It was four in the afternoon when we sighted Parahyba, capital of the state of the same name, on its ridge beside a river of similar designation which we had been following for several hours. We were met by a considerable delegation, including the Danish manager of the “Cinema Rio Branco,” a young chap whom Vinhães had left behind to look after his interests, and the German owner of the “Pensão Allemã,” whom some unauthorized friend from Recife had told to prepare rooms for us. As the only other hotel-keeper in town admitted, evidently under the impression that it was a recommendation, that half his rooms were given over to unprotected women, I allowed our personal baggage to be carried away by the solicitous German, while three little carts dragged the rest uphill to the cinema. By the time our apparatus was set up and the tickets stamped, perspiration was oozing from our shoes. I raced back to the pensão to get rid of two days’ dust and whiskers, and by the time I appeared again the house was packed to the roof. But as it held only four hundred, and the president of the state had thrust himself in with half a dozen generously painted females, and a score of other “influential citizens” had followed his example, it was evident that we were not going to win an independent fortune in Parahyba. To make things worse, “Tut” had failed to try out the apparatus before the doors were opened, and our first number flashed on the screen without a sound to accompany it! The phonograph had suffered some slight injury during the rough journey and refused to speak. To my astonishment a great howl of satisfaction went up from the audience, followed by a constant series of cat-calls until the loose screw had been found and the trouble remedied.

It was not merely, as I first suspected, that sense of being greater than the inventor whose invention fails to work which had delighted these lineal descendants of African tree-climbers, but the pleasure of what might be called the anti-Kinetophonists at being able to say, even momentarily, “I told you so!” Formation of petty cliques is one of the chief pastimes in these dawdling old towns off the track of world travel, and Parahyba had divided, without our knowledge, for and against us almost at the moment we descended from the train. Those who sided with the disgruntled hotel-keeper joined the friends of the rival cinema in an effort to boycott us, with the result that, though we did not know it until next day, by the time the show had been set up all Parahyba had been assured that both the Kinetophone and this “gringo” Edison were humbugs of the first water, and that those who came to see it would be wasting their money. The instant destruction of this theory as soon as the phonograph had been readjusted confounded the opposition, but the atmosphere of ill-will, and of doubt, always engendered among the volatile Brazilians by the slightest mishap on an opening night, could be felt as long as we remained in the town.

Parahyba was founded in 1585 by Martín Leitão—his name, by the way, means suckling pig—eighteen miles from the mouth of the river of the same name. This region was once abundant in the pau brazil for which the country was named, but to-day its principal product is cotton, bales of which were exchanging places with barrels of Minneapolis flour in the freight-cars behind the station. Most of the town’s estimated 30,000 inhabitants appeared to be loafing government employees. They were a melancholy lot, on the whole, to whom life was evidently as joyless as to the Puritan, crushed under the weight of existence and always struggling to repress the desire to live gladly. “These tropical people,” said a Dane who had lived long among them, “have none of the joy of living, none of the chest-expansion of pleasure at confronting life which is common to northern peoples. Such enjoyment as they have is made up almost exclusively of the constant stimulating of the sexual instinct. They have no feeling for what we people of the North call a “home,” and never really found one. They have a wildly romantic idea of marriage, which means to them nothing but physical gratification, and, their sensual instincts satisfied, they continue to live together merely out of custom, following the line of least resistance. There is not a man in town, from president to porter, who does not keep at least one other woman besides his wife, if he can by hook or crook afford it.”

“Whatever the economic condition of the colony,” boasts the History of Parahyba, “it never failed to bequeath plenty of churches to posterity.” The town terminates in a bulking old religious edifice, and is generously supplied with others throughout its length. Of breadth it has little, for it falls quickly away on either side of its ridge into cacao groves or vast reaches of bluish swamp-like bushes, half covered at high tide. The dead hot streets of noonday were like those of an abandoned city; stepping from the sunshine into the shade was like dropping an enormous weight off one’s head and shoulders. Most of the thirty thousand live in mud huts with palm-leaf roofs and doors, the earth for floor, and the omnipresent hammock for chair, bed, and favorite occupation. The central praça has a hint of grass, by great effort and much carrying of water, and glorious royal palms stand high above it. But beautiful as it is, the royal palm does not take high rank as a shade tree. Elsewhere the streets, like Kipling’s railroad, soon run out to sand-heaps. An hour’s swift walk from the new power-house at the end of the made-in-Germany tram line brings one, through hot sandy jungle, heavily wooded in places, to the open sea, where the well-to-do Parahybanos go in “summer” by a little railroad that did not operate in this wintry season. Small steamers can reach Parahyba at high tide, though few ever do so. Its port is Cabedello at the mouth of the river, the fortress of which, like most of Brazil north of Rio, fell several times into the hands of Holland, the name of the town being once changed by Maurice of Nassau to “Margarida” in honor of his mother.

It is only 130 miles by rail from Parahyba to Natal, capital of the next state north, but it takes more than twenty-four hours to cover them. For some distance the route is the same as that back to Recife; then at Entroncamento, which is Portuguese for Junction, another branch starts north, striking well inland, like the other lines of the “G.W.B.R.” The yellow-green cajueiro, rugged as an olive-tree, was often the only vegetation that broke the dreary sand landscape. Evidently the constant trade winds that were so welcome to the sun-scorched skin are deadly to the soil, blowing far to the south and west the rains it needs so badly. White men living in northeastern Brazil complain that eyes grow weak early in life from the constant glare. Even bread dries up in this moistureless, heated air almost between the cutting and the raising to the lips. Here and there were patches of cotton, in saffron-colored blossom, planted in small quantity and only by the poorer classes, for those who keep account of profit and loss do not find it worth the trouble. Yet one carried away the impression that, properly irrigated and inhabited by an energetic people, this thirsty paunch of South America should be able to feed all the armies of Europe. Grazing, however, is the main industry on the larger estates. In North Brazil the word fazenda loses the significance of “plantation” that it has to the south and means cattle ranch, of which there are great numbers farther inland. Such plantations as are cultivated are usually in the hands of a morador, literally a “dweller,” who runs the place to suit himself and sells the crop to the owner at a fixed price agreed upon between them. There are few absentee owners in this settled eastern part of the region, however, even the “best families” spending much of the year on their estates and only a few months in their town house in the capital. The more-or-less negro laborers are paid from 500 to 1000 reis a day, with ground on which to build their mud and palm-leaf huts; but it is probably as much as they earn, and there is no approach to slavery or peonage, for the obsequiousness of the working class, so striking to the American traveler in most of South America, has no exponents in Brazil.

A moderate range of hills gradually grew up on our left, and we rose high enough above the general dead-level to look across immense reaches of Brazil, bushy and faintly rolling, flooded with sun to the ghost of the far-off range. As usual, there was not a drop of water on the train, which would not have been so bad if anything to drink had been sold along the line. But there were not even oranges, and dining-cars do not run above Parahyba. Well on in the afternoon we halted at a station with a large earthenware crock of water, lukewarm and of swampy odor, on the platform. The first man to drink from the single tin can hanging beside it dropped it into the vessel, whereupon the next travel-stained mulatto rolled up a sleeve and plunged in a yellow arm to the elbow. The natives saw nothing amiss in this, and the rest of us were forced to drink anyway, for we were on the verge of choking to death.

Toward sunset we drew up, in a bushy half-desert, at the town of Guarabira, recently renamed Independencia, but a change which the populace had refused to adopt, perhaps because they found the new name sarcastic. Here all trains, from north or south, stop overnight, so that the so-called hotels, lacking more of the indispensable requirements of public hostelries than the stay-at-home could imagine possible, were crowded beyond their capacity, though on four nights a week they are empty. There was a good cinema in Independencia, which plays only on the three train-nights and on Sundays. The owner had gone down to Parahyba to see the Kinetophone and had come back with me, coaxing me all the way to give him a two-day contract. Instead, I signed for one day on the return trip, for this time the show was to sail directly from Cabedello to Ceará, picking me up at Natal.

By six next morning the same crowd of us, all men, were riding on into the north by the same train. Toward eight we crossed the arbitrary boundary into Rio Grande do Norte, grinding on through unbroken miles of the same bushy wilderness. Every town of half a dozen huts sent its quota of beggars down to meet the train, so that the begging line that had begun at Maceió was never broken. The “Great Western of Brazil” could add materially to its revenue by a tax on station mendicants. Before ten we stopped at a partly whitewashed collection of desert huts for jantar, first of Brazil’s two daily meals. The first-class passengers charged madly across the sand to one of the huts, where a long table was set for some thirty guests. Each “washed” his hands in the single pan of yellow water, wiped them on the one towel, and fell to with a mighty noise upon the immense plates of fish, roast pork, beef in all its forms, rice, farofa, and chicken which, already cold, garnished the table. To wash down this stalwart provender there was nauseating lukewarm water, or equally tepid and unpalatable beer, at prices only within the reach of the wealthy. As we ate, the whistle of our train kept blowing, as if the contrivance were about to dash away again, and having gulped down the dinner ostrich fashion, we rushed back on board and gradually crawled on into the north.

Beyond, we rose slightly, and there opened out a vista of flat valley with some fertility. Bananas and green cocoanuts were offered for sale at some of the stations, from nearly all of which great baskets of mangos were shipped. Here the chief features of a landscape uninspiring as a decapitated palm-tree were fields of mandioca, their willow-like bushes from one to ten feet high. The tuberous root of this plant is peeled and the poison washed or squeezed out, after which it is turned into one of the several flours or meals that stand in jars on every Brazilian table. If it is simply cooked, fermented, and dried, the result is farinha secca, white, bran-like mandioca flour; a more elaborate process, including grating under water, gives the yellow farinha d’agoa, which seems to be the favorite. A coarser form of the same product is called farofa, and during the cooking there are precipitated the gum-like grains we call tapioca. Taquira, a species of alcohol, is also produced from mandioca. Farinha or farofa are to the Brazilians what potatoes are to the Irish. Whole boatfuls of it in leaf-and-creeper baskets may be seen loading or unloading at every coast town, and the native who could not reach out and get a spoonful—or a handful—of this, his favorite fodder, with which to thicken his soup or stew or to eat dry, would consider his dinner a total failure.

The wearisome desert country broke up frankly into sand-dunes as we neared the coast again, and through these and a bit of arid vegetation we rumbled into Natal, not only the end of the “Great Western of Brazil Railway,” but the jumping-off place of those traveling north, for here South America turns sharply to the westward. A little line, staggering under the name of “Estrada de Ferro Central do Rio Grande do Norte,” does start from across the harbor and wander a few hours and about as many miles out into the country, but it soon returns, as if terrified at the thought of losing itself in the choking wilderness. There would be no choice henceforth but to take to the sea. The Brazilian Government has long contemplated extending its principal line from Pirapora on the São Francisco to Pará, which would make it the “Central Railway of Brazil” indeed; but even had this nebulous project already been carried out, I should not have chosen that route, for while scenery is all very well in its way, the great bulk of Brazil’s estimated thirty millions of people live along her seaboard.

Raul de Freitas Walker, a more than ordinarily endurable young Brazilian, agent for the “Companhia Cinematographica Brazileira” with which we had signed our first contract, agreed to share with me the only room available in the “International Annex,” another of the alleged “hotels” of North Brazil. It was a garret room, in which Freitas occupied the hammock and I the bed, and the best that can be said of it is that it had first choice right off the ocean of the constant trade winds bound inland on their drought provoking errands. Its scant half-inch partitions made the pastimes of my fellow-guests and the mulatto girls, who accosted one everywhere with an inviting air, quite free from privacy, but there was no choice between enduring them and going out to sleep in the sand on the beach. The maternal grandfather of Freitas was English; hence his silent last name, which he pronounced, when forced to do so, “Vahl-kar.” His British blood had not saved him from being a true Brazilian, and on the second day he left me with vociferous regrets and moved over to a cheaper one-story hotel, not to save money but “so I won’t have to climb stairs.”

Natal is rather a pleasing town, for all its aridity. Considering the difficulties it has to struggle against in the form of heat, sand, and the usual tropical drawbacks, it is almost worthy of praise. Though they are knee-deep in sand wherever they are not paved, its streets are wide, and there are several large public gardens marked by the indolent swaying of flexible palm-trees. Government buildings, and a few private ones, are far from being eyesores. If the electric-lights are weak, they are at least widespread, and electric tramcars carry one in any direction, notably to the top of a great sand ridge called Petropolis, from which there is a far-reaching view of curving beach edged with leaning cocoanut-palms, of the reef that gave Natal its site, and the old fort at the narrow entrance to the bottle-like little harbor. Perhaps there are 12,000 inhabitants, if one counts all the mud huts scattered about the sand-blown outskirts—for in places the sand is drifted completely over the rails of the tram-line that stretches on over the rolling sandhills to nowhere.

At one of the two cinemas our poster portrait of Edison was already displayed, though it would be at least two months before the show could play there. Pará beer, reminding me that the end of Brazil was approaching, was sold in the cafés and hotels, but it seemed to enjoy less popularity than a mineral water from Wisconsin, widely consumed by Brazilians. Local drugstores advertised an “Específico contra Cançaço” (Specific against Tiredness) which should have won its inventor a fortune in Brazil alone. Many otherwise pretty girls—if one could overlook a cocoa tint—lost their rating for lack of good teeth. Politicians in heavy black frock-suits, waiting in the broiling sun for others of their clan, made it a pleasure to know that there are some places where politicians must do penance for their sins. Social formality refused to take climate into account, and at the gate of the sandy cemetery, hot as the most approved purgatory, male visitors were requested to remove their hats! Sharp-cut masses of black shade alternating with patches of blinding glare, a parrot trying to pick the red spots off a ten of diamonds as the only sign of life in a long noonday street-vista, contrasted with the shrieking far into the night of sidewalk groups—for Brazilians of the north cannot discuss the simplest subjects without howling, dancing, and waving their hands in their excitement—complete the picture of Natal.

St. Patrick’s Day in the morning dawned hotter than I had ever known it before. As I looked out across sandhills and ocean toward the soft summer sunrise, I made out the steamer Pará of the “Lloyd-Brazileiro” already at anchor a stone’s-throw from the shore. It was just too far off to make out whether “Tut” and the show were on board, and after waiting in vain for them to come ashore I slipped into my oldest garments and set out on a last tramp through Natal’s ankle-deep sand in an effort to reduce the surplus energy that is so troublesome on shipboard. There was no danger of being left behind, for the Pará was bottled up in the harbor until high tide at two in the afternoon. Groups of passengers came ashore, but I began to fear that my “company” had been left behind. Soon after noon he of the unpronounceable grandfather and I, not to mention a new steamer-chair, now that I must take to the sea, were rowed out to the Pará, on which I found to my amazement that not only Carlos and the agent of Vinhães but even “Tut” had squatted all day without once going ashore!

The exit from Natal harbor is as difficult as the oldest seadog would care to attempt in a large steamer. The long jagged reef has only one break in it, and just inside that there is a series of sharp and mainly submerged rocks. A ship of any size, therefore, must make a right-angle turn in almost her own length, through an opening barely her own width by which at low tide there is scarcely exit for a rowboat. The rusted boiler and ribs of a steamer piled up close beside the entrance showed that the passage has not always been as successful as ours, and there was a general sigh of relief and a settling down to deck-chair ease as the Pará took to pulsating steadily across a smooth blue sea toward the setting sun.

The coast of Brazil resembles Broadway,—a main thoroughfare along which, if one travel it long enough, many faces become familiar. There were half a dozen men on the Pará whom even I, accustomed to crawl along the land wherever possible, instead of following the broad sea route of Brazilian travel, had seen before somewhere—along the Avenida of Rio, at some theater in São Paulo, on the streets of Bahia or Pernambuco. If I had ever wondered during my dust-laden, cinder-bitten, oft-broken journey from the Rio Grande of the South to the far different one of the North how Brazilian ladies or the more finnicky of their male contemporaries travel from one city to another, here was the answer. They take to the sea, either in one of the foreign ships that ply up and down the coast or in the sometimes no less luxurious steamers of their own national line.

The “Lloyd-Brazileiro,” like the “Central Railway,” is operated by the Brazilian Government, and is thereby subject to many of the same misfortunes. If one can believe a fourth of the tales that float up and down the coast, the national temperament is as much at home on the rolling main as on Brazilian soil. Rumor has it—and verification is often thrust upon the traveler who is in the habit of leaving his berth—that the line has three times as many employees as are required,—needy friends of politicians ranging all the way from pantry-boys without potatoes to peel to captains and managers with nothing to command or direct. “Deadheads” are notoriously so numerous that any Brazilian who pays his fare runs the risk of losing caste among his clever friends. Congressmen and the like not only travel on government boats free of charge as a legal right, but carry with them whole Brazilian families, from upholstered mama and her dusky maid down through the whole stairway of children and their servants to the pet poodles and shrieking parrots. Even the mere citizen who plans to take to the sea is said to have no difficulty in obtaining his ticket without the troublesome formalities of the pocketbook route—provided, of course, that his political affiliations are suitable. Those are only foolish travelers, native or foreign, scandal has it, who pay, even to New York, more than the fare in the class next below the one in which they wish to make the journey, for it is a simple matter to “fix it up” after they get on board. The “Lloyd-Brazileiro” steamers carry livestock and fowls as food on their journeys. When a ship arrives in Pará or Manaos, the story runs, the steward sells those that are left—and an hour later he goes ashore and buys back the same animals for the return trip, naturally not at the same price at which they were sold. The line has always been noted for its generous yearly deficit. In 1914 the government tried to sell it, but there was not a single bid. Private owners knew the insuperable obstacles to discharging or refusing to carry free the swarms of political favorites and putting the boats on a paying basis.

On board, however, few evidences of these things meet the naked eye. Outward propriety, from scandal-less grafting to frock-coat and spats, is a fixed Brazilian characteristic. The Pará was one of the large new ships of the line, British made, and even government ownership had not yet succeeded in ruining it. In the sumptuous music-room reigned the air of a salon gathering in high society, the nearest approach to luxury which many a Brazilian ever gets. I sat late into the moonlighted evening, broken by music and attempts thereat, idly comparing and checking off the pretty girls who flitted in and out among the rather pompous gathering. There were a few who, could one have extracted what they had in place of them and inserted brains, would have made quite passable domestic ornaments—for the few years until they were overtaken by that fatal faded fatness that comes so early upon South American women.

At ten next morning the boundless sea was broken on the port bow by a long white strip of sand, behind which gradually grew up a shadowy range of almost mountains. By noon, but long after the midday meal, we dropped anchor before Ceará, capital of the state of the same name, a flat and sandy town, with the usual churches and palm-trees rising above it, as did two dimly seen clusters of hills against the fathomless horizon.

Ceará is the worst landing-place on the coast of Brazil, being no port at all but merely a sandy shore, marked by a lighthouse far out on the end of a tongue of sand and open to all the winds from off the North Atlantic. What it might be in bad weather was not hard to guess, for even with the slight swell of a calm and cloudless day the scores of heavy rowboats and freight barges that came out a mile or more to meet us rolled and pitched like capering schoolboys. That we would be ducked in getting ashore was taken for granted, that being a common disaster in the port of Ceará; my fears were rather for our outfit, which seemed several times on the point of being hopelessly smashed or dropped overboard before we got it lowered into one of the toy barges. Even passengers have been lost here, and the rusted carcass of an old steamer lay piled up on the beach. At the shore end the landing facilities were even worse. A high and flimsy wooden wharf thrust itself far out to barge depth where, with the boat rising and falling twenty feet or more with every swell, half a dozen languid negroes, tugging at the extreme end of an often too-short rope and liable, in their Brazilian apathy, to let go at any moment, slowly hoisted our travel-battered old maroon trunks upon it. To have dropped almost any one of them would have meant the immediate canceling of the Kinetophone tour of Brazil.

As things were landed on the wharf, negroes put the lighter articles on their heads and straggled ashore—not, of course, without mishaps. One haughty lady, returning from Rio or Paris, had among her belongings six huge pasteboard boxes, which she or her maid had carelessly tied shut, and which an equally careless negro tried to carry off all at once without securing them. He had taken three steps when the roaring sea wind picked two boxes off his head, opened them, and tossed the latest creation in head-gear and feathers into the sea, a fate from which another dream in pink and froth was saved only by being stepped on by a barefoot but unusually quick-witted negro. They would not have been cheap hats anywhere, and in Brazil they certainly would have cost four times as much. The owner having already gone ashore before the mishap occurred, the negro waded out into the surf and rescued the feathered contraption, which he put back into the box and delivered as if nothing had happened, getting his pay and fading from the landscape before milady opened the box to prepare for the gala first performance of a new invention at the municipal-state theater that evening.

It took us four hours to get all our outfit from the ship to the theater. Vinhães, however, had everything prepared for an immediate estrea under conditions that promised excellent results. By manipulating certain political filaments he had obtained the “Theatro José d’Alencar,” named for Brazil’s greatest novelist and the most famous “son” of Ceará. It is government owned and the most important one in northeastern Brazil, generally closed except when some second-rate Caruso or a European dramatic company comes to give Fortaleza the sensation of being the center of the universe. The nominal sum of 130$ covered the salaries of the countless government employees attached to the place, though there was no knowing how many permanent passes Vinhães had issued for the five days he had advertised. His posters, articles, and newspaper displays had penetrated to the last hut in town; and he had even had special tickets printed, the stamping of which, in addition to the thousand and one other things essential to a proper début, left us little time to loiter between the landing and a hurried supper.

Our time, taken from the ship and Rio, was twenty minutes later than that of the town, so that when I returned to the theater at sunset Vinhães greeted me halfway across the square with the tightly pursed lips and the closely compressed fingers of the upraised right hand which, in Brazil’s complete language of gestures, meant a densely packed house. It was, and more than that the crowded audience was getting vociferous in its demands for the show to begin, that they might judge for themselves this new wonder. Despite all these favoring circumstances our opening came near resulting in disaster. The state theater was not equipped as a moving-picture house. Vinhães had hired the only available lantern in town and arranged with a local operator to run the ordinary films he had himself brought along. But the operator had not recovered from the celebration made possible by the advance he had demanded on his wages, and the lantern was so aged and the lens so worthless that barely the outline of the pictures reached the screen. Protest was rapidly developing into uproar when I saved the day by ordering the ordinary films run through our special machine. This was contrary to my contract with Vinhães and something we had never done before; but I waived that clause for once and agreed to have “Tut” and Carlos run the whole show, provided Vinhães paid them 10$ a night each for their extra labor. Thus their salaries were in a twinkling raised high above my own, while to me was left the brunt of fighting the crowd at the door.

It may be that his sudden and unexpected good luck turned Carlos’ head. It was now trebly important for the Kinetophone to do its best,—the ordinary films had been a disappointment, the house was crowded with an audience which would carry good or bad word of our performance to every corner of the city, nay, of all Ceará, and the state president himself sat in the center of the regal central box, surrounded by all the most influential members of the political and social world. I had chosen our program with care, the introductory film to be followed by a portion of “Il Trovatore,” a well-sung number which always delighted the higher class of Brazilian audiences. As the title flashed on the screen a murmur of satisfaction rippled across the house. The president readjusted the broad red ribbon across his paunch and settled down for what he plainly expected to be a treat. On the screen a romantic figure, dressed in the elaborate garb of the days of knights and troubadours, advanced with the supreme grace of medieval heroes, at least as it has been brought down to us by Italian tenors, and with a princely gesture opened his mouth and—and in the nasal twang of an untraveled native of rural Indiana said, “Gentlemen, be seated!” Carlos had put on the record that went with our minstrel show!

All disasters, however, save death, may be more or less redeemed by hard work, good luck, and so splendid an apparatus as a well-operated Kinetophone, and before our performance was over the audience had advanced from resentment to enthusiasm, had even burst forth in loud applause, a social faux pas almost unknown at a cinema in Brazil. Chuckles of delight and flattering words could still be heard under the murmuring, silver-flecked palm-trees when “Tut” piloted me to a gay café on the main praça and showed his gratitude by squandering a considerable amount of his extra ten milreis for two small portions of what North Brazil thinks is ice-cream. Cearenses went out of their way to assure us that we had brought the finest music that had ever been heard in the state and the best theatrical performance that had ever been given at such modest prices. Had we come two or three years before, more than one of them asserted, we might have charged seven times as much and packed the house at every one of the ten performances we would be obliged to give.

Vinhães had arranged for us in the “Pensão Bitú,” the “only hotel” in Ceará, as there is only one within even the Brazilian pale of respectability in all these northern capitals. Considering what it might have been, it was almost good, with a constant sea breeze sweeping through our long and narrow room, which almost made us forget that we were within four degrees of the equator. Rumor had it that deaths from yellow fever were frequent in Fortaleza, and though we saw no mosquitoes, “Tut” and I were careful to tuck in the canopied mosquito-nets over our beds. Carlos, across the hall, scorned such refinements, or else it was natural Brazilian carelessness that made him sleep, stark naked, as comes to be the custom of both native and foreigner, and without any protection from possible flying death.

As in the case of Pernambuco, the capital of Ceará is best known to the outside world by the name of the state, only in the interior of which it takes universally its correct title of Fortaleza. The old fort which gives it this name still forms a part of the public promenade near the “only” hotel, and to this day old cannon point bravely out to sea from its several dry, grassy levels. The City of the Fort is one of the most important towns of North Brazil, a comparatively new city, for all its antiquity, rebuilt since the destructive drought of 1845. Situated directly on the sea, without so much as a creek to give its rowboats refuge, it has all the maritime advantages, except a port. Its soil is sandy, almost Sahara-like in its aridity, and though it has some ten praças shaded by castanheiros, mangos, palms, and other magnificent tropical trees, its vegetation is dependent on the almost constant care of man. The city water is abominable, even after being filtered, and wise foreign travelers—there seem to be no foreign residents—and Brazilians from the south quench a thirst which cannot but be frequent in this climate with mineral water or native beer, or by melting the plentiful product of the local ice factory.

More American windmills than in any town of similar size in the United States rise above the monotonous level of Ceará. It is almost entirely of one story, for its people know the terrors of earthquakes and have little faith in their loose, sandy soil. The private buildings of two stories could probably be counted on the fingers, though several churches in the old Portuguese style of architecture and some rather pretentious government edifices bulk above the general mass. Where its right-angled and often wide streets are not paved in rough, unshaped cobblestones it is impossible to walk with any degree of pleasure because of the sand. The landscape reminds one of the driest regions of Arizona, an Arizona of perpetual July, and it is hard to understand how the human race lives here—or why. Yet there is a picturesqueness, a pleasing something about Fortaleza that makes it more interesting than all but the half a dozen most striking Brazilian cities. Its windows are covered with wooden blinds hinged at the top, and from these and the doors peer upon the passer-by a constant double row of people, except during the midday siesta. It is a curious custom of Fortaleza to have water-spouts of tin or zinc projecting from the low flat eaves well out into the street, just far enough to deluge the pedestrian whenever it does rain; and these are always in the form of a conventional alligator, serpent, or dragon, the spout of even the poorest house ending in an open-mouthed monster, the teeth, tin tongue, toothed fin on top, and the smooth one on the bottom never lacking. Vistas of these may be seen for a kilometer or more down almost any street. The variegated bright colors of the house façades are all that break the monotonous symmetry of the fixed architecture, for originality does not seem to be a North Brazilian characteristic. Many doors open so directly upon the scanty or entirely missing sidewalks that they thrust pedestrians off them—which serves them right for not realizing that sidewalks are meant here to be family verandas rather than public passageways.

Ceará is famous for its hammocks—redes, or nets, they call them in Portuguese, for lack of an exact word. They are woven of cotton grown in the state—by hand still in the sertão, though by machinery in town factories—and great heaps of them lie for sale in the most nearly picturesque market-place in Brazil. This is a large square in the center of town, partly roofed over, and here, too, sit women selling home-made lace, which constitutes perhaps the second most important industry of the state. The hammock is the favorite bed of the Cearense, and his lounge, cradle, and easy-chair; wherever the visitor enters, a hammock offers him its lap. In and about among vendors and buyers, and down the white-hot streets, wander blind beggars led by a sheep, often wearing several bells to announce its coming. Many women and children, and some men, wear about their necks a little black hand made of ebony, as a protection against the evil eye. The leisurely traveler from the south is struck by the scarcity of African blood; a full negro is almost never seen and the prevailing mixture is Indian with white. The flat head of the Cearense is legendary, and the average complexion is a half-burnished copper. Their own citizens admit that four fifths of the people of Ceará are mestiços with a greater or less percentage of aboriginal blood, and this gives them an individuality among their largely African fellow-countrymen, with many of the characteristics of the South Americans of the Andean regions. In place of the hilarious indifference of blacker Brazil, they face life with the rather melancholy fatalism of the New World aborigines.

In their native dances, such as the samba, the Cearenses display tumultuous passions and an ardent temperament in great contrast to their quiet everyday manner, and the scent of a merry-making throng of sweating, rarely washed people of the mestiço rank and file has a suggestion of that of a den of wild animals, mixed with the odor of home-made perfume. Politics is always a seething pot, and the bickerings of parties ever on the verge of bursting forth in violence. The Cearense is easily recognizable elsewhere in Brazil by his speech, the peculiar accent of the region, especially in the country districts, consisting of raising the tone of the last unaccented syllable in each phrase, giving a sort of singsong rhythm and an upturned ending to each sentence, like the flip of the tail of a playful fish. Fortaleza, however, prides itself on its modernity and worldly-wiseness, and feels little but scorn for the uncouth, singsongy mattuto or sertanejo of the interior, startled out of his wits by his first encounter with such extraordinary manifestations of civilization as an automobile or one of the ancient but recently electrified street-cars of the state capital.

On Sunday evening people poured in upon us so rapidly that I had to stand like a buttress in the middle of the stream, just inside the door, and split it into two channels so that our ticket-takers could do their duty. There was one unexpected step just above me, and not too much light, so that some fifty or sixty of the ladies of Ceará fell into my arms during the course of the evening. It would be exaggeration to say that the majority of them were worth embracing, though now and then a real gem appeared among the gravel—just the ones whose footing was surest. As our theater belonged to the state, of course every third cousin of a grandniece of a government employee expected to march in at will. Vinhães had arranged with the chief authorities that we were to donate four loges, as many upper boxes, and thirty-five seats, and also let in those wearing uniforms. But there is no such thing as satisfying the “deadhead” appetite of Brazilians. Officials, from state president down to government bootblack, would not be hampered by presenting passes; if I dared to halt a flashily dressed courtesan, the head door-keeper came rushing up to draw me aside and warn me that it was fatal to open strife with that class, as their political influence was all-powerful. I left it mainly to Vinhães to curb the voracity of his own countrymen, but even he found the task impossible. As “deadheads” multiplied, he donned his most resplendent black garb and called upon the delegado of police, offering to send as many free passes as he needed, if only he would not allow plain-clothes men to come in without them. The delegado assured him that three would be sufficient. He sent six for good measure—and that night almost the first man to arrive was one who showed a document proving that he was a plain-clothes man and insisted on bringing three friends in with him. Vinhães opposed him with un-Brazilian firmness. The man went away, and soon afterward the delegado and his be-diamonded wife entered, whereupon Vinhães caused him to state within hearing of all the door-keepers that only those with passes were to be admitted. Barely had the illustrious couple disappeared within when a boy policeman, wearing the white uniform which takes the place on Sundays of the week-day khaki, marched up to Vinhães and told him that he was under arrest and must report at once to the delegacia, on order of the delegado! He refused to go. The policeman returned to the station and came back with still more urgent orders. Again Vinhães declined to obey, and as the police were about to use force he stepped inside and entered the box of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—to learn that the delegado knew nothing whatever of the order purported to have been given out by him, which had been signed in his name by his escribano on complaint of the latter’s friend, the disgruntled plain-clothes man. Thereupon the boy policeman took to marching to and fro, assuring everyone that he was wholly innocent in the matter, and all the policemen on duty gathered in a compact group and spent the rest of the evening chattering and waving their arms excitedly over their heads. Sad fate it must be to live permanently the life of the helpless native in this land of political pull.

The State of Ceará has long been notorious for its seccas, or deadly droughts. Of the four or five states in the so-called “dry zone” of Northern Brazil it is the most harshly treated by the moisture-sponging trade winds. An all-wise native editor has it that “in Ceará there has always been less lack of water than of instruction and practical knowledge of the most rudimentary notions of agronomy.” A simple hot-air pump would do wonders, he contends, for wood is plentiful; and even crude windmills with cloth sails have been known to make garden spots of the driest parts of the state. All this may be true enough, but the traveler in primitive South America never ceases to marvel at the improvidence of wilderness people, which often costs them so dearly. High as he stands in some respects among his fellow-Brazilians, the Cearense has not the energy and initiative needed to overcome his one great natural disadvantage—at least as a people, and even the editor admits that individuals could do nothing, since to supply themselves with a special source of water would merely be to have all their neighbors camp upon them in dry weather. Hence the state continues to endure periodical drought and famine with Indian fatalism, dying off, emigrating to the Amazonian region, or awaiting a change in the weather, “como Deus quere—whatever God wishes.”

They call 1877 “O Anno da Fome”—“The Year of Famine”—in Ceará, but there have been others nearly as deadly. When the never-ceasing winds from the Atlantic refuse to bring rain with them, or carry it too far into the interior, the trees grow bare, covering the ground with their leaves, as in lands where winter reigns; the naked beds of rivers tantalize thirsting man and beast—the maps of Ceará divide its streams between “perennial” and “non-perennial”—even the hardy roots of the mandioca dry up, and there is nothing left but flight or death. In the worst years human skeletons have been strewn along the trails from the interior to Fortaleza; and even in the capital sufficient aid has often been unobtainable, so that plagues have added to the misery of the hordes of refugees, and people have died so continuously that there has been neither time nor energy to bury them. Those wealthy enough to die in their hammocks are carried off in them; the corpses of others are tied hands and feet to a pole and borne to some sandy hollow beyond the town, over which hover clouds of gorged and somnolent vultures. Many of the starving become earth-eaters, which may postpone but not alleviate their fate. The more enterprising abandon what to them is their native land and take up life anew along the Amazon, enduring as best they can the gloomy heavens and months of constant rains which make that region so different from their own cloudless land.

The opening up of the Amazon basin, and the consequent enormous increase in the production of rubber, was largely due to the droughts in Ceará. Nomad by atavism through his Indian ancestors, the irregularities of the season and the impossibility of counting on a certain to-morrow has made the Cearense more so, and it is a rare spot that has been inhabited by the same family for generations. First they went to the rubber-fields singly, then in bands, and finally in whole ship-loads, contracted and shipped by regular recruiting agents. In the Amazonian wilderness they may die of fevers or other dread ailments, but at home they are sure to die of drought, so in years of extreme dryness the risk is worth taking. If they live through all the dangers of the wilderness along the “Sea-River” and escape the onslaughts of the swarms of touts and harlots of all colors and nationalities who prey upon descending rubber-gatherers at Manaos and Pará, their return to Ceará is much like that of an Italian immigrant from America to his native village. So rare and so important, in fact, is the native of Ceará who returns from the rubber-fields to his dry but beloved home that a special term has been coined for him; they call him a paroara—one who has been beyond Pará.

This year the drought threatened to be as bad as the fearful one of 1877; worse, in fact, for then at least there was good old Emperor Peter, whose statue in the praça just outside our window testified to Ceará’s gratitude for his timely assistance; then money was plentiful instead of all Brazil being wrung dry by a financial crisis, and there was the final resort of the rubber-fields, which now returning paroaras were reporting useless because of the low price of that commodity. Already tales of wholesale starvation were coming from the vicinity of Cratheus, and cattle were dying by hundreds throughout the interior, leaving nothing but their hides to recoup the owners for their labor and investment. True, there was an imposing government department in Fortaleza known as the “Inspectory of Works against the Droughts,” but the country people knew only too well that this was mainly a means for political rascals to make hay out of their sufferings.