The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top of the “Sugar Loaf.”
Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them. There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea.
At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy, the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite, midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage, and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast spreading city, strewn in and out among its morros until it resembles some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes, until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in person.
Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle, winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit. But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense, jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time.
From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches.
Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300 above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too easy accessibility.
A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana, pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a mere tapera now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped valley.
But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs, between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the otherwise unbroken vegetation.
Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado, for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and “Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the “Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree, all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together.