the moats that inclose this species are many others which only repeated assurance would convince the novice are not dangerous. The non-venomous snakes are in general larger than the others, and may also be distinguished by the lack of any special tail, being, as it were, all of one piece. If the employees of the institute, from the scientists in charge of serum-making to the negro snake-herders, are to be believed, there are other differences: the harmless snakes lay eggs, while the others produce their young alive; the former must be fed, and the latter have never been caught taking nourishment since the institute was started. Some of the harmless cobras attain considerable size, though by no means any such as they do in popular jungle tales. The largest in captivity at São Paulo was a species of constrictor about sixteen feet long and as large around as a rain-pipe. They vary widely, too, in habits. The sucurý is huge, clumsy, and sluggish; a large brown snake in the same inclosure was almost lightning-like in its movements, snapping at the flap of the attendant’s trousers and returning to the attack with incredible swiftness as often as the latter threw him away with his crooked iron stick. Like so many really harmless creatures he is evidently given his vicious temper to make up for the lack of any real defense. This reptile is said to follow for miles any creature that angers it, and though its bite is harmless, only a man with long experience or iron nerve could resist taking to his heels when this personification of speed and anger dashes upon him with its great jaws wide open. All such species, however, are mere souvenirs of the sertão, of no other use than to keep company for the mussurama, great numbers of which are sent to the snake-infested areas of Brazil as rapidly as they attain mature size.
On my second or third visit, after I had won his gratitude with my kodak, the chief snake-herder arranged a special snake-eating contest. Into a moated compound of mussuramas he threw a jararaca de rabo branco, the most deadly snake of Brazil. Far from pouncing upon the newcomer, the black cannibals gave it no attention whatever. The attendant stepped over the wall and introduced the visitor to his hosts one by one. The first turned up his nose at it, which drew forth the information that this one had eaten only a week before and was not yet hungry. The second had not dined for at least a fortnight. No sooner had the jararaca been tossed near him than he sprang forward and wound himself about the other so rapidly that the eye could not follow the individual movements, kinking and knotting him in an intricate entanglement in which only their difference in color distinguished one slimy body from the other. The two snakes were almost of a size, about three feet long. The jararaca writhed in agony, opened his huge mouth with its two ugly looking fangs on the upper jaw, and struck hard into the black body of his opponent, the yellow venom running down over his scales. The only response of the oppressor was to increase the entanglement until the head of the jararaca was confined in a coil, as his own was protected within the folds of his own body.
For more than twenty minutes after his first sudden movements the mussurama scarcely moved a scale. I began to think he had gone to sleep again. Then gradually, imperceptibly, almost as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock moves, he withdrew his own head from the coil that had protected it, looked cautiously about to see whether danger threatened, then moving one muscle at a time, with the patience of a professional wrestler, he worked his frog-mouth sidewise slowly along the body of the jararaca until he reached the neck. Pulling the head carefully out of its confining coil, he crushed it flat by slow pressure of his powerful mouth. Only then did he appear satisfied and at ease. Disentangling himself, he began to swallow the jararaca head first, working his way along it in successive bites at about the speed with which a lady might put on the finger of a new glove, now and then wriggling his body to increase its capacity. Once he stopped, rolled a bit, and took a long breath, then went steadily on until the white tail of the jararaca, looking for a moment like a long tongue of his own, disappeared entirely, perhaps four minutes from the time the swallowing had begun, and the snake that was left where two had been before crawled lazily away to his cement house for a fortnight’s sleep.
I remained for some time in São Paulo not only because it proved to be a city worth exploring, but because I had come to the end of my railroad passes, and unless I could discover a new source of supply I faced the painful and unusual experience of having to pay my fare. To tell the truth, so weary had I become of train riding and respectability that I found myself planning to slip into my oldest clothes, pick up a fellow-beachcomber, and take to the road for the three hundred and twenty miles left to Rio. But short samples convinced me that such a walk would not prove entirely a pleasure jaunt and railway passes evidently do not grow on São Paulo bushes. I was forced, therefore, to fall back on my own slender funds. There is frequent and comfortable service from São Paulo to Rio four times a day in twelve hours by day or night on the government railway, but a more pleasant as well as cheaper route appeared to be that by way of Santos and an ocean steamer; moreover, it seemed more fitting to enter the far-famed harbor of the Brazilian capital by the harbor’s mouth than to sneak in at the back door by the government railway.
An excellent express of the British “São Paulo Railway Company” left the industrial capital at eight in the morning and raced thirty of the fifty miles to Santos across level country in less than an hour. Then we halted at Alto da Serra for the inevitable coffee and a new engine. This was small and inclosed within a sort of car with glass-protected observation platform, for almost the only work required of it was to hook us, two cars at a time, to a cable running on large upright wheels between the rails, two small trains counterbalancing each other at opposite ends of the cable making little motive power necessary. Just beyond was the abertura, the “opening” or jumping-off place, where the world suddenly spread out far below, some of it visible, some hidden by vast banks of mist slowly melting under the torrid sun. The cable let us down more than two thousand feet in a very few miles, the descending and ascending trains passing each other automatically on a switch halfway down. The road was so swift that the buildings along the way seemed sharply tilted uphill, but though the valley was densely wooded with scrub growth, it was only a narrow one, so that while the engineering feat may be as remarkable, the scenery was by no means equal to the descent to Paranaguá. It took as long to lower us to Piassagüera in its banana-fields, only eight miles without stops, as it had to cover the thirty miles with several halts from São Paulo to the opening of the range. This road, over which virtually all the coffee grown in Brazil starts to the outside world, is reputed to be one of the richest concessions on earth, though its charter restricts its net profits to a certain percentage of the invested capital, the rest going to the government. The company has always had great difficulty in devising ways and means to spend its surplus earnings and keep them from falling into the public coffers. It is rumored that all the switch-lamps are silver-plated. The latest plan of the harassed directors is to electrify the road, but to the casual observer this would seem exceedingly unwise, for heavy coffee trains coasting down the hill might store up electricity enough to run the entire road, and with no more coal to buy at the breath-taking price of that commodity in Brazil the problem of spending their surplus would become hopeless.
Santos is even older than São Paulo, having been founded by Thomé de Souza two years earlier. Not so long ago it was a pesthole, noted especially for its yellow fever. Those unpleasant days are forever gone, though it is still not a health resort and many of its people prefer to live in São Paulo and come down daily on business. If it was not always raining in torrents during my stay there, at least it was overhung by a soggy, humid heat that had nothing in common with the cool, clear atmosphere of São Paulo. Such air as arises in Santos drags its way sluggishly through the streets, and there was a heavy, blue-mood temperament about the place quite unlike the larger city up the hill.
This languid, gloomy mood pervaded even the club in which a group of Americans sit all day long, day after day, “mopping up booze,” exchanging the chips that pass in the night, and buying coffee. The last is their appointed task, but it is a light one. Every now and then a dealer or a native messenger comes in with a name, a price, and one or two other hieroglyphics scratched on a slip of paper; one of the buyers lays aside his cards long enough to “o.k.” it, and the deed is done. Santos exports a million dollars’ worth of produce to the United States each year, “about one hundred per cent. of which is coffee.” When one compares the retail price of this commodity in the American market with what the planters of São Paulo state get for it, the wonder arises as to where the difference goes. Some of it, of course, goes to the world-weary men who spend their days exchanging chips at the club in Santos; transportation takes its full share; a high ad valorem export tax goes to the federal government; a similar impost of five francs a sack goes to the State of São Paulo; the municipalities through which it passes do not allow themselves to be forgotten; the European builders of the port improvements exact their generous pound of flesh; and “official charges” thrust out a curved palm at every step, so that whoever drinks coffee helps generously to support the plethora of mulatto politicians of Brazil. Yet even then the State of São Paulo is not satisfied with the price paid for its principal product and in order that this may fall no lower prohibitive taxes now make it impossible to lay out new coffee plantations within the state.
In all the business section of Santos there are pungently scented warehouses in which coffee is picked over by hand by women and children whose knowledge of sanitary principles is embryonic; while down at the wharves the coffee-porters give the town a picturesque touch. Long lines of European laborers, dressed in undershirt, cotton trousers, a cloth belt, and a tight skull-cap, all more or less ragged, discolored and soaked with sweat, trot from train to warehouse or from warehouse to ship, each with a sack of coffee set up on his neck, moving with a jerk of the hips and keeping the rest of the body quite rigid. Their manners are gayer than one might expect of men constantly bearing such burdens. The law requires that each sack weigh exactly sixty kilograms, about 132 pounds, that the state may levy its tax without difficulty; and the men are paid sixty reis for every sack they carry. In the slave days of thirty years and more ago this coffee-carrying was done by African chattels, trotting in unison to the time of their melancholy-boisterous native melodies. Now there is not a drop of African blood among the carriers, though there were not a few haughty negroes in uniform sitting in the shade superintending the job and down on a tiny cruiser nearby all the sailors were of that race. The Portuguese have driven out the negro carriers by their greater strength and diligence, but they in turn are being superseded by modern improvements.
“Brazil is no good any more,” grumbled a sweat-soaked son of Lisbon with whom I spoke. “It is forbidden now to carry two sacks at a time, and these great carrier-belts they are putting in, as well as the auto-trucks, are robbing us of our livelihood.”
Santos has now grown almost wholly around a steep, rocky hill that was once on its outskirts, spreading in wide, right-angled streets lined by pretentious light-colored dwellings to the seashore, with several large bathing-season hotels and many fine beaches along the scalloped coast. Up at the top of this hill in the center of the flat modern town is an ancient place of pilgrimage known as the “Santuario de Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat,” overflowing, like that of Penha, with wax imitations of cures. Prices were distressingly high in Santos. Bananas, which overload the landscape about the town, cost 600 reis each in any restaurant; and all else was in proportion. No doubt milk must be sold at 32 cents a quart in a town where the milkmen drive about in luxurious go-carts, dressed as if on their way to a wedding. But such things are painful to the wanderer who has already begun to doubt his ability to pay his way home from the next port, particularly when he finds that for once there is no steamer bound thither for several days, and that the fare for the overnight sea-trip is half as much as that to Europe.