Brazil on the Move Read Online Free PDF Page A

we were crossing sunseared savannas that had once been planted in sugarcane and where occasionally the ruins of a stone and adobe fazenda crumbled under a bristling mat of vegetation. The abolition of slavery had made them uneconomical.
    Scattered white and gray zebu cattle with big humps grazed on the plain. The railroad swept into bare rocky hills. The hills were scorched and smoldering because this was the season when they burned over the land to plant it when the rains began.
    In the valleys there was an occasional ranch house with mud walls and tiled roofs set in a bunch of tattered banana trees. As the evening began to thicken in smoke and dusk the line wound in endless curves up a rocky valley. In the distance blue humped mountains rose from dark rock faces into fantastic cones against the sky.
    Walter Runge was a hefty young man from New Jersey who had studied his engineering at Rutgers. He pointed out with a craftsman’s pride the work his outfit had done, straightening curves, eliminating grades, laying new rails, reballasting. He made you feel that this rickety singletrack line into the wilderness was an amusing and capricious toy to be coddled and petted and gradually babied out of its errors and vices.
    Night came down on us suddenly. As the car came to a stop on a siding he pointed up into a barely visible tangle of matted trees. “We had a camp up there … All over here is swamps … The place is full of wonderful orchids … Before DDT we had to keep a double payroll because half the men were always down with malaria.”
    “Any wild animals?”
    “There might be some deer. They claim Espírito Santo is a great place for jaguars but I never saw one … Ticks and chiggers keep you so busy you don’t worry about other wild life.” He started scratching at the very thought of them.
    We were waiting for an oretrain to come down. The night was dead silent. A few grasshoppers made a rasping noise in the trees. From away up the line we heard the whistle of the engine and the rattle of the trucks of the orecars coming round the curves.
    The doctors were talking about jungle yellow fever that had been found to be carried by the
Haemagogus
mosquitoes that bred in the little pools of water in the forks of high forest trees. Now that the standard type had been eliminated, the jungle type was the next enemy to be vanquished. People called it the bridegroom’s disease because it was often contracted by young men who went out to clear themselves a piece of land when they married. The yellow fever inspectors kept track of it by watching for the bodies of the little animals that lived in the highest level of the rainforest. If they found a lot of dead monkeys it meant that there was yellow fever about.
    The oretrain went slambanging past. After that the line was clear. We crossed the divide and went lurching and jangling through the night round long curves over singing rails until we roared with siren hooting into the main street of a place called Colatina.
    There were creamcolored stucco housefronts and stores and cafés lit up theatrically by a string of electric lights.
    The local doctors had come to meet us at the station.
Abraços
and
felicidades
. We walked to the hotel beside flatcars piled with immense logs of
peroba
wood. Now this hotel, Dr. Penido was explaining, was an example of how public health worked. I should have seen it a year ago. Now at least the kitchen was clean and the bedrooms and the dining room and bar. I’d be distressed by the toilet but he was working onthat. Gradually. Gradually … Keeping a toilet clean was the result of years of education. In the Rio Doce Valley a privy was a monstrous novelty five years ago.
    Next morning we were out early walking round the town. Rosy mist hung low over the broad sluggish puttycolored river. The bridge had been built for a railroad that never got completed; battered trucks were coming across it into town and occasionally a cart with whining