He went out, fuming at the nostrils, leaving me wondering if he would send a subordinate to place me under arrest, but abuse of authority had become so rampant that I would have been willing to explore the interior of a Brazilian prison to bring the matter to a head. When the performance was ended I cornered the manager in his office and forced him to pay us our share for every “deadhead” I had counted, and though he and his equally dusky assistant hastened to assure me that my demands were wholly justified and that they did not stop officials and ladies “because they did not have the courage of Americans,” there was something in their manner that told me they would have taken supreme delight in knifing me in the back. That evening I turned my papers, valuables, and revolver over to “Tut,” in order to be prepared for the probable next move of the delegado. But he must have suffered a change of heart, for thereafter even soldiers and policemen in uniform had orders to pay admission unless they were on duty and wearing their sidearms to prove it. Thenceforward every resident of Bello Horizonte who entered the “Cinema Commercio” either handed in a ticket or gave proof of his right to free admission, whether he was president, senator or state dog-catcher. When we had broken all records for the time and place, I ran the second section of the show myself, just to keep in practice against the day when I must become a motion picture operator, and went to bed leaving orders to be called at dawn. By this time “Tut” spoke considerable Portuguese—though, having learned it mainly from Carlos, he had many of the errors of grammar and pronunciation of Brazil’s laboring class—so that I left on my next advance trip with less misgiving.
Nowadays you can go to famous old Diamantina by rail. The world is building so many railways that there will soon be no place left for those who prefer travel to train-riding. I had little hope that the diamond town would prove worth the time and expense necessary to bring the Kinetophone to it, but I had a personal desire to see it, and also, though I could not get exact information on the subject, the map suggested that I might be able to cross on muleback from Diamantina to Victoria and thereby save myself a long and roundabout trip.
The rain had let up at last, though sullenly, like a despot forced out of power. All that day there came the frequent cry of “chiero de panno queimado!” (smell of burned cloth), whereupon everyone jumped up and shook himself—everyone, that is, except the advance-agent of the Kinetophone, who had ridden behind Brazilian wood-burners often enough to know how to dress for the occasion. Our “express” not only stopped but was sidetracked at every station, and every time it gave a sign of coming to a halt the passengers sprang up as one man, crying “A tomar café!” and poured out upon the platform, to return growling if even a dog-kennel of a station miles from nowhere was not prepared to serve them their incessant beverage. “Tut” used to say that the Brazilians drank so much coffee that their minds went to dregs. It is a curious paradox, too, that the Brazilian, often an unprincipled rogue in business, never dreams of cheating the coffee-man out of his tostão, even if he has to exert himself to hunt him up and pay it before scrambling aboard again as the warning-bell rings.
Beyond Sete Lagoas the country began to flatten out, with patches of corn in new clearings, then more and more heavy brush and only the red-earth railway cutting and a wire fence on either side. Curvello, the largest town of the day, was almost a city, but so largely made up of negro huts that it probably would not have paid us to make it a professional visit. The traveler never ceases to wonder how all Brazil came to swarm so with negroes; all the ships of Christendom could not have brought so many from Africa, and the original slaves must have multiplied like guinea-pigs. In the afternoon I got reckless and bought an apple, which only cost me a milreis—but then, it was a very small apple. Far up here in the interior prices seemed to be easing off a bit, but this was largely offset by the lack of small change. In contrast to Rio, there was almost no silver or nickel, which made an excellent excuse for plundering the traveler of a few tostões every time he approached a ticket-window, and forcing him to accept dirty old bills often patched together out of six or seven pieces that were completely illegible.
It would have been sunset, had there been one, by the time we pulled into Curralinho, whence a branch line carries a two-car train three times a week to Diamantina. I believe I was the only first-class traveler with a ticket next day, one having a kilometer-book and the rest government passes or uniforms. There was not a woman on board, though one man with a government pass had with him a boy of seven who, the conductor weakly declared, should pay half fare; but he did not insist and let the matter slide in the customary Brazilian way. No wonder the Belgian syndicate which built this line and another starting toward Diamantina from Victoria hovers on the verge of bankruptcy, though my own ticket cost 14$800, plus 1$600 for the federal government and 1$600 for the State of Minas, or $5.80 for ninety-five miles of uncomfortable travel.
Except in spots the country was almost sertão, a bushy wilderness with here and there long piles of wood for the engines. We crossed the Rio das Velhas, flowing northward and inland, carrying red earth in solution and pieces it had torn away from the forests through which it had commandeered passage. There were some cattle and here and there a patch of bananas in a hollow with a hut or two, but the rest was a desolation of black rock, which proved to be white inside where the railroad builders had broken into it. Rare patches of corn were the only visible cultivation; between scattered collections of miserable adobe huts there appeared to be no travel; the listless part-negroes lolling their lives contentedly away in their kennels seemed to raise nothing but children and, not being cannibals, it was a mystery what they lived on. Slowly and painfully we climbed to the top of a great ridge, a wild country of barren rocks heaped up into hills that were almost mountains, drear and treeless as the landscape of Cerro de Pasco. No wonder the men who wandered up here seeking their fortunes thought the bright pebbles they picked up worth keeping, if only to break the melancholy monotony.
Beyond a miserable collection of huts where those of robust nerves ate “breakfast,” we passed the highest railway point in Brazil, 4,600 feet above sea-level, whence vast reaches of dreary country, broken as a frozen sea, spread to the horizon in all directions. The last station before Diamantina looked like a town in Judea, so ugly was the desolation that surrounded it, and across this one gazed as vainly for the city which the map proclaimed near at hand as one may stare for a glimpse of La Paz from the plains of Bolivia high above it.
Ten years before, one traveled on muleback all the way from Sabará to reach the heart of Brazil’s diamond-bearing territory, and only this same year had the inaugural train reached Diamantina, amid hilarious rejoicing of its population. In the few months that had passed since, the inhabitants had not lost the sense of wonder which the tri-weekly arrival of the puffing monster on wheels gave them, and though it was Christmas Day, nearly the whole town had climbed to the station to greet us. For climb they must. A youth of decided African lineage took my bag and we stepped over the edge of the uninhabited plateau, to find a town heaped up directly below us, all visible roads and trails pitching swiftly down into it. The medieval streets were rough-paved in misshapen cobbles, with a kind of sidewalk of naturally flat stones running down the center. The town was labyrinthian, its narrow blocks of every possible form between the narrower streets, built to fit the lay of the land, spilling down on the farther side into a deep valley and backed on all sides by a rough and savage landscape of blackish hue as far as the eye could see. It was as picturesque as Ouro Preto, which it seemed to equal in age, though it had been somewhat less elaborately built than the old state capital, and its churches were fewer, smaller, and more insignificant. The fact that here also there were no vehicles may be one of the reasons why the population seemed so healthy and active—climbing to the station alone proved that—in spite of their decidedly preponderating negro blood.
The railroad had not yet brought them long enough into contact with the outside world to spoil the simple people of Diamantina. They seemed to live together like a great affectionate family, soft-mannered and little given to quarreling, even the street boys treating one another like French diplomats. No doubt it was their negro blood, perhaps also the adventurous happy-go-lucky, take-a-chance character natural to a mining community, that gave them their considerable gaiety. There was no evidence of anything but kindliness and good-feeling among the barefoot women who stopped to gossip with water-jars set jauntily on their heads—real jars, too, for Diamantina is so far away from the world that American oil tins have not yet come to usurp the place of picturesque native pottery. As final high praise, my hotel host asserted that the town is so different from the rest of Brazil that a man can occasionally visit a family with unmarried daughters without bringing them into disrepute among public gossips. It is, indeed, a Brazilian Utopia!
I was Diamantina’s star guest during my stay, having the main room in the main hotel looking out on the main praça. The latter was small and three-cornered, paved with cobbles back in the days of Shakespeare, and had in its center a bust of a native of Diamantina who was Minister of Viaçao when President Peçanha was coaxed into signing the decree giving the Belgians the concession for their railroad. But then, Brazil is the land of busts, and the man who does not succeed in getting at least one of himself tucked away in some praça is not much of a buster. My huge front room, next to the homelike hotel parlor with many chairs and a cane divan all dressed up in lace coats, was fully twenty feet square, its immense French windows reaching to a floor made of great hand-cut planks fastened by handmade spikes with heads an inch square—or in diameter, according as the blacksmith happened to shape them—and so glass-smooth and warped and twisted that in places one had to brace one’s legs to keep from sliding downhill along it. The house seemed older than the surrounding hills, but there is so much of the new and crude in Brazil that the old cannot but be greatly relished. As a matter of fact Diamantina does not deserve a public hostelry, for nearly all its visitors have the South American habit of stopping with friends or relatives, and for all its electric lights and spring beds, and moderate charges, the hotel had only a couple of paying guests.