In his “Voyage of the Beagle” Darwin speaks of seeing South American ant-hills twelve feet high. I had set this down to the exuberance of youth, but suddenly, not far north of Campos, we came upon great fields of them, like eruptions on the face of nature, mounds eight, ten, perhaps even twelve feet high, but here grass-grown, instead of presenting the solid clay, cement-like surface familiar elsewhere. The sandy condition of the soil evidently made it possible only to pile them up in this oval form, so sharply contrasting with the usual sugar-loaf shape of those made of clay. In mid-afternoon the flat, baking, sea-level littoral gave way to rolling, then hilly country, and we had climbed to a height of several hundred meters when we passed from the little State of Rio de Janeiro into the equally tiny one of Espirito Santo, for here the great plateau of central Brazil forces its way clear down to the edge of the sea. Time was when the State of Rio was enormous, but bit by bit, during the eighteenth century, there was lopped off from it the much larger states of São Paulo, Minas Geraes, Goyaz, and finally Matto Grosso, until to-day the population within its limits—which do not include the federal district and national capital—is estimated at little more than one fifth that of the old mining province, vastly less than that of São Paulo and Bahia, and with Rio Grande do Sul and Pernambuco also outdistancing it.
Coffee-clad hills and a reddish soil gave Espirito Santo a slight resemblance to São Paulo, though most of it was dense-green with heavy timber, through which a howling wind-and-rain storm came raging toward sunset. We halted for the night in Cachoeira do Itapemirim, so called for the cachoeira, or rapids over a series of rocks in the Itapemirim, the sound of which deadened our footfalls all the way from the station to the “Hotel Toledo” on the tiny main square. It was little more than a barefoot village in the bush, but the show would be forced to spend a night there—nay, two nights, for it would arrive on Saturday—and I soon added to my collection the signature of the “Turk” who, in addition to a little cloth-shop and billiard-and-liquor-room, owned a miniature cinema jutting far out over the rocky river.
Relieved of the feeling that the show was treading on my heels, I let the morning train go on without me and settled down to make up the sleep I was in arrears. Four or five hours slumber out of each twenty-four may be all very well for an Edison, but commonplace mortals require more. Not only was the hotel as quiet and bucolic as the town itself, but it had “beds of wire”; both heat and mosquitoes were conspicuous by their absence; the never-ceasing music of the cachoeira was calming to the nerves, and if I ever did wake up there were horses to hire for a jaunt through the surrounding country. Moreover, the town and vicinity were the scene of one of Brazil’s most famous novels, “Chanaan” by Graça Aranha of the Brazilian Academy, and just then Minister to The Hague—though the town itself was supremely ignorant of its celebrity the world round in the dozen languages into which the tale has been translated. Even the local editor had never heard of it, though he did know the author, “because I am obliged to know all Brazilian diplomats.”
The animal that was intrusted to me for a modest consideration next afternoon could scarcely have been called a horse, though it resembled even less any other known quadruped, as the wooden frame thinly covered with leather and hung with two iron rings into which I could barely insert the ends of my toes must perhaps be called a saddle for want of a more exact term. By dint of reducing my right arm to paralysis I succeeded in forcing the torpid brute up and down the few streets of the village and out one of the roads that wander off as trails through the plump, dense-wooded hills about it. But it would have been as speedy and far more comfortable to have walked, or better still, perhaps, not to have gone at all, for we were overtaken and imprisoned by one of those raging storms for which this region seems famous. Immense banks of snow-white clouds far off on the horizon completely encircled us when we set out, yet so benign was their appearance that I scarcely noticed them, except as a detail of the charming landscape, until suddenly they swept in from all sides at express speed, getting blacker and ever blacker, until the entire sky was wiped out and the sullen growls of thunder grew to violent outbursts of anger that deafened the ears like an artillery barrage, while the wind tore at the trees and bamboo groves as if it would uproot not only them but the sheer stone “sugar-loaf” near which the storm had found us. With the help of two negro boys on muleback and the butt of my heavy native whip I urged the equine caricature into a lame and ludicrous gallop and reached the edge of town before I was wholly drenched, taking refuge in a half-finished building. A negro boy sleeping on a narrow plank high above the still unboarded floor said he was not ill; evidently he was just lying there to let the day get by so that he could sleep through the night and then take a good rest to-morrow. I could only get the head of the alleged horse under shelter, but it was evident that he had stood out in many worse storms than mere wind and rain; and there I squatted for three mortal hours, chiding myself for not having put a bit of reading matter in my pocket. I might have read the negro boy, I suppose, but he looked like a primer, just such a crude and simple volume as makes up the whole human library of Cachoeira do Itapemirim.
Another all-day train-ride of little more than a hundred miles brought me to Victoria, capital of the State of Holy Ghost, or, more exactly, to a little backwoods station on the opposite side of the long narrow arm of the sea on which the capital is situated. So placid was this, and so cool the weather after a heavy rain, that I had to taste it as we were being rowed across before I could believe that we were down at sea-level again. It was an easy-going, less aggressive capital than those farther south, and its prices were so nearly reasonable that I grew bold and marched into the new and showy four-story “Palace Hotel” on the waterfront. The “brutal crisis” had dealt Victoria an almost deadly blow. There was not a show in town, except a free cinema in the liquor emporium of the little French electric tramway company that sends its cars wandering along the waterfront for miles in both directions. On one of these I gradually worked my way out to the home of the “colonel” who owned the imposing theater—and found that he had passed me on the way in. I hurried back to town—if that verb may be used in the same sentence with Victoria’s street-car service—and found that the “colonel” had gone out home again. But by sternly overcoming adverse fate and the fatalistic indifference of those accustomed to hang around the theater I finally had him hunted up, a heavy, middle-aged, over-courteous mulatto, as was also his manager and, for that matter, almost every conspicuous citizen in town. Having impressed upon them the extraordinary good fortune that was soon to descend upon Victoria, I went home to dinner, telling them to think it over. Their theater, like two former cinemas in town, had been closed since the first month of the war; they had so completely lost heart that they were not even having films shipped to them any more, and felt that it would be impossible to get up a show. I assured them that wherever the Kinetophone landed there must be a show, and within half an hour had them worked up to such enthusiasm that instead of accepting my suggestion that we play Monday and Tuesday and sail for Bahia on Wednesday, they were imploring me to book for a solid week.
This having been done, the manager and I made polite and diplomatic calls on the editors of Victoria’s two pitiful little dailies of four foolscap pages each, more than half taken up with advertising and the rest with large-type “news” consisting mainly of birthday greetings to “our most influential citizens.” Neither of the apathetic pseudo-journalists caught even a hint of the news value of Edison’s part in the affair, but they did waste many words in giving a full account of the “delightful courtesy” which “Dr. Franck,” and the distinguished and much-titled fellow-citizen who brought him, had shown in visiting them.
Victoria was one of the old settlements of the Portuguese crown when what afterward came to be known as Brazil was given out in capitanias, having been founded nearly four centuries ago on the island of São Antonio. It may have 15,000 inhabitants in all the coves and corners of rocks among which it is scattered, but it is essentially an unimportant, if picturesque, village. The nucleus of the town is well inland along the narrow, river-like little roadstead, with a yellow presidential palace and some other buildings of size, but it is made up chiefly of one-story buildings quickly running down to huts. There are a few coffee houses that export, and a few stores that supply the interior, but for the most part Victoria lives on government salaries—when conditions are such that these can be paid. How backward it is may be guessed from the fact that negro coffee-porters have not yet been driven out by whites, and that it is the outpost of the reign of hammocks which covers all northern Brazil, at least half the population seeming to spend their days swinging back and forth inside the baked mud kennels they call home. An ancient fort in ruins and the clustered sanctuary of Nossa Senhora da Penha in a striking site on the summit of a stone hill, with the usual collection of wax and pictured proofs of miracles that have been wrought here since 1769, are the main sights of interest. For the ocean is not visible until one has walked—or, if time is no object, taken the tramway—for miles out through little groves of plump, rosy-cheeked mangos and along the single street from which most of Victoria sprawls and scrambles up the rocky, half-wooded hills along her waterway to her huts perched among huge, blackish granite rocks. Then, when the calm, boatless sea and the labyrinthian harbor entrance bursts forth at last from the long, narrow, yellow beach out to which the cars eventually stagger, there is not a glimpse left of the town itself, hidden away among its wet-green hills.
“Tut,” Carlos, and the show arrived on time and were eventually coaxed through the red tape that entangles any state capital and loaded into the canoa, or mammoth log turned into a boat, of the German who reigned in Victoria as the American Consul. This was gradually rowed, not directly to the theater, but to the “American’s” wharf, where we were forced to hire a wagon and lose an hour to cover the hundred yards remaining. We were installed, however, in time to give the two sections as advertised—though the managers were so skeptical of my solemn promise that they would certainly have postponed the opening date had I not been on the ground to forbid it—and were deluged by such a mob of pleasure-seekers that we had to close the doors and hold hundreds of them back until the second section.
Next day the agent of a local steamship line came to the theater and measured all our trunks, arranging to send the whole outfit to Bahia the following Monday for about one-tenth what train-travel had led us to expect. For I had come at last to a break in the railroads up the east coast of South America and was forced to take to the sea for the first time since Hays and I had entered the continent at Cartagena, Colombia, two and a half years before. On Wednesday “Tut” and I took our last Victorian stroll—the negro boys along the way halting open-mouthed and gazing up and down him to see where he was spliced—and in the afternoon I boarded the Maranhão of the Lloyd-Brazileiro and settled down in my cabin. I had dropped into a Brazilian novel of colonial days and completely forgotten the life of the harbor and the little capital that was still crawling slowly on about us, when I was suddenly astonished to see standing before me the owner and manager of the theater. Those two stodgy, bashful, rather artless mulattoes had hired a boat and taken the time and trouble to come out on board to bid me the good-by, which I, in my American incivility, had completely forgotten. One after the other they gave me the fraternal South American embrace of a handshake and an affectionate patting on the back with the left hand, assuring me that the show would be run with as great care and our percentage as honestly computed as if I were there in person, that they would see to it that my entire “company” boarded the Monday steamer, and bade me be sure to stop and see them if ever I came that way again. The most steel-rimmed color-line could not but be joggled by such Brazilian amiability.
On the second morning thereafter, with no other incident than being halted and examined by British cruisers hidden among the Abrolhos Islands in Brazilian waters, the Maranhão slipped smoothly into the immense Bay of All Saints, specks of white sails dotting its blue immensity, distant land with low hills gradually spreading along all the port horizon, and when I chanced to look up again the City of São Salvador da Bahia was gazing down upon us from the ridge along which it stretches for mile after hazy mile.