It was too late to change my plans and make the journey to Rio by rail, however, and I made the best of the delay by joining a Sunday excursion to Guarajá, a beach with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that was being “boomed” a few miles out through the wilderness. A little steamer carried us from the Santos docks to a station across the harbor, from which a tiny steam railroad runs off through the jungle. The benches were hard, the toy engine incessantly spat smoke, cinders, and fire back upon us, and a woman of the laboring class was jammed into close, popular-excursion contact with me throughout the journey. But the beach of Guarajá was fine and hard, and the day brilliant and clear. Chalets, bandstands, and all the Palm Beach paraphernalia recalled the season of six to eight weeks during which coffee kings and their mistresses hold high revel and yield the promoters a good year’s profit on their investment. Natives, both men and women, had here and there rolled up their trousers or the feminine counterpart and gone wading, but evidently it was not considered the proper season to swim, for all the heat of midwinter July, or else the community had the customary South American fear of “wetting the body all over.” Gringos may always take their own risks, however, and by dint of long inquiry I found I could get an ill-fitting bathing-suit and the key to a bathhouse, all for a mere 2000 reis, and I went in alone.

It was the first time I had been in or upon the sea since entering South America way up on the gulf of Panama more than two years before. I plunged in and was soon diving under the combers and enjoying myself hugely, when I suddenly found that I could not touch bottom, and that the more I tried the less I touched. This would not have mattered had I not realized by some indefinable sense that I was not only in an ebbing tide but that I was caught in an undertow which was dragging me swiftly seaward. The buildings and the excursionists on the shore were growing slowly but steadily smaller. I waved an arm above the water and attracted the attention of a group of men, but it was evident by their indecisive actions that they were “Spigs” and that no help would come from that quarter, though they might be of use in testifying before the coroner’s jury. Among the Sunday crowd on the shore and the hotel veranda arose more stir than I had yet caused anywhere in Brazil, and the bathhouse attendant who had taken the 2000 reis away from me rushed down to the spray’s edge frantically waving his arms. For the next twenty minutes or so I had visions of navigating the high seas without a ship, but as I did not confine myself during that time to smiling at the vision, but took to performing superhuman feats of swimming, I was suddenly surprised, not to say relieved, to feel my feet strike sand, and what might have been a coroner’s inquest turned out to be nothing but a lesson for the foolhardy. When I returned to dress, the attendant said that he had forgotten to tell me that certain parts of this beach had a very dangerous undertow. Posthumous information was to be expected of a Brazilian; but when the American of Santos who had suggested my spending the Sunday at Guarajá replied to my mention of the entirely personal incident, while we were lunching at the Sportsman Café next day—at his expense—with “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that is the most dangerous beach in South America, hardly a Sunday passes without someone drowning there,” I could not but thank him fervently for his kind warning.

The steamer of the Spanish line owned by the Jesuits spent most of Tuesday in “leaving within five minutes,” during which the passengers all but succumbed to uproar, congestion, and perspiration. I found myself packed into a tiny two-berth cabin with two other travelers whom I should not naturally have chosen as companions; nowhere was there a spot clean and large enough on which to sit down. Once a refresco, a glass of sickly sweetened water, was served to us as a special favor just before we choked to death, and finally about five in the afternoon we let go the wharf, made a nearly complete circle with the “river” on which Santos is located, and dipping our flag to its last fort, were soon out on the high seas, the roll of which I had almost forgotten.

CHAPTER VIII
AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO

I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes.

The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the morros which everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the green background.

But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the Minas Geraes that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever profit the ships pick up on the high seas.

I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext. This and the feijão, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with now and then a bit of xarque, dried or salted beef, added to give it distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets. My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off toward dawn it was only to dream madly.

The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it.

The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length, it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly at the end of the vista.