From Mogy Mirim a shaky little train carried me westward through more wilderness than coffee, past the lively little town of Itapira roofing a slight hill, to a helter-skelter village called Sapucahy, where it unloaded us on a platform, bag, baggage, and bathrobes, and backed away. As frail a train backed in from the other direction and loaded us up again, all the Brazilian travelers paying carregadores to set their bags down from the windows and up again, and after more than an hour of fuss and frustration we creaked on. The yellow creek of Sapucahy, it transpired, was the boundary between São Paulo, where the “Mogyana’s” concession ended, and the State of Minas Geraes, where we had been taken in charge by the “Rede Sul Mineira,” a branch of the “Brazilian Federal Railways.”
The land was somewhat swampy now, more wild and unsettled, with parasol pine-trees beside slender, undeveloped palms with thin tufts of disheveled foliage. The town of Ouro Fino (“Fine Gold”) was a small, off-the-main-line sort of place, but here the daily train got in at five at night and did not leave until five in the morning, so whatever we might make would be money in pocket. After supper I set out on the steep hillside up which the town is built and down which run red mud streets, and at length found at his club—the club, in fact—the manager of the local theater, a tar-brushed youth of aristocratic manners, or at least gestures, who naturally accepted and signed without argument the contract I handed him. Upon my return to the hotel I found the dingy-looking room I had left an hour before gay with speckless white bedclothes and fancy mosquito canopy, evidently in honor of the large theatrical troupe which rumor already had it would soon be following in my wake. Our train stood all night just outside my window, giving me, perhaps, too great a feeling of security, for I was all but left behind. It was already pulling out toward a faint crack in the darkness when I scrambled on board, breakfastless and not fully dressed, and with the privilege of paying a fifty per cent. fine on my ticket for not having bought it at the station.
Long piles of wood for the locomotives stood along the way through a wilderness inhabited by “poor white trash” in rags smeared with red earth, who crowded to the doors of their thatched huts as we passed. For some time we followed the Sapucahy, swollen red with floods that gave a picturesque appearance to the hilly village of Itajubá on its banks. This was a friendly little town where everyone spoke to strangers, after the pleasant manner of back-country districts, but though it has an important engineering school, it is little more than a grass-grown hamlet, with a populous cemetery conveniently situated on a hill close above it, so that all the inhabitants can drink to their ancestors. Itajubá was just then the object of a general interest out of all keeping with its size. Just next door to the “Cinema Edison” in which I arranged for our appearance was the modest home of the new president of Brazil. There he had lived most of his life—even since his election on March first, though he was “Dudú’s” vice-president and required by the constitution to preside over the senate—and he had left less than a week before for his inauguration.
The train next set me down at Caxambú, another of the watering-places on the irregular line across southwestern Minas, where the rolling country from the Plata northward begins to break up almost into mountains and produces a stratum of hot and cold mineral springs. Huge hotels accommodate those who come to “take the waters” in Caxambú, as in Poços de Caidas not far distant, and a mineral water that sells all over Brazil at a milreis or more a small bottle is here as free as the air. The largely negro and barefoot local population comes in a constant stream, carrying every species of receptacle, to a low spot in the center of town in which the water bubbles up incessantly, and where all manner of paupers and loafers sit under the feathery plumes of waving bamboos, drinking in turn out of a broken bottle.
Itajubá, state of Minas Geraes, the home of a former Brazilian president
Ouro Preto, former capital of Minas Geraes
The walls of many a residence in the new capital, Bello Horizonte, are decorated with paintings