Another nuisance is the carapato. It is everywhere, but chiefly inhabits the coffee plantations. There are three sorts, which only vary in size and colour. It is a cross between a tick and a small crab; the biggest would be the size of a little finger-nail. If you ride through a coffee plantation you come out covered with them. I have more than once taken off my riding habit and found my jacket nailed to the skin from the outside; to pull them is to tear your flesh and produce a festering wound. You have to get into a hot bath, in which you put one or two bottles of cachaça, the spirit of the country, and that clears off most of them; and if any obstinate ones remain, you have to light a cigarette, and apply the hot end to their tails till they wriggle their own head and shoulders out from under your skin. Cockroaches you don't count, but you must always look in your sleeves, and dress, and boots, for large horned beetles or spiders or other horrors.
Poor W. H. Bates (the naturalist of the Royal Geographical Society), who was a great friend of ours, was laughed at because he spoke of spiders as big as a toy-terrier; but it is perfectly true—there are such spiders, though they are not seen in towns, only out in the forest, and they are the size of a good-sized crab. The body is hairy, and when they are angry they kick up and throw their hairs on you, which are poisonous. I was going to hit one, and a native drew me back and made me run away, for, he said, "it can spring at you, and it is instantaneous death." Richard and I did not go so far as to believe this, unless your blood is in a very bad state, but we did believe in its making people ill for several days. A priest was once going to say Mass, and he took his vestment down from the wall where it was hung up, and put it on, when he suddenly felt something hard in the centre of his back. He called to the servers and asked them to remove his vestment gently, without touching his back, telling them there was something inside. They did so, and it was one of these big spiders; when it was removed he fainted.
The people eat a large black ant, an inch and a half long. They bite off the fat body, which has to them a pleasant acid, and throw the head and legs away. Another use they make of them is to dress them up like dolls and sell them. The copim, or white ants, build nests like milestones. The people here believe in a sort of house-that-Jack-built as regards animal feeding. They believe that toads eat ants, that snakes eat toads, that owls eat snakes, also the geese, and that is why they are cheap.
Snakes are everywhere—in your garden, in your basement, in your rafters; and there is every description of them, from the boa-constrictor in the wilder parts, to the smallest. It is a common thing to hear the rattlesnake in the grass, and to scamper quickly. Those who kill them cut out the rattle and give it you for good luck. I have one now. At night, when you walk out you go with a lantern at the end of a stick, for the snake called jararaquassú lies curled up at night on the road, looking exactly like a heap of dust, and you would certainly put your foot on it; it bites your ankle, and they say that you live about ten minutes.
These things, which sound so wonderful in England, become so common to us who live and travel in Brazil, out of towns and off beaten tracks, that we get quite accustomed to them, as everyday parts of our lives, as you do to showers in April and dying flies in September; so that I should not know now that they had ever happened if I had not written them down at the time. No one who means to write, should ever trust to memory, because scene after scene fades like a dissolving view and is never caught again, whilst others rise to replace them.
The storms were another thing to be somewhat dreaded. For our three summer months, which are December, January, and February (whilst the Thames is frozen over in London), we, maybe, have 115° in the shade, and you see a semicircle of clouds beating up. As our house was on a kind of promontory running out, not to sea, but to grassy plain, we used to have to make "all taut" as if we were on board a ship, because when it did come it was like a cyclone, lasting two or three hours, and then clearing off, leaving everything bright and beautiful, the earth and air barely refreshed; but while it lasted the thunder and lightning were close to you. I have frequently thought that if there was one more clap my head would split—it deafened one. The windows were generally broken, there were balls of fire flying through the air—blue, red, yellow; and on one occasion, on a pitch-black night, perceiving a light from an opposite angle in my husband's room, I thought the house was on fire. The door was locked for the night. I ran down the corridor, unlocked the door, and, going in, found that the lightning had broken a window and had set on fire one of my husband's large rolling atlases on canvas, which hung from the walls. I ran back and called him, and it made him very uncomfortable. He thought that one of these lightning balls of fire must have done it, but there was no aerolite or anything to show. There was no fireplace in the room, not even a box of matches.
At nine p.m. on the 20th of October, a meteor fell with a loud sound, and lit up the City of São Paulo. Martinico Prado and some others were standing near it, and he fell insensible. It fell on the hill near São Bemte; blue flame was seen in our house at the same moment. It was intensely cold, but bright, beautiful weather.
We bought horses—one that had something of the mustang in it, called Hawa, which always carried me, and Penha, a smaller one from Campos for Richard. When we drove, it was in an American buckboard, seat for two, with huge wheels, and a little place to hold a box, with a pair of wild mules that used to pull one's arm off. When Richard did not ride with me, Chico used to take the second horse.
Chico and I never had but one quarrel, and I will give it as an illustration. When I first arrived, Richard used always to laugh at me, because I was so miserable at the way the cruel people treat the blacks—just in the same way that I, and so many others, feel about the treatment of animals—and he kept saying, "Oh, wait a bit, till you have lived with negroes a little; you philanthropic people always have to give in." Well, about six weeks after I got Chico, I heard a tremendous noise, and shrieks of agony proceeding from the kitchen, and rushing in the direction I found Chico roasting my favourite cat at the fire. I made one spring at his wool, and brought him to the ground. Richard, who had also rushed out at the noise, saw me, and clapped his hands, saying, "Brava! brava! I knew it would happen, but I did not think it would be quite so soon." I could only blubber out, "Oh, Jemmy, the little beast has roasted my cat." He then punished him himself, and Chico was a good boy evermore. In begging for forgiveness, he told us that their fathers and mothers always instructed them, that when Christ was thirsty, if He asked a little dog for water, the dog would go and fetch it for Him, but if He asked a cat for water, that it gave Him something in a cup, which I cannot mention in polite society; and that all the little negroes were taught to be cruel to cats, and that he had done atrocious things to cats, but he would never do so any more.
A very amusing thing was that this little monkey used to imitate his master in everything. If Richard bought a suit of clothes, he used immediately to take it to the tailor and get it exactly copied in small, and his evening suit especially. To go to a ball he was the exact copy of his master—white shirt, white tie, little dress suit, little gibus, and all. We used to make him come and show himself to us when he was dressed, to amuse us. Then, unlike his master, he started a toilette-table with mirror, perfumes, and scents, and his pillow was all edged with deep lace. Each of the best families had one of these intelligent negroes; they used to give supper-parties, and then stand up and make speeches, just like us. Mr. Aubertin's used to talk about the railway shares, and the value of cotton, and the coffee produce; another, belonging to a reverend gentleman, used to stand up and speak of the "benighted state of the souls of the black man and the brother;" but our Chico used to declaim on "the Negro's place in Nature," as he had heard Richard do in his lectures, and talk of the progress that they had made from the original ape (Darwinism), and how they might eventually hope to rise into a white man.