The English writer Southey, who wrote a six-volume history of Brazil, complained of the “tremendous ascents” and the thinness of the air on the plateau of São Paulo—with its elevation of nearly 2,500 feet! Certainly the man who has rambled about the Andes feels only gratitude for that altitude, which lifts him above the sweltering heat of the coastlands. Even to the casual observer, however, there seems no other fitting reason for founding a city at this particular spot, and one is quickly driven to printed authority to account for such taste. In 1554 the Jesuit, José de Anchietta, had gone to the town of Piratinanga to establish a school, but being dissatisfied with that village, he ordered its inhabitants, in the dogmatic Jesuit manner of those good old days, to remove to a site on the Tieté. Now the Tieté is scarcely a brook, rising on the Brazilian plateau near the Atlantic and flowing away across country to the Paraná, finally to join the Plata and pour its scanty waters into the South Atlantic. There are a dozen real rivers to the north and south of this insignificant stream and a hundred sites that would have seemed better suited to the good padre’s purpose, but the Jesuit insisted and at length the people of Piratinanga obeyed his command; and because the town that was destined to grow to be the industrial capital and the railway center of Brazil was founded on June 25, it was named St. Paul in honor of that day’s saint.

One must get some little way out of São Paulo to appreciate its situation clearly. Built on plump low hills in a rolling, treeless country, rather dry and reddish of soil, the nature of the ground gives splendid views of the town from many points of vantage, and in tramping about its environs one finds every now and then the reddish, light-colored city spread out in almost its entirety below or above him. In a general sense the city and the region about it would be called flat, yet in detail it is by no means so. The character of its site gives São Paulo an intricate network of streets, with viaducts over great gullies and street-cars passing above and under one another. The great Viaducto do Chá stands so high above the great ravine through the center of town that it is a favorite place of threatened suicide among lovesick youths.

Its unexpected position as capital and metropolis of the world’s greatest coffee-producing state has given this once bucolic country town so extraordinary a growth that the Cidade of the nineteenth century is now merely the central tangle of streets in the heart of town. From this nucleus run splendid avenues lined with a bushy species of shade-trees, and residence sections with dwellings of coffee kings, ranging all the way from sumptuous comfort to magnificent and palatial eyesores, spread away across town in various directions. São Paulo has more than half a million inhabitants, a municipal theater for opera, drama, and concerts scarcely second to any in the western hemisphere, and an up-and-coming manner which quickly establishes its claim to equality with modern cities of the temperate zone. The “Light and Power Company” runs an excellent service of open street-cars and gives the city a nightly brilliancy that is not often reached in cities of its size. Its immaculate policemen carry speckless white clubs, thrust into leather scabbards except when directing traffic. No one has ever known them to strike a man with a club, but they are at least awe-inspiring representatives of law and order.

The extraordinary activity of São Paulo is plainly due to its European immigrants,—Portuguese, Spanish, especially Italian. Whether it is because they come from the northern part of the peninsula, where sterner characters grow, or that they feel peculiarly at home in the Brazilian environment, the Italians of São Paulo stand noticeably high in the community. Many of the important business houses, some of the professions, and much of the wealth is in their hands; among the rather insignificant-looking hybrid Brazilians they are conspicuous for their better physique and greater energy. Modern and energetic though it is, however, São Paulo swarms with non-producers. At the stations crowds of able-bodied carregadores, paying a high municipal license and waiting most of the day in vain for an errand, try to recoup themselves by demanding a thousand reis or more for carrying the traveler’s bag across the street. The city has so many shops and hawkers and peddlers that one might easily fancy it in a densely populated country, rather than in one where land is everywhere suffering for cultivation. Countless little liquor shops are run by grasping individuals without initiative, anyone with cash or credit enough to buy a dozen bottles of liquor seeming to choose this high road to opulence. Vendors of tickets for both the national and state lotteries make day and night hideous with their uproar and crowd the principal streets with their booths; hordes of silk-clad, bejeweled French and Jewish adventuresses roll luxuriantly to and fro every afternoon in their automobiles.

The principal place of meeting for the rank and file is the Jardim da Luz, a “popular” park retreat of the German beer-garden style, well crowded of an evening, especially when a municipal or military band plays. Here, too, vendors of strong and weak drink are ubiquitous, their tables in the open air, their prices posted on the trees, yet demanding 500 reis for a glass of sweetened water, with the waiter still to be satisfied. Everyone moves with an almost tropical leisure, though there are evenings in this July midwinter when autumn garments are not out of place and not a few young fops affect overcoats. Yet São Paulo is, on the whole, a less showy town than one expects. Foreigners are so usual in any gathering that one attracts little notice. Though perhaps a majority of such a “popular” crowd is of the physically insignificant, negroid mixture common to much of Brazil, in the strolling throng may be seen every nationality from tow-headed Norwegian girls—about whom there are suggestions of the effects of a tropical climate and environment in slackening social morals among any race—to a Japanese out on the edge of the night, with a far-away-across-the-Pacific look in his cynical-inscrutable eyes out of all keeping with his commonplace “European” garb.

Every stroll beyond the city limits well repaid the dusty exertion. Evidently the year’s shipment of rain, like so many carelessly billed supplies from the North, had been carried past its destination, for the region about São Paulo was deadly dry at a season when it should have been verdant, and the newspapers reported the churches of Buenos Aires filled day and night with people praying that the celestial waterworks might be shut off. The cloud effects on the Brazilian plateau are so striking that São Paulo was perhaps more beautiful on a gray day than on a bright one when the glare brought out something of squalor. Out at Ypiranga on the bank of a tiny stream, where Emperor Pedro I gave the “cry of independence” that eventually shook Brazil free from Portugal, there is a remarkably good museum full of a wealth of historical material,—mementoes of the aboriginal inhabitants, splendid collections of the fauna of Brazil, hundreds of borboletas, or butterflies, of which the country has an incredible variety in size and color, innumerable species of beija-flores (“kiss-flowers,” or humming-birds), many pica-paos (“pick-sticks,” which are none other than woodpeckers); strange specimens of the vulture family known as João Velho (“Old John”).

Or the five-mile tramp out to Penha is no waste of time. The road passes through many market gardens of black soil in the bottomlands. Along the way are Italian husbandmen with wide heavy mattocks, Sicilian stocking-caps like the chorus of “Cavalleria Rusticana” on their heads, Egyptian water-dips on poles with American oil-cans as buckets, Gallego ox-carts with solid wooden wheels and axles that shriek along the highway, much cabbage and lettuce, a few potatoes, grapes, baskets of strawberries almost the year round. Pack-mules and the raucous cry of muleteers plodding soft-footed in the dust behind them, one person to each milk-can of a gallon or two, carrying it on his head to town, there to sell it by the cupful—no wonder milk costs its weight in silver—and much more may be seen spread out across the reddish landscape bounded by the low rolling hills, light-wooded in places and distance-blue in color, of the coast range. The town of Penha is pitched on the summit of a knoll with a striking view of São Paulo, five miles away, and a shrine to which the pious flock in great numbers. Inside the otherwise uninteresting church is an ornate Virgin who is credited with miraculous cures, and her chamber overflows with evidences of gratitude from her devotees,—hundreds of pictures by native “artists,” atrocious photographs of accidents posed for after they had taken place, that the miraculously rescued victim might carry out the promise made in the heat of fear to the Virgin, the latter always represented somewhere in the upper right-hand corner of the picture in the act of saving the devotee from appalling sudden death in the very nick of time. Here a fat man is being snatched from beneath the wheels of a heavy truck, there a baby is shown safely deposited on the fender of a street-car, or a countryman falling from his horse is landing upright with divine assistance. Far more numerous than these pictorial atrocities, however, are the wax imitations of all parts of the body. A sign on the wall announced that “only things that are decent may be shown in the miracle room,” but words have not the same meanings in different climes and races, and little was left to the imagination, though no doubt the rule cuts down appreciably the material evidences of cures. How widespread is superstition and the fostering of it even in the progressive state of São Paulo is shown by the fact that a month fills the room to overflowing. During the few minutes I was there a man brought a wax foot, a buxom young woman a breast, and a mulatto crone a hand which no doubt was meant to represent one of her own, though it was snow-white except where she had painted a red streak across the back to indicate the portion she wished, or had already had, cured. But the Virgin of Penha draws no color-line, for her own complexion is by no means strictly Caucasian, and her quadroon swarthiness no doubt gives the average of her devotees a comfortable feeling of racial propinquity.

Most famous, perhaps, of all the sights in and about São Paulo is the “Instituto Butantan,” known among the English-speaking residents as the “snake farm.” A mile walk out beyond the Pinheiros car-line brings one to this important and well-conducted establishment, first started by private initiative but now receiving government aid. On the crest of a knoll are several concrete buildings and about them scores of snake-houses, half-spherical cement structures some four feet high inclosed in sections by low walls and moats, where thousands of snakes lie basking in the sun. By Brazilian law any public carrier must transport free of charge from its place of capture to the “snake farm” of São Paulo any new species of snake discovered. There are one hundred and eighty known species of reptile in Brazil—the Portuguese word for snake, by the way, is cobra—of which ten are known to be venomous; in other words when a snake appears even in Brazil there is only one chance in eighteen that his bite is harmful, and the odds are eighteen to one that he is just a harmless fellow who wants to cuddle up in your lap for company. But the venomous ones are venomous indeed. There is the deadly cascavel, or rattlesnake, the jararaca, worst of all the jararaca de rabo branco, the jararaca with a white tail. Aside from its mere museum or “zoo” function, the “Instituto Butantan” has two very practical purposes. Three serums are made here for snakebites and sent to all parts of the republic, remedies that have saved the life of many a sertanejo dwelling in wilderness isolation back in the sertões of Brazil, where an ignorant pill-peddler, who calls himself “doutor,” but whose training as a physician is largely imaginary, sometimes appears not more than once or twice a year. The venomous snakes are required to furnish their own antidote. A uniformed negro attendant springs over the low wall and moat into an inclosure of dangerous snakes, pins one to the ground with a sort of iron cane, picks it up by the throat with his bare hands, and forces it to spit its yellowish venom into a piece of cheesecloth drawn tight over the opening of a glass receptacle. Healthy young mules are inoculated with this, and the serum produced in much the same way as smallpox vaccine.

The second purpose of the institute is to breed and distribute the mussurama. This is a native black snake sometimes reaching eight feet in length, entirely harmless to man but which feeds exclusively on other snakes, venomous ones by preference. Within the moats that inclose this species are many others which only repeated assurance would convince the novice are not dangerous. The non-venomous snakes are in general larger than the others, and may also be distinguished by the lack of any special tail, being, as it were, all of one piece. If the employees of the institute, from the scientists in charge of serum-making to the negro snake-herders, are to be believed, there are other differences: the harmless snakes lay eggs, while the others produce their young alive; the former must be fed, and the latter have never been caught taking nourishment since the institute was started. Some of the harmless cobras attain considerable size, though by no means any such as they do in popular jungle tales. The largest in captivity at São Paulo was a species of constrictor about sixteen feet long and as large around as a rain-pipe. They vary widely, too, in habits. The sucurý is huge, clumsy, and sluggish; a large brown snake in the same inclosure was almost lightning-like in its movements, snapping at the flap of the attendant’s trousers and returning to the attack with incredible swiftness as often as the latter threw him away with his crooked iron stick. Like so many really harmless creatures he is evidently given his vicious temper to make up for the lack of any real defense. This reptile is said to follow for miles any creature that angers it, and though its bite is harmless, only a man with long experience or iron nerve could resist taking to his heels when this personification of speed and anger dashes upon him with its great jaws wide open. All such species, however, are mere souvenirs of the sertão, of no other use than to keep company for the mussurama, great numbers of which are sent to the snake-infested areas of Brazil as rapidly as they attain mature size.

On my second or third visit, after I had won his gratitude with my kodak, the chief snake-herder arranged a special snake-eating contest. Into a moated compound of mussuramas he threw a jararaca de rabo branco, the most deadly snake of Brazil. Far from pouncing upon the newcomer, the black cannibals gave it no attention whatever. The attendant stepped over the wall and introduced the visitor to his hosts one by one. The first turned up his nose at it, which drew forth the information that this one had eaten only a week before and was not yet hungry. The second had not dined for at least a fortnight. No sooner had the jararaca been tossed near him than he sprang forward and wound himself about the other so rapidly that the eye could not follow the individual movements, kinking and knotting him in an intricate entanglement in which only their difference in color distinguished one slimy body from the other. The two snakes were almost of a size, about three feet long. The jararaca writhed in agony, opened his huge mouth with its two ugly looking fangs on the upper jaw, and struck hard into the black body of his opponent, the yellow venom running down over his scales. The only response of the oppressor was to increase the entanglement until the head of the jararaca was confined in a coil, as his own was protected within the folds of his own body.

For more than twenty minutes after his first sudden movements the mussurama scarcely moved a scale. I began to think he had gone to sleep again. Then gradually, imperceptibly, almost as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock moves, he withdrew his own head from the coil that had protected it, looked cautiously about to see whether danger threatened, then moving one muscle at a time, with the patience of a professional wrestler, he worked his frog-mouth sidewise slowly along the body of the jararaca until he reached the neck. Pulling the head carefully out of its confining coil, he crushed it flat by slow pressure of his powerful mouth. Only then did he appear satisfied and at ease. Disentangling himself, he began to swallow the jararaca head first, working his way along it in successive bites at about the speed with which a lady might put on the finger of a new glove, now and then wriggling his body to increase its capacity. Once he stopped, rolled a bit, and took a long breath, then went steadily on until the white tail of the jararaca, looking for a moment like a long tongue of his own, disappeared entirely, perhaps four minutes from the time the swallowing had begun, and the snake that was left where two had been before crawled lazily away to his cement house for a fortnight’s sleep.

I remained for some time in São Paulo not only because it proved to be a city worth exploring, but because I had come to the end of my railroad passes, and unless I could discover a new source of supply I faced the painful and unusual experience of having to pay my fare. To tell the truth, so weary had I become of train riding and respectability that I found myself planning to slip into my oldest clothes, pick up a fellow-beachcomber, and take to the road for the three hundred and twenty miles left to Rio. But short samples convinced me that such a walk would not prove entirely a pleasure jaunt and railway passes evidently do not grow on São Paulo bushes. I was forced, therefore, to fall back on my own slender funds. There is frequent and comfortable service from São Paulo to Rio four times a day in twelve hours by day or night on the government railway, but a more pleasant as well as cheaper route appeared to be that by way of Santos and an ocean steamer; moreover, it seemed more fitting to enter the far-famed harbor of the Brazilian capital by the harbor’s mouth than to sneak in at the back door by the government railway.

An excellent express of the British “São Paulo Railway Company” left the industrial capital at eight in the morning and raced thirty of the fifty miles to Santos across level country in less than an hour. Then we halted at Alto da Serra for the inevitable coffee and a new engine. This was small and inclosed within a sort of car with glass-protected observation platform, for almost the only work required of it was to hook us, two cars at a time, to a cable running on large upright wheels between the rails, two small trains counterbalancing each other at opposite ends of the cable making little motive power necessary. Just beyond was the abertura, the “opening” or jumping-off place, where the world suddenly spread out far below, some of it visible, some hidden by vast banks of mist slowly melting under the torrid sun. The cable let us down more than two thousand feet in a very few miles, the descending and ascending trains passing each other automatically on a switch halfway down. The road was so swift that the buildings along the way seemed sharply tilted uphill, but though the valley was densely wooded with scrub growth, it was only a narrow one, so that while the engineering feat may be as remarkable, the scenery was by no means equal to the descent to Paranaguá. It took as long to lower us to Piassagüera in its banana-fields, only eight miles without stops, as it had to cover the thirty miles with several halts from São Paulo to the opening of the range. This road, over which virtually all the coffee grown in Brazil starts to the outside world, is reputed to be one of the richest concessions on earth, though its charter restricts its net profits to a certain percentage of the invested capital, the rest going to the government. The company has always had great difficulty in devising ways and means to spend its surplus earnings and keep them from falling into the public coffers. It is rumored that all the switch-lamps are silver-plated. The latest plan of the harassed directors is to electrify the road, but to the casual observer this would seem exceedingly unwise, for heavy coffee trains coasting down the hill might store up electricity enough to run the entire road, and with no more coal to buy at the breath-taking price of that commodity in Brazil the problem of spending their surplus would become hopeless.

Santos is even older than São Paulo, having been founded by Thomé de Souza two years earlier. Not so long ago it was a pesthole, noted especially for its yellow fever. Those unpleasant days are forever gone, though it is still not a health resort and many of its people prefer to live in São Paulo and come down daily on business. If it was not always raining in torrents during my stay there, at least it was overhung by a soggy, humid heat that had nothing in common with the cool, clear atmosphere of São Paulo. Such air as arises in Santos drags its way sluggishly through the streets, and there was a heavy, blue-mood temperament about the place quite unlike the larger city up the hill.

This languid, gloomy mood pervaded even the club in which a group of Americans sit all day long, day after day, “mopping up booze,” exchanging the chips that pass in the night, and buying coffee. The last is their appointed task, but it is a light one. Every now and then a dealer or a native messenger comes in with a name, a price, and one or two other hieroglyphics scratched on a slip of paper; one of the buyers lays aside his cards long enough to “o.k.” it, and the deed is done. Santos exports a million dollars’ worth of produce to the United States each year, “about one hundred per cent. of which is coffee.” When one compares the retail price of this commodity in the American market with what the planters of São Paulo state get for it, the wonder arises as to where the difference goes. Some of it, of course, goes to the world-weary men who spend their days exchanging chips at the club in Santos; transportation takes its full share; a high ad valorem export tax goes to the federal government; a similar impost of five francs a sack goes to the State of São Paulo; the municipalities through which it passes do not allow themselves to be forgotten; the European builders of the port improvements exact their generous pound of flesh; and “official charges” thrust out a curved palm at every step, so that whoever drinks coffee helps generously to support the plethora of mulatto politicians of Brazil. Yet even then the State of São Paulo is not satisfied with the price paid for its principal product and in order that this may fall no lower prohibitive taxes now make it impossible to lay out new coffee plantations within the state.

In all the business section of Santos there are pungently scented warehouses in which coffee is picked over by hand by women and children whose knowledge of sanitary principles is embryonic; while down at the wharves the coffee-porters give the town a picturesque touch. Long lines of European laborers, dressed in undershirt, cotton trousers, a cloth belt, and a tight skull-cap, all more or less ragged, discolored and soaked with sweat, trot from train to warehouse or from warehouse to ship, each with a sack of coffee set up on his neck, moving with a jerk of the hips and keeping the rest of the body quite rigid. Their manners are gayer than one might expect of men constantly bearing such burdens. The law requires that each sack weigh exactly sixty kilograms, about 132 pounds, that the state may levy its tax without difficulty; and the men are paid sixty reis for every sack they carry. In the slave days of thirty years and more ago this coffee-carrying was done by African chattels, trotting in unison to the time of their melancholy-boisterous native melodies. Now there is not a drop of African blood among the carriers, though there were not a few haughty negroes in uniform sitting in the shade superintending the job and down on a tiny cruiser nearby all the sailors were of that race. The Portuguese have driven out the negro carriers by their greater strength and diligence, but they in turn are being superseded by modern improvements.

“Brazil is no good any more,” grumbled a sweat-soaked son of Lisbon with whom I spoke. “It is forbidden now to carry two sacks at a time, and these great carrier-belts they are putting in, as well as the auto-trucks, are robbing us of our livelihood.”

Santos has now grown almost wholly around a steep, rocky hill that was once on its outskirts, spreading in wide, right-angled streets lined by pretentious light-colored dwellings to the seashore, with several large bathing-season hotels and many fine beaches along the scalloped coast. Up at the top of this hill in the center of the flat modern town is an ancient place of pilgrimage known as the “Santuario de Nossa Senhora de Monte Serrat,” overflowing, like that of Penha, with wax imitations of cures. Prices were distressingly high in Santos. Bananas, which overload the landscape about the town, cost 600 reis each in any restaurant; and all else was in proportion. No doubt milk must be sold at 32 cents a quart in a town where the milkmen drive about in luxurious go-carts, dressed as if on their way to a wedding. But such things are painful to the wanderer who has already begun to doubt his ability to pay his way home from the next port, particularly when he finds that for once there is no steamer bound thither for several days, and that the fare for the overnight sea-trip is half as much as that to Europe.

It was too late to change my plans and make the journey to Rio by rail, however, and I made the best of the delay by joining a Sunday excursion to Guarajá, a beach with a Ritz-Carlton hotel that was being “boomed” a few miles out through the wilderness. A little steamer carried us from the Santos docks to a station across the harbor, from which a tiny steam railroad runs off through the jungle. The benches were hard, the toy engine incessantly spat smoke, cinders, and fire back upon us, and a woman of the laboring class was jammed into close, popular-excursion contact with me throughout the journey. But the beach of Guarajá was fine and hard, and the day brilliant and clear. Chalets, bandstands, and all the Palm Beach paraphernalia recalled the season of six to eight weeks during which coffee kings and their mistresses hold high revel and yield the promoters a good year’s profit on their investment. Natives, both men and women, had here and there rolled up their trousers or the feminine counterpart and gone wading, but evidently it was not considered the proper season to swim, for all the heat of midwinter July, or else the community had the customary South American fear of “wetting the body all over.” Gringos may always take their own risks, however, and by dint of long inquiry I found I could get an ill-fitting bathing-suit and the key to a bathhouse, all for a mere 2000 reis, and I went in alone.

It was the first time I had been in or upon the sea since entering South America way up on the gulf of Panama more than two years before. I plunged in and was soon diving under the combers and enjoying myself hugely, when I suddenly found that I could not touch bottom, and that the more I tried the less I touched. This would not have mattered had I not realized by some indefinable sense that I was not only in an ebbing tide but that I was caught in an undertow which was dragging me swiftly seaward. The buildings and the excursionists on the shore were growing slowly but steadily smaller. I waved an arm above the water and attracted the attention of a group of men, but it was evident by their indecisive actions that they were “Spigs” and that no help would come from that quarter, though they might be of use in testifying before the coroner’s jury. Among the Sunday crowd on the shore and the hotel veranda arose more stir than I had yet caused anywhere in Brazil, and the bathhouse attendant who had taken the 2000 reis away from me rushed down to the spray’s edge frantically waving his arms. For the next twenty minutes or so I had visions of navigating the high seas without a ship, but as I did not confine myself during that time to smiling at the vision, but took to performing superhuman feats of swimming, I was suddenly surprised, not to say relieved, to feel my feet strike sand, and what might have been a coroner’s inquest turned out to be nothing but a lesson for the foolhardy. When I returned to dress, the attendant said that he had forgotten to tell me that certain parts of this beach had a very dangerous undertow. Posthumous information was to be expected of a Brazilian; but when the American of Santos who had suggested my spending the Sunday at Guarajá replied to my mention of the entirely personal incident, while we were lunching at the Sportsman Café next day—at his expense—with “Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that is the most dangerous beach in South America, hardly a Sunday passes without someone drowning there,” I could not but thank him fervently for his kind warning.

The steamer of the Spanish line owned by the Jesuits spent most of Tuesday in “leaving within five minutes,” during which the passengers all but succumbed to uproar, congestion, and perspiration. I found myself packed into a tiny two-berth cabin with two other travelers whom I should not naturally have chosen as companions; nowhere was there a spot clean and large enough on which to sit down. Once a refresco, a glass of sickly sweetened water, was served to us as a special favor just before we choked to death, and finally about five in the afternoon we let go the wharf, made a nearly complete circle with the “river” on which Santos is located, and dipping our flag to its last fort, were soon out on the high seas, the roll of which I had almost forgotten.