The scenery, which we saw to advantage from seats placed in front of the leading car, is extremely beautiful as the train winds along steep slopes from which one looks down into richly wooded glens, with tiny waterfalls descending through ravines amid a profusion of tall ferns. It is a very wet bit of country, and before reaching the top, we were enveloped in clouds and heavy rain, and so lost what are perhaps the finest views, those looking back from the higher levels down the main valley and out to the now distant ocean. On the top one seemed suddenly to lose sight of the mountains, for we came out upon level ground without any descent to the other side of the hill. The weather cleared, and across a sparsely wooded undulating plain, in some parts open moorland, in other parts under tillage, we could descry distant peaks that rose sharp and clear in the less humid air. Whoever has travelled from north to south in Spain will remember a similarly abrupt transition when the railway, after climbing the mountains south of Santander, dripping with the rainstorms that constantly drive in from the Bay of Biscay, emerges on the bare dry plateau of Old Castile.
The train, speeding along the perfectly smooth roadbed which this gilt-edged railroad boasts, brought us after fifty miles to the city of São Paulo, the briskest and most progressive place in all Brazil, though with less than half the population of Rio de Janeiro. It is one of the oldest towns in the country, founded in 1553 by a Jesuit missionary. The early settlers, many of whom intermarried with the native Indians, became the parents of a singularly bold and energetic race, who, in their search for gold and silver, explored the land and raided the Indians and whites, too, if there were any, all the way down from here to the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. In those days the Portuguese government at Bahia, far off and weak, seldom interfered with its subjects. The free spirit of these "Paulistas" has passed to their descendants. Living in healthy uplands, they have shewn more industrial and political activity than the people of any other state in the federation. Since 1875 the planting of enormous tracts of land with coffee has rapidly raised the wealth of the region, and this city, being its heart and centre, has risen in sixty years from a small country town to be a place of four hundred thousand inhabitants.
It stands upon several hills, from the highest of which there are charming views to the picturesque ranges to the north and along the valley of its river, the Tiete. Rising only thirty miles from the sea, this stream flows away northwestward to join the Paraná and enter the ocean above Buenos Aires, the slope of all this region, so soon as one has crossed the Serra do Mar, being from east to west. The city has grown so fast as to shew few traces of its antiquity, except in the centre, where the narrow and crooked streets of the business quarter have a picturesque variety rarely found in the rectangular towns of the New World. The alert faces, and the air of stir and movement, as well as handsome public buildings rising on all hands, with a large, well-planted public garden in the middle of the city, give the impression of energy and progress. This plateau air is keen and bright, and, though the summer sun was strong, for we were in mid November, the nights were cool, and the winter, which sometimes brings slight frosts, restores men to physical vigour. We drove out a few miles to see the Independence Building, a tall pile, which from its hilltop looks over a wide stretch of rolling country. It was erected to commemorate the revolt of Brazil from Portugal in 1822, and contains what is one of the largest fresco paintings in the world, shewing Dom Pedro of Braganza, then Regent of Brazil, surrounded by his generals, proclaiming the independence of the nation, a spirited if somewhat theatrical composition. There is a collection of objects of natural history, as well as of native weapons and ornaments, but both here and elsewhere in Brazil, and, indeed, generally in South America, one is struck by the small amount of interest shewn in all branches of knowledge, except such as have a direct practical bearing and pecuniary value. Considering the enormous field of research which this Continent presents, and what advances have been made in scientific natural history during the last sixty years, far too little is being done to gather or to arrange and classify specimens illustrative either of the world of nature or of prehistoric and savage man. The collections are for the most part inferior to what European museums were seventy years ago. Let it be said, on the other hand, that the state of São Paulo has set an admirable example to the rest of Brazil in the liberal provision it is making for elementary schools.
Many immigrants from Italy have in the last decade entered the state and the city, and now by their labour contribute largely to the prosperity of both. Negroes are comparatively few; it is these Italians that do the most and the best of the work. The larger business, both commercial and industrial, for there are now a good many factories, is chiefly in the hands of foreigners, Italians, Germans, and English, with a few French, a state of things which accelerates material progress and leaves the native or Portuguese Brazilians more free to devote themselves to politics, a sphere of action into which, as already observed, the modern Paulistas have carried the energy of their ancestors. The state is not only the most prosperous, but politically the most influential, in the republic. One way or another, what with Paulistas and foreigners, city and state are vigorous communities, and to see them disabuses the traveller of the common belief that the South Americans are slack and inert.
The railway—a government line—from São Paulo to Rio runs at first through that high, rolling country which lies behind the escarpment facing to the coast. Its variety of surface, and its patches of woodland, the trees handsome though seldom tall, make it very pretty, and there are glimpses of the mountain range to the west, one of whose summits is the loftiest in all Brazil. The line, as it approaches the coast, begins to descend, running along the edge of deep gorges, where the bright green herbage and luxuriant growths of shrubs and ferns contrast with the deep red of the soil produced by the decomposition of granitic rocks. After the arid severity of the Andean valleys of Argentina and Bolivia, and the sternness of chilly Patagonia, there was something cheering in this exuberance of vegetation, this sense that Nature is doing her best to give man a chance to live easily and happily. The train sweeps down a long ravine, and passes many a waterfall, till at last the ravine becomes a wide valley and opens into the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
How is one to describe Rio? I had read a score of descriptions, yet none of them had prepared me for the reality. Why should a twenty-first description be any more successful? Its bay has been compared to the bays of Naples, of Palermo, of Sydney, of San Francisco, of Hongkong, and of Bombay, as well as to the Bosphorus. It is not in the least like any of these, except in being beautiful, nor, I should fancy, is it like any other place in the world. Suppose the bottom of the Yosemite Valley, or that of the valley of Auronzo in the Venetian Alps, filled with water, and the effect would be something like the bay of Rio. Yet the superb vegetation would be wanting, and the views to far-away mountains, and the sense of the presence of the blue ocean outside the capes that guard the entrance.
The name (River of January) suggests a river, but this was a mistake of the Portuguese discoverers, for nothing but trifling streams enter this great inlet. It is a landlocked gulf, twenty miles long and from five to ten miles wide, approached from the ocean through a channel less than a mile wide between rocky promontories upon which forts have been erected. On the north side, inside the entrance, is the town of Nictheroy, whose name commemorates a long-extinct tribe of Indians. Bold rocky isles lie in front of it and high hills rise behind.
The city of Rio lies upon the south side of the gulf, the great bulk of it inside, though two or three suburbs have now grown up which stretch across a neck of land to the ocean. It runs along the shore for five or six miles, occupying all the space between the water and the mountains behind, and cut up into several sections by steep ridges which come down from the mountains and jut out into the water. The coast-line is extremely irregular, for between these jutting promontories it recedes into inlets, so that when one looks at Rio, either from offshore in front or from the mountain tops behind, it seems like a succession of towns planted around inlets and divided from one another by wooded heights. All these sections are connected by a line of avenues running nearly parallel to the coast, so that the city sometimes narrows to a couple of hundred yards, sometimes widens out where there is a level space between the water and the hills, sometimes climbs the hill slopes, and mingles its white houses with the groves that cover their sides. Behind all stands up the mountain wall, in most places clothed with luxuriant forests, but in others rising in precipices of grey granite or single shafts of rock. Thus Rio stands hemmed in between mountains and bays. There is hardly a spot where, looking up or down a street, one does not see the vista closed either by the waving green of forest or the sparkling blue of sea.
Other cities there are where mountains rising around form a noble background and refresh the heart of such town dwellers as have learnt to love them. "I will lift mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my aid." Such cities are Athens and Smyrna, Genoa and Palermo, San Francisco and Santiago de Chile. But in Rio the mountains seem to be almost a part of the city, for it clings and laps round their spurs just as the sea below laps round the capes that project into the bay. Nor does one see elsewhere such weird forms rising directly from the yards and gardens of the houses. One can hardly take one's eyes off the two strangest among these, which are also the most prominent in every prospect. The Pan de Azucar (Sugar Loaf) is a cone of bare granite, so steep as to be scaleable at one point only by the boldest climbers, which stands on the ridge between the bay and the ocean. The other peak is the still loftier Corcovado, a vertical shaft of rock something like the Aiguille de Dru,[91] which springs right out of the houses to a height of over two thousand three hundred feet. Such strange mountain forms give to the landscape of the city a sort of bizarre air. They are things to dream of, not to tell. They remind one of those bits of fantastic rock scenery which Leonardo da Vinci loved to put in as backgrounds, though the rocks of Rio are far higher, and are also harder. A painter might think the landscapes altogether too startling for treatment, and few painters could handle so vast a canvas as would be needed to give the impression which a general view makes. Yet the grotesqueness of the shapes is lost in the splendour of the whole,—a flood of sunshine, a strand of dazzling white, a sea of turquoise blue, a feathery forest ready to fall from its cliff upon the city in a cascade of living green.
It is hard for man to make any city worthy of such surroundings as Nature has given to Rio. Except for two or three old-fashioned streets in the business quarter near the port and arsenal, it is all modern, and such picturesqueness as there is belongs to the varying lines of shore and hill, and to the interspersed gardens. A handsome modern thoroughfare, the Avenida Central, has been run through what used to be a crowded mass of mean houses, and it has the gay effectiveness of a Parisian boulevard. Villas surrounded by trees crown the hills that rise here and there; and one street is lined by two magnificent rows of Royal palms, their stems straight and smooth as marble pillars, crested by plumes of foliage. At the east end of the city the semicircular bay of Botafogo is surrounded by a superb palm-planted esplanade, whose parapet commands the finest general view over the entrance to the bay and the heights behind Nictheroy, and as far as the Organ Mountains which rise in a row of lofty pinnacles thirty miles away.