In riding about the vicinity on other days I came upon several gangs of a score of negroes each, bare-legged and ragged, hoeing at an average wage of eighty cents a day in banks of red earth through which a rainy season stream had been turned. This they keep up as long as the rains last, rarely seeing a diamond, which wash along through the artificial gorge with the other gravel and come to rest on a sandy flat place beyond. Then the men are set to “batting the baca,” until the sand is washed away and the diamonds recovered by the same crude methods used in the first days of the colony. One question almost sure to be asked by the layman is how workmen are kept from stealing the diamonds. Theft, it is explained, is by no means so easy to accomplish as would appear at first glance. In the first place, it takes on the average a cartload of sand and gravel to yield a one-quarter carat diamond. By the time the negro has washed a load down to about two bushels an overseer has an eye on him and watches him until the process is finished. It is rare for a diamond to appear suddenly on the surface during the preliminary washing, when the negro might snatch it, and even if he did he would have a hard time selling it. If ever a native of Diamantina has stolen a diamond, even as a boy, he is blackballed in the community for the rest of his life. It is a long way to anywhere else, even since the advent of the railroad, so that thieving of the town’s chief product is extremely unusual. Men from far off up country come in with thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds or black carbons on a pack mule, which lags far behind with its negro driver. Everyone along the way knows what it carries, yet for decades no driver has run away nor anyone “framed” a holdup.
In town, gold and precious stones are handled with a casual carelessness only equalled by the Bank of England. A local jewelry shop, famous in the trade the world over, looks like a miserable little tinker’s den, where a dozen men and boys, all with more or less African blood, work at dirty old worn and smoked benches. About them is a wilderness of junk where cigarette butts, gold nuggets, old iron tools, gold wire, and worthless odds and ends lie scattered and tumbled together with diamonds of all sizes, cut and uncut, old tin tobacco-boxes containing fortunes in diamonds and precious stones of several species wrapped in dirty bits of paper. Gold coins of the former Empire as well as new British sovereigns waiting to be melted up for local use can scarcely be distinguished from the dusty rubbish on the tables; drawers filled with the ragged money of to-day stand half-open; a tiny show-window—recently put in as a concession to modern ideas—has a six-carat diamond stuck against the glass with several smaller ones about it, day and night; a can that originally held soap but now full of emeralds, amethysts, topazes, and half a dozen other precious stones found in the region was kicking about the floor. Yet there was no sign of lock or key, except that used to fasten the outer door at night. The owner only came now and then during the day, and amid this disordered jumble of wealth his dozen workmen and boys toiled from seven in the morning until sometimes nine at night at ludicrous wages without a loss ever having been reported.
Down in the valley near the town there is a native diamond-cutting establishment, a capacious old barn of a building with the immense rough-hewn beams of olden times and two long double rows of “wheels” run by water-power on which the stones are “cut.” Strictly speaking, a diamond is not “cut” at all; it is ground—lapidar or “stoning” they call it in Brazil. Disks of the best grade steel, about a foot in diameter, move round and round at a moderate rate of speed. Rough diamonds are first chipped off by hand to the general shape desired; then they are set into a bed of lead and solder so that one facet may be ground down, after which they are removed at a forge, resoldered, and ground on another facet. The “wheels” must be polished down and filed in slight ridges every two or three weeks, a task that takes about one day, and they are rented at 12$ a month to the individual lapidarios, both men and women, largely of negro blood, who work for themselves, either “cutting” diamonds for others or speculating with such as they can buy themselves. A day is the average time consumed here in “cutting” a one-carat diamond, at a cost of about 7$, the chips and diamond dust left over bringing the ordinary income up to 65$ a week.
Diamond buyers of all nationalities journey to Diamantina, and the town expressed surprise and often incredulity to hear that I had not come to purchase a few “parcels” for speculation. “Everyone” buys diamonds, yet no one pays the state export tax on them, if one may believe local opinion. This would have to be paid if the stones were sent out legally by express, but when a buyer has collected a “parcel”—in Portuguese it is partida—he finds some man bound for Rio and says to him, “If it isn’t too much trouble just hand this little package to —— and Co.,” thereby defrauding both the railroad and the politicians. The men who deal in diamonds in the place of their origin no more wear them than do the men who dig them. Old buyers who have handled the precious stones all their lives are not only plainly dressed but have none of the tendency toward personal adornment so widespread among Brazilians. Two American diamond-men I met had huge blacksmith hands on which a ring would have looked absurd, and the only diamonds one sees in Diamantina are those offered for sale in “parcels” or show-windows, or those worn by an occasional tenderfoot.
Newcomers have sometimes been deceived by this state of affairs. A few years ago there arrived in Diamantina a German with a conviction of his own wisdom and superiority over common mortals, who, with an air implying that the thought had never occurred to anyone else, let it leak out that he was buying diamonds. An old negro wandered up to the hotel in an aged shirt and trousers, a ragged hat, and bare feet, and shuffling in a halting, diffident way into the German’s room, told him that he did not know what the two diamonds he carried wrapped in a scrap of paper were worth, but that he would sell them cheap. The German paid him about half the market price for them and asked him if he had any more, adding with a wink that any transactions they might make would be kept a secret. The poor old negro said he thought he could find a few more about his hut or in the river or among his friends, and for a month or six weeks he continued to slouch into the hotel, until he had sold the wise German about a pint of diamonds for a mere song of fourteen or fifteen contos, say $5,000. Then the Teuton, highly pleased with himself, packed up and took the down train from Curvello, smuggling his untold riches out of the state without paying the export duty—and discovered when he reached Rio that every one of the fine diamonds the poor ignorant old negro had sold him so cheaply were what are known in the trade as “fourths,” or worse, full of knots and gnarls as a century-old olive tree and worth at most some 50c a carat for cutting glass. A bit later, the poor innocent old negro having occasion to go down to the capital and talk with the senator whose political boss he was in Diamantina, blew into Rio in the frock-coat and patent leathers he wears when not doing business with gullible strangers, with a real six-carat diamond dazzling from his little finger and two or three more shouting from his shirt front and, meeting the worldly-wise German on the Avenida, raised his fifty-dollar imported Panama hat with true Brazilian courtesy, and invited him to come in and have a drink for old times’ sake.
One evening my hospitable host of the hotel dragged me over to the cinema he owned, where I found a crowded house come to see what to Diamantina was a brand new romance of their own color, called “A Cabana do Pae Thomaz,” in other words, “The Cabin of Uncle Tom.” It was all too evident, however, that there was nothing to be gained by bringing our show so far inland, for the negroes had little to spend and the railway charges are naturally high to those who can find no excuse for not paying them. Meanwhile I had opened negotiations for a journey on horseback, or even on foot, across to the railhead of the line out of Victoria, which would have brought me out well up the coast on my journey north. A native camarada familiar with the trail offered to rent me a horse or a mule for the journey, with saddle and spurs, for 3$ a day. This seemed reasonable. It would make the trip across come to about 20$? Yes, but it takes two animals. Why’s that? You must have a guide, or at least a man to bring back the horses. Ah, then that makes 6$ a day instead of 3$? Yes—ah—and then of course you must pay the man. How much? Oh, 3$ a day, the same as the other animals. Ah, then that makes 9$ a day, and seven days would be.... No, say ten days. But why ten days? Because in this season that is the least you can depend on. In other words the trip would cost me 90$, nine times ten? No, it would be nine times twenty, or 180$. Eh, what twenty days? Why, the man and the horses would have to come back, wouldn’t they? Sacramento, I suppose so, unless I could chloroform them when I got there. So then 180$ would cover all the expenses? All, completely all—er—that is, of course, you would have to feed the animals and the man on the trip, and it might be much more than ten days, and—er.... And no doubt there would be a tip to the man and the animals, and perhaps a third horse needed when he caught sight of my valise, and of course the government officials here and along the way would come in for their customary graft, and there would be the stamp-tax on each horseshoe, unless they were mule-shoes, in which case no doubt it would be doubled, and a tax on each bray the “burros” might emit en route, and—whereupon I gave him a warm handshake and bade him good night, saying I would think it over and wire him from Bagdad in 1946, and thus eventually got him out of the room. In short, I had come to understand at last why people travel by rail in Brazil, even though their bones are racked on the warped and twisted roadbeds, their movie-magnate garments turned into sieves by burning cinders from the straining locomotives, and there is a tax on every corner of a railway ticket.
All Diamantina was down—I mean up—to see us off, just as they are at the same early hour three times a week. The distance-blue piles of earth lay heaped up into considerable hills where a clearer atmosphere disclosed wider horizons, hung on all sides with fantastic heaps of clouds, that increased the sense of being on the top of the world. On the several days’ trip southward I met a strange man, a juiz de dereito, or district judge, from Serro back in the hills, who refused to ride on a government pass or to accept one for his son, whom he was taking to the medical school in Rio, declaring that there was “much abuse” in such matters by government officials! At Burnier, where we changed to the broad gauge, I got a berth to the capital. Though the car was the familiar American Pullman, the slovenly government employees had discarded most of the small conveniences. The aisle was as carpetless as the floors of Brazil, the berth net had long since been turned into a hammock for the brakeman’s baby, the mattress was thin and hard as a Brazilian wooden bed, and the sleep I did not get as we creaked and jounced through the endless low hills explained why sleeping cars and night trains are not more popular in the mammoth republic of South America.
When I returned from the washroom next morning, “Tut” stood dressing beside the opposite berth. They had played in Palmyra the evening before and managed to pack up in time to catch the night train. Carlos had had his hat stolen in the preceding town and “Tut” had been bitten by a dog while walking out to pay his respects to the English-speaking miners near Ouro Preto; otherwise things had gone well—except for one other personal mishap to “Tut.” While buying his ticket for the sleeper he noted that the berths were divided into “leitos inferiores” and “leitos superiores.” Now why should he take an inferior berth when he had been working hard, and Linton paid the bill anyway? He took a leito superior. Unfortunately, in the matter of berths, the Portuguese word superior means “upper”!
By seven the day was already brilliant and hot, for we were down off the great plateau I was never to climb again, and the familiar suburbs of Rio were rumbling past. I dropped off as we drew into the yards, knowing from experience how long a process it is to get into the station, and diving out through a hole in the railway wall, I hurried away up the Rua Mattoso to the home of our theater contractor. He surprised me by saying that times had grown so “brutally hard” in Rio, to say nothing of the brutal heat of midsummer, that it would not be worth while to play there at all, but that we could finish our sixteen days with him at his theater in Nictheroy.
The ferry that carried us across the bay was crowded with newspaper men and photographers, and the gunboat Sergipe lay close off the state capital with its guns trained on the public buildings. Inquiry disclosed the fact that there was not a new mutiny, but that a revolution was expected in Nictheroy during the day.