The “Fazenda” houses had great iron-studded doors, often a moat, and not infrequently a rusty cannon, though generally dismounted, and a relic of bygone time. The traveller fared, as a general rule, much worse than in the Banda Oriental, for save at the large cattle-farms it was impossible to buy a piece of meat. Admitted to the house, one rarely passed beyond the guest-chamber, a room with four bare white-washed walls; having for furniture a narrow hard-wood table with wrought-iron supports between its legs; chairs cut apparently out of the solid block, and a tin bucket or a large gourd in the corner, with drinking-water; so that one’s sojourn at the place was generally brief, and one’s departure a relief to all concerned. Still on the frontier the Gaucho influence made itself a little felt, and people were not so inhospitable as they were further in the interior of the land. Two or three leagues beyond the pass there was a little town called “Don Pedrito,” towards which we made; but a “Pampero,” whistling from the south, forced us to camp upon a stream known as the “Poncho Verde,” where, in the forties, Garibaldi was reported to have fought.
Wet to the skin and without food, we saw a fazenda not a mile away, rode up to it, and for a wonder were asked inside, had dinner in the guest-chamber, the owner sitting but not eating with us; the black Brazilian beans and bacon carried in pompously by three or four stalwart slaves, who puffed and sweated, trod on each other’s naked toes, and generally behaved as they had been carrying sacks of corn aboard a ship, only that in this instance no one stood in the gangway with a whip. Much did the conversation run on politics; upon “A Guerra dos Farapos,” which it appeared had riven the country in twain what time our host was young. Farapo means a rag, and the Republicans of fifty years ago in Rio Grande had adopted the device after the fashion of “Les gueux.” Long did they fight, and our host said: “Praise to God, infructuously,” for how could men who wore moustaches and full beards be compared to those who, like our host himself, wore whiskers carefully trimmed in the style of those which at the same epoch in our country were the trade-mark of the Iron Duke? Elective kings, for so the old “conservador” termed presidents, did not find favour in his eyes; and in religion too the “farapos” were seriously astray. They held the doctrine that all creeds should be allowed; which I once held myself, but now incline to the belief that a religion and a name should be bestowed at baptism, and that it should be constituted heresy of the worst kind, and punishable by a fine, to change or palter with either the name or the religion which our fathers have bestowed.
Politics over, we fell a-talking upon other lands; on Europe and England, Portugal, and as to whether “Rondon” was larger than Pelotas, or matters of that sort. Then our host inquired if in “Rondon” we did not use “la bosa,” and I not taking the thing up, he rose and stretching out his hands, set them revolving like a saw, and I then saw our supposed national pastime was what he meant; and told him that it was practised, held in repute, and marked us out as a people set apart; and that our greatness was largely founded on the exercise he had endeavoured to depict. We bade farewell, not having seen a woman, even a negress, about the place; but as we left, a rustling at the door showed that the snuff-and-butter-coloured sex had been observing us after the fashion practised in Morocco and in houses in the East. The hospitable “conservador” sent down a slave with a great basket full of oranges; and seated at the camp we ate at least three dozen, whilst the man waited patiently to take the basket back.
Night caught us in the open “camp,” a south wind blowing, and the drops congealing as they fell. Three of us muffled in ponchos rode round the horses, whilst the others crouched at the fire, and midnight come, the riders rode to the fire, and stretched on the wet mud slept fitfully, whilst the others took their place. Day came at last; and miserable we looked, wet, cold, and hungry, the fire black out, matches all damp, and nothing else to do but march till the sun rose and made life tolerable. Arrived at a small rancho we got off, and found the owner was a Spaniard from Navarre, married to a Brazilian woman. In mongrel Portuguese he bade us welcome; said he was no Brazilian, and that his house was ours, and hearing Spanish brightened up, and said in broken Spanish, mixed with Portuguese, that he could never learn that language, though he had passed a lifetime in the place. The country pleased him, and though he had an orange garden of some three acres in extent, though palms, mameyes and bananas grew around his door, he mourned for chestnuts, which he remembered in his youth, and said he recollected eating them whilst in Navarre, and that they were better than all the fruit of all Brazil; thinking, like Naaman, that Abana and Pharpar were better than all the waters of Israel, or rivers of Damascus; or perhaps moved in some mysterious way by the remembrance of the chestnut forests, the old grey stone-roofed houses, and the wind whistling through the pine woods of some wild valley of Navarre. At the old Spaniard’s house a difficulty cropped up with our men. I having told a man to catch a horse which looked a little wild, he answered he was not a horse-breaker, and I might ride the beast myself. I promptly did so, and asked him if he knew what a wild horse was, and if it was not true that horses which could be saddled without tying their hind legs were tame, and the rest laughing at him, he drew his knife, and running at me, found himself looking down the barrel of a pistol which my partner with some forethought had produced. This brought things to a crisis, and they all left us, with a hundred horses on our hands. Several Brazilians having volunteered, we took them, bought a tame horse accustomed to carry packs, procured a bullock, had it killed, and the meat “jerked”; and making bags out of the hide, filled them with food, for, as the Spaniard said, “in the country you intend to cross you might as well be amongst Moors, for even money will not serve to get a piece of beef.” A kindly soul the Spaniard, his name has long escaped me, still he was interesting as but the truly ignorant can ever be. The world to him was a great mystery, as it is even to those who know much more than he; but all the little landmarks of the narrow boundaries of his life he had by heart; and they sufficed him, as the great world itself cannot suffice those who, by living in its current, see its muddiness.
So one day told another, and each night found us on horseback riding round the drove. Through forest, over baking plain, up mountain paths, through marshes, splashing to the saddle-flaps, by lone “fazendas,” and again through herds of cattle dotting the plain for miles, we took our way. Little straw huts, each with a horse tied day and night before them, were our fairway marks. Day followed night without adventure but when a horse suddenly threw its rider and a Brazilian peon uncoiled his lasso, and with a jangling of spurs against the stirrups, sprang into life, and in a moment the long snaky rope flew through the air and settled round the runaway just underneath his ears. Once in a clearing, as we plodded on, climbing the last barrier of the mountain range, to emerge upon the district called “Encima de la Sierra,” a deer appeared jumping into the air, and coming down again on the same spot repeatedly, the Brazilians said that it was fighting with a snake, for “God has given such instinct to those beasts that they attack and kill all snakes, knowing that they are enemies of man.” [32] A scheme of the creation which, if held in its entirety, shows curious lacunæ in the Creator’s mind, only to be bridged over by that faith which in itself makes all men equal, that is, of course, when they experience it and recognize its charm. So on a day we crossed the hills, rode through a wood, and came out on a plain at the far end of which a little town appeared.
For about ten leagues in circumference the plain stretched out, walled in with woods, which here and there jutted out into it, forming islands and peninsulas. The flat-roofed town straggled along three flat and sandy streets; the little plaza, planted with mameyes and paraiso trees, served as a lounging-place by day, by night a caravanserai for negroes; in time of rain the streets were turned to streams, and poured their water into the plaza, which became a lake. At the west corner of the square was situated Cardozo’s store, the chief emporium, mart, and meeting-place (after the barber’s and the chemist’s) of the whole town. Two languid and yellow, hermaphroditic young Brazilians dressed in alpaca coats, white trousers, and patent leather boots dispensed the wares, whilst negroes ran about rolling in casks of flour, hogsheads of sugar, and bales of black tobacco from Bahia, or from Maranhão. Such exterior graces did the little town of the High Cross exhibit to us, wearied with the baking days and freezing nights of the last month’s campaign. Whether some Jesuit in the days gone by, when missionaries stood up before their catechumens unsustained by Gatling guns, sheltered but by a rude cross in their hands and their meek lives, had named the place, in commemoration of some saving act of grace done by Jehovah in the conversion of the heathen, none can tell. It may be that the Rood set up on high was but a landmark, or again to mark a frontier line against the heathen to the north, or yet it may have been the grave of some Paulista, who in his foray against the Jesuits in Paraguay died here on his return, whilst driving on before him a herd of converts to become slaves in far San Paulo, to the greater glory of the Lord. All these things may have been, or none of them; but the quiet sleepy place, the forests with their parrots and macaws, their herds of peccaries, their bands of screaming monkeys, the bright-striped tiger-cats, the armadillos, coatis, capibarás, and gorgeous flaming “seibos,” all intertwined by ropes of living cordage of lianas, and the supreme content of all the dwellers in the district, with God, themselves, their country, and their lives, still after twenty years is fresh, and stirs me, as the memory of the Pacific stirs a reclaimed “beach-comber” over his grog, and makes him say, “I never should have left them islands, for a man was happy in ’em, living on the beach.”
To this commercial centre (centro do commercio) we were advised to go, and there I rode, leaving my partner with the peons riding round the caballada upon the plains. Dressed as I was in the clothes worn by the Gauchos of the Banda Oriental, a hat tied underneath the chin with a black cord, a vicuña poncho, and armed with large resounding silver spurs, I made a blot of colour in Cardozo’s shop amongst the quietly dressed Brazilians, who, though they were some of the smartest men in South America upon a horse, were always clad in sober-coloured raiment, wore ordinary store-cut trousers, and had their feet endued with all the graces of a five-dollar elastic-sided boot.
Half-an-hour’s talk with the chief partner shattered all our plans. It then appeared that to take horses on to Rio was impossible, the country, after San Paulo, being one dense forest, and even if the horses stood the change of climate, the trip would take a year, thus running off with any profit which we might expect. Moreover, it appeared that mules were in demand throughout Brazil, but horses, till past San Paulo, five hundred miles ahead, but little valued, and almost as cheap, though much inferior in breed to those bred on the plains of Uruguay. He further told us to lose not a day in teaching all the horses to eat salt, for without that they would not live a month, as once the range of mountains passed between Cruz Alta and the plains, no horse or mule could live without its three months’ ration of rock-salt; there being in the pasture some malign quality which salt alone could cure. Naturally he had the cheapest salt in the whole town, and as our horses were by this time so thin that it was quite impossible to take them further without rest, they having been a month upon the road, we set about to find an enclosed pasture where we could let them feed.
Xavier Fernandez, a retired slave- and mule-dealer, was the man on whom by accident we fell. Riding about the plain disconsolately, like Arabs changing their pastures, and with our horses feeding near a little pond, we met him. An old straw hat, bed-ticking trousers, and with his naked feet shoved into slippers of carpindo leather, and an iron spur attached to one of them and hanging down at least an inch below his heel, mounted upon a mule saddled with the iron-framed Brazilian saddle, with the addition of a crupper, a thing strange to our eyes, accustomed to the wild horses of the plains, he did not look the type of “landed gentleman,” but such he was, owner of flocks and herds, and, in particular, of a well-fenced pasture, enclosing about two leagues of land.
After much talk of things in general, of politics, and of the revolution in progress in the republic we had left, upon our folly in bringing horses, which could go no further into the interior, and of the money we should have made had we brought “bestas,” that is, mules, we agreed to pay him so much a month for the use of his fenced pasture, and for our maintenance during the time we stayed. Leaving the horses feeding, watched by the men, we rode to see the place. Upon the way Xavier imparted much of history, a good deal of his lore, and curious local information about Cruz Alta, duly distorted, as befits a reputable man, through the perspective of his predilections, politics, faith, opinions, and general view of life.