CHAPTER VIII

AT LARGE IN RIO DE JANEIRO

I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned fortresses; back of one of them, scarcely a stone’s throw away, rose the sheer rock of the “Sugar Loaf,” like a gigantic upright thumb, and a moment later I saw the sun rise red over a great tumble of peaks along the shore, among which I recognized the “Hunchback” stooping broodingly over the almost invisible city. A haze hid all of this, except for a long line of little houses, like children’s blocks, along the foot of great cliffs. Then bit by bit, as the sun sponged up the mists, the scene spread and took on detail, until it became perhaps the sublimest spectacle of nature my eyes had yet fallen upon in all the circuit of the earth, a sight not only incomparable but one that obliterated the disappointment inherent in all long-imagined and often-heralded scenes.

The vast bay, of irregular shape and everywhere dotted with islands, was walled on every side by a tumultuous labyrinth of mountains, some sheer rounded masses of bare rock and precipitous cliffs on which nature had not been able to get the slightest foothold, the majority a chaotic maze of ridges, peaks, and fantastic headlands covered with the densest vegetation, terminating in lofty Tijuca and with a dim, dark-blue background of the range called “the Organs.” The city itself, of many striking colors reflected in the blue-green sea along which it stretched in endless public gardens and esplanades skirting the water front, was strewn in and among these hills as if it had been poured out in a fluid form and left to run into the crevices and crannies, the scum, in the form of makeshift shanties, rising to the tops of the _morros_ which everywhere bulked above the general level, the more important of them crowned by picturesque old castles that stood out sharp-cut against the green background.

But if nature is peerless in Rio, one quickly discovers that man is still the same troublesome little shrimp he is everywhere. We crawled at a snail’s pace past a rocky islet covered with royal palms and a turreted castle, past seven large Brazilian battleships, among them the _Minas Geraes_ that had recently mutinied and bombarded the capital, and finally came to anchor well out in the bay. When our baggage had been rummaged by a flock of negroid officials quite as if we had arrived from a foreign country, we were privileged to pay foul-tongued and clamoring boatmen several thousand reis each to row us the few hundred yards to the shore. Rio has ample wharves, but passing vessels avoid the use of them whenever possible, lest the European exploiters pocket whatever profit the ships pick up on the high seas.

I wandered the crowded and blazing streets for some time before I decided to try my luck at the “Pensão Americana” in the Rua Larga, or Wide Street. Here, for six thousand reis a day, I was permitted to occupy a breathless little inside den and to eat whatever I found edible among the native dishes set before us on a free-for-all table at noon and evening. I was back in rice-land again, that inexcusable substitute for food, the only thing on the menu of which there was anything like abundance, being served at every meal and on every possible pretext. This and the _feijão_, the small black bean of Rio Grande do Sul, with now and then a bit of _xarque_, dried or salted beef, added to give it distinction, makes up the bulk of any native Brazilian repast in such rendezvous of starvation as the “Pensão Americana.” The only drink furnished was water, and one soon learns to avoid that in tropical Brazil. One dining-room wall was decorated with large glaring advertisements of beer and shoes, on the other was an enormous and gaily colored chromo of the Last Supper, at which the fare was as scanty as our own. The general parlor in the front of the second story and opening upon the wide street might have been passable as a lounging-place had not noisy, undisciplined brats been constantly running about it and the snarly, quarrelsome air of cheap boarding-houses the world over everywhere pervaded it. The entire establishment was an unceasing bedlam. Women shrieking as only Latin-American women can gave no respite from dawn to midnight; most of them kept pet parrots—or toucans, which are several times worse—and occasionally an entire flock of parrakeets. My bed proved to be of solid boards with an imitation mattress two inches thick. The gas is turned off in Rio at ten in the evening, and we had no electricity. I could not read for lack of light, I could not sleep because of the sweltering heat inside my cubbyhole, stagnant as only an interior dungeon in the tropics can be, and the uproar beyond the half-inch partitions, which in no way deadened the nightly domestic activities of the families about me. When I did at length doze off toward dawn it was only to dream madly.

The evening’s determination to move, even if I must sleep in the streets, was strengthened by the rumpus that awoke me at daylight and by the thimbleful of black coffee that constituted the only breakfast served until eleven. I struck out none too hopefully to re-canvass the town. A white cardboard swinging at the end of a string from a balcony window, I soon discovered, meant that a room was for rent, but though these were numerous they were all unfurnished. Those who rented furnished quarters were expected to eat in the same house, and 6000 was evidently the rock-bottom price for board and room anywhere in Rio. For that sum I could get real food and a tolerable room in a hotel kept by a German in the Rua do Acre in the heart of the downtown section, and it mattered little that the pungent smell of raw coffee struck one full in the face in passing the open doors of the warehouses in the Rua São Bento and the adjoining streets leading to it.

The Rua do Acre opens out upon the wharves at the beginning of the broad Avenida Central, gashed from sea to sea straight through the heart of the business section of Rio. Both in history and appearance this new main downtown artery of the Brazilian capital is similar to the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, which, though it does not rival it in length, it outdoes in some respects, particularly in the picturesqueness of the types that pass along it. Old Rio was crowded together in medieval congestion on the principal point of land jutting into the harbor, and in time this portion became so densely populated with business and so inadequate under modern traffic conditions that nothing but surgery could save it. The major operation of cutting this broad avenue through the compact old town was intrusted to the Baron of Rio Branco, and it still officially bears his name. Early in the present century his plans were carried out at the expense of much cost and destruction, and in place of a labyrinth of narrow unsavory streets and aged unsanitary buildings there appeared in an incredibly short space of time a passageway a hundred meters wide and more than two thousand meters long running with geometrical precision from the inner harbor to the Monroe Palace on the edge of the Beira Mar, with the “Sugar Loaf” set exactly at the end of the vista.

There are many things of interest in downtown Rio, but of them all perhaps the Avenida Rio Branco is the most enticing. Stroll where one will on either side of it, to the Arsenal, the Ministries, the palace where the last emperor of the western hemisphere had his official residence up to little more than thirty years ago, to the heavy and not particularly striking cathedral, one is sure to drift unconsciously back and take again to wandering aimlessly along in the human stream that surges as incessantly through the Avenida as if the populace were still enjoying the novelty of moving freely where their ancestors could not pass. The only other street in old Rio that has anything like the same fascination is the narrow Rua Ouvidor, as it is still known in popular speech, though the city fathers long since decreed that it shall be called the Rua Moreira Cesar. This is to Rio what the Calle Florida is to Buenos Aires, not merely a populous street but a popular institution. Along it are the most brilliant shops, in it may be seen the most exclusive residents of Rio greeting one another with the elaborate and leisurely formality of their class. Level paved from wall to wall, it is in reality a broad sidewalk, for here wheeled vehicles may not enter at any hour whatever. Yet even the enticing windows and the now and then attractive shoppers of the Rua Ouvidor do not often keep the stroller long from wandering once more out into the Avenida.

For all its width it is not easy to walk along the Avenida. What might be called “sidewalk manners” are atrocious throughout South America; in Rio they are at their worst. This is not because the _Fluminenses_—for these, too, call themselves “rivereens,” though they are far from any real river—are especially inconsiderate, but because they are tropical idlers with no fixed habit of mind, and instead of picking a straightforward course down the broad avenue they wander back and forth across one’s path in all sorts of erratic diagonals. The pace of life slows down noticeably in twelve degrees of latitude, and street crowds are not only slower but much more stagnant in Rio than in Buenos Aires. In time the direct and hurrying northerner comes to realize that the Avenida is not designed to be merely a passageway from somewhere to somewhere else. It _is_ somewhere itself, a lounging-place, a locality in which to show off at one’s best, a splendid site for café chairs and tables. By late afternoon it is often so blocked that passage along it is a constant struggle; in the evening clumps of seated coffee sippers and groups of gossiping men fill the broad sidewalks almost to impassability.

These sidewalks of the Avenida were evidently laid with the connivance of shoemakers. Most of them are mosaics of black and white broken stone in striking designs and fantastic patterns, here geometrical, there in the form of flowers, with horsey figures before the Jockey Club, nautical things before the Naval Club, all of striking effect when seen, for instance, from the upper windows of the _Jornal do Commercio_ building, but particularly deadly on shoe leather. An architect might have much to say of the score of splendid structures that flank the avenue. Some are merely business houses; farther seaward, beyond two great hotels, are clustered the sumptuous Municipal Theater, the School of Fine Arts, and the National Library; set a little back from the street are the Supreme Tribunal and the Municipal Council until the Avenida breaks out at length into the Beira Mar beside the Palacio Monröe in its little park. This last marble and granite edifice was carried back from our St. Louis Exposition and set up chiefly as a show-place and an ultra-formal gathering-hall, but the Chamber of Deputies has been meeting there since their old firetrap on the Praça da República took to falling about their ears. Beyond it lie the blue waters of the oval bay, across which, always in full view from anywhere on the avenue, stands the _Pão d’Assucar_, like a rearing monolith, the thread-like cable that now and then carries a car to or from its summit plainly visible in the clear tropical sunshine.

However, it is not these more formal things but rather the continual interweaving of curious and motley types, the air of unworried tropical indolence that pervades the throng, the brilliance of the night lights that draw the idler again and again to the chief artery of downtown Rio. Particularly after the hour of siesta does the capital exchange the extreme négligée of the household for its most resplendent garb and sally forth to stroll the Avenida, the women with curiously expressionless faces, as if they would prove themselves deaf to the audibly flattering male groups that grow larger and larger until by sunset the sidewalks become a great salon rather than places of locomotion. Foreigners and those who have lost the spirit of Rio and must hurry may take a taxi. These pour so continually past, day and night, that to cross the Avenida is a perilous undertaking at any hour, for the personal politeness of the _Fluminense_ does not extend to his automobiles, and the chances of being run down, particularly by empty machines cruising for fares, are excellent. Nor is it worth while for the lone pedestrian to protest, for the odds are against him. Both private automobiles and those for hire carry two chauffeurs, usually in white uniforms, less often unquestionably of that complexion, their faces studies in haughtiness as they gaze down upon the plebeian foot-going multitude. The extra man is known colloquially as the “secretary,” and the custom is said to have arisen from the fact that before the law required meters taxis charged all the traffic would bear and it often took two men to collect from recalcitrant customers. But its persistence suggests that there are other reasons, among them the Brazilian love of sinecures, the terror which solitary labor causes to the tropical temperament, the pleasure of having a congenial friend always hanging about, the excess of population over jobs, the real chauffeur’s need of someone to crank his car, light his cigarette, and keep an eye on the police, most of all, perhaps, the Brazilian love of _fazendo fita_. Literally _fazendo fita_ means “making a film,” but by extension it has come to signify posing for the moving-picture camera, hence, in the slang of Rio, “showing off.” It is a rare Brazilian who is not given to acting for the movies in this sense. Watch a traffic policeman, in his resplendent uniform and white gloves, and you will find that he is much more seriously bent on displaying his manly form and graceful deportment to a supposedly admiring audience than on keeping his street corner clear. Go up to any man with a gold cable swung across his chest and ask gently, “O s’nhor tem a hora?” and he is almost as apt as not to reply with a mumbled, “Ah-er-I cannot tell you the time,” meanwhile grasping first one end of the chain, then the other, as if he were striving to convince even himself that he has a watch somewhere attached to it.

It was midwinter in Rio, yet plump, sun-browned youths rolled in the surf each morning below the wall of her chief driveway and lolled in the shade of the open-air cafés along it. Even in July the lower levels of the city can be unpleasantly hot, which makes it all the more remarkable that it gives such an impression of energy during its business hours. From the wharves to the edges of the mainly residential sections the place pulsates with perspiring activity, though on closer inspection one suspects that the _Fluminense_ is more energetic at play than in productive labor. Whatever his exertions, however, he divides them into short sections separated by the partaking of coffee. All along the Avenida, in every downtown street of importance, there is not a block without its coffee-house, a cool room filled with marble-topped tables on a damp, sawdusted floor, into which one steps from the heated street, silently turns upright one of the score of tiny cups on the table before one, fills it half full of sugar, raps on the table with the head of one’s “stick” until a silent waiter comes and fills what is left of the cup with black coffee, which one slowly sips and, dropping a _tostão_, a nickel 100-reis piece, beside the empty _tasa_, wanders on down the street—to repeat the process within the next few blocks.

But with sunset, at least during what Rio likes to refer to as winter, the temperature grows delightful, and it is from then on until a new day warms again that one gets the full tropical fragrance, the un-northern _dolce far niente_ that makes the Brazilian capital so enticing to the wandering stranger. The newcomer soon learns to stay up most of the night and enjoy the best part of the day. Not even Paris was ever more brilliantly lighted than downtown Rio—cynics whisper that the city fathers have a close personal interest in public lighting—not even Parisian boulevards are more scented than the Avenida and its adjacent streets with the pungent odor of mercenary love. Far into the night the Avenida pulsates; long after the theaters and countless cinemas, and the opera in its season, have ended, the surge of humanity continues, punctuated at all too frequent intervals by that most distinctive sound of the night life of Rio,—bass-voiced newsboys singsonging their papers—“A Rua!” “A Noite!”—in the distressingly German guttural peculiar to the native tongue as spoken in the Brazilian capital.

Larger in extent than Paris, broken everywhere by savage, rocky, wooded _morros_—virgin-jungled hills rising in the very heart of town and which, peeled of their thick scalp of vegetation, prove to be of solid granite—stretching away in great green mounds and ranges standing high into the peerless tropical sky, Rio was as entrancing as Buenos Aires is commonplace. The level parts of the city were flat indeed, flat as if the sea had washed in its débris until it had filled all the spaces between the rocky island hills, and then completely flooded those valleys with houses. Nor did the building stop there. Seeping everywhere into the interstices of its hills, the town was here and there chopped back into them, or, if the _morros_ set sheer rock faces against the intrusion, it climbed upon and over them, until its many-colored houses lay heaped into the sky or spilled down great gorges and valleys beyond. Then always, from whatever point of vantage one saw it, the scene was backed by its peerless sky-line,—the Pico de Gavea with its square head, like a topsail or the conventional symbol for a workingman’s cap; the “Sleeping Giant,” showing nature’s most fantastic carving; hollow-chested Corcovado, the “Hunchback,” peering amusedly down upon puny man playing ant in and out among the tumbled rocks below; the admirable “Sugar Loaf,” keeping eternal watch over the entrance to the bay, the ridges and wooded summits of Tijuca backed far off by the “Organ” range, protruding like broken columns above the distant horizon. “Vedete Napoli e poi mori” might with many times more justice be said of Rio.

It was always a wonder to me how the citizens of the Brazilian capital succeeded in keeping within doors long enough to do their daily tasks. Day or night its peerless scenery and glorious climate were inviting one to come out and play, to forget the commonplace things of life. A local editor complained that the people of Rio do not read in the street-cars, “as our neighbors do in the United States, but spend their time gazing about them and thus lose much opportunity for culture.” Probably he had never been in New York or Chicago, or he would have realized that sometimes people read during their urban travels to keep their minds off the “scenery.” In Rio nature and all outdoors are so much more splendid than any printed page that reading seems a sacrilege. Though I rode along the Beira Mar a dozen times a day, I never succeeded in withholding my eyes from the scene about me; never was I able to miss a chance to gaze across the bay to Nictheroy, or up at the silhouettes of Corcovado and Tijuca; like a great painting it grew upon one with every view.

I passed frequently along this most marvelous boulevard in the western hemisphere, Beira Mar, the “Edge of the Sea,” stretching for miles along the harbor’s edge so close that the ocean spills over upon it on days when it is _brava_. Between the shady Passeio Publico behind the Monroe Palace and the heroic statue of Cabral on the green Largo da Gloria, the foothills crowd in so closely that there is room for only one street to pass, and right of way is naturally given to the chief pride of the city. Here converge the pleasure seeking traffic and the business bent, to split again presently on the rocky Morro da Gloria, crowned by its quaint little medieval church, the one stream to hurry away through the Rua do Cattete, the other to follow with more leisure the serpentine Beira Mar. This, lined by splendid trees and pretentious residences on the land side, outflanks another rocky hill that would cut it off by passing between walls of man-scarred granite behind it, skirts another arm of the turquoise-green harbor, with a closer view of the gigantic “Sugar Loaf,” and then bursts out through a long tunnel upon the ocean front where marvelous beaches and a succession of boulevards continue for miles through what is rapidly developing into the finest residential section of the Brazilian capital.

The Beira Mar is the show-place of Rio and of Brazil. It is sometimes as if one were asked to admire a costume without seeing more than the lace along the bottom, the eagerness of its people to impress the visitor with the undoubted splendor of this glorious seaside driveway. Yet there are many other strips and corners of the city that are well-nigh as sumptuous or as picturesque; the difficulty is to hunt them out among the _morros_ and foothills that everywhere divide the capital into almost isolated districts. Walking is all very well, but perspiration flows quickly and copiously in Rio, and a perpetually drenched shirt is not entirely conducive to pleasure; and the city is so incredibly extensive that even tramway exploration becomes serious to the man with a weak financial constitution. There are two street-car systems and they operate what is perhaps the best surface system in the world; but it is also the most expensive. Take a street-car ride from one end of Rio to another and back and you have spent, thanks to the “zone system” imported from Europe, the equivalent of half a dollar; and as there are lines out through all the score or more of gaps between the hills and _morros_, I quickly made the discovery that if I attempted to explore all the city, even by street-car, I should probably have the privilege of swimming home.

What was my joy, therefore, to learn that the superintendent of the “Botanical Garden Line,” which covers all the more beautiful half of Rio, came from the town in which I had spent much of my boyhood. I had long wanted the experience of being a street-car conductor or motorman, and made application at once. My fellow-townsman hesitated to give me any such place of responsibility unless I would agree to stay for some time, but he was quite ready to appoint me a _fiscal segreto_ of the system under his charge, at the most munificent salary I had ever drawn in my life—six thousand a day! That was exactly enough to pay for my room and board in the German hotel of the Rua do Acre; still it was decidedly better to be paid for riding about town than to have to pay for that privilege, and with my living and transportation assured until I sailed my chief problems were solved.

The “Botanical Garden Line” begins at the principal hotel on the Avenida Central, about which every car loops before setting forth again on its journey to some part of that section of Rio most worth seeing. I was furnished a book of free tickets and had only to take a back seat on any of these cars and, while reading a newspaper or seeing the scenery as inconspicuously as possible, casually notice whether the conductor showed an inclination to forget to ring up fares or to break any other of the strict rules of the company. My tickets were good only for the oceanside half of town, for though they were under the same North American ownership the two car systems did not connect, and anyone traveling all the way through town must walk a block from the hotel loop to the cars of the business section. This, however, was more compact and less interesting to the casual visitor than the region in which I had been given free transportation.

I was frequently seen thereafter boarding a “bonde da Light” at the Avenida hotel, or alighting from one after a long journey seaward. The company was officially known as the “Light and Power,” whence the abbreviation of ownership; and as the first electric street-cars introduced into Brazil were financed by bonds that were offered for sale to the Brazilians with much advertising, and there was no other term for them in the national vocabulary, the street-cars that finally came were dubbed “bonds,” and so they remain to this day, except that, as the Brazilian, like all Latins, cannot pronounce a word sharply cut off in a consonant, he usually calls them “bondes,” in two syllables.

The “bondes” of Rio are as excellent as those to be found anywhere on the globe, particularly on the more aristocratic “Botanical Garden Line.” Naturally, when a street-car company can get a quarter for a ride across town it can afford to maintain the best of service. The cars are all open, there are five persons, and five only, to a seat, smoking is allowed on all but the first three benches, and the law forbids those not properly dressed to ride in the first-class cars, there being second-class trailers for workmen and the collarless at certain hours of the day, on which those carrying bundles larger than a portfolio are also obliged to travel. Street-cars, like every other enterprise in Brazil, carry a heavy incubus of official “deadheads” and politicians. Soldiers, sailors, gasmen, mailmen, customhouse employees, street lighters, policemen, and a dozen other types in uniform ride free by crowding upon the back platform. They are not allowed seats, as are the swarms of politicians with elaborately engraved yearly passes—which they consider it beneath their dignity to be asked to show; but with those exceptions there are no “standees.” Law, custom, natural politeness and the lack of haste of the Brazilian are all against permitting a person to crowd into a filled car, no matter what the provocation. Laws are not always obeyed to the letter in the liberty-license atmosphere of South America’s most recent convert to republicanism, but during all my stay in Brazil I never saw a passenger attempt to board a full street-car.

I am compelled to admit that the street-car conductors of Rio are superior to our own in courtesy and their equal in attending strictly to business, and that the “Light” probably gets as large a percentage of its fares as does the average line in the United States. In spite of my duty as secret inspector I was utterly unable to find any serious fault with them, thanks perhaps to long and strict American discipline, for there was a great difference between their staid, careful manner and the annoying tomfoolery of the more youthful collectors on the native-owned motor-busses along the Avenida and out the Beira Mar. Part of this result, perhaps, was accomplished by a regular system of increase in wages and a gold star on the sleeve for each five years as inducements to longevity in the service. The Brazilian is noted for his inability to protest against exploitation, but he is very touchy as to the manner in which he is asked to pay, which is perhaps the reason the conductors of Rio never say “fares, please,” but only rattle suggestively the coins in their pockets as they swing from pillar to post along the car. Nor have we ever reached the level of masculine daintiness of the Brazilian capital, where young dandies carry little mesh purses worthy of a chorus-girl, from which they affectedly pick out their street-car fare, dropping the coins from well above the recipient palm in order to avoid personal contact with the vulgarly calloused hand of labor.

Most of the lines of the “Botanical Garden” system are so long that three or four round trips a day was all I could, or was expected to, make; moreover, I was instructed not to return by the same car that carried me out between Rio’s hills to the end of the line, lest I betray my calling. Thus I was forced to visit every nook and corner of half the capital in the natural discharge of my duties. The Botanical Gardens for which the system was named, lay far out on the edge of the salty Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, a marvelous collection of tropical and semi-tropical flora. Yet this was made almost inconspicuous by its setting, for all Rio is a marvelous botanical garden. Greater wealth of vegetation has been granted no other city of the world, so far as I know it. Date palms, cocoanut-palms, a multitude of other varieties, each more beautiful than the other, grew in profusion down to the very edge of the sea, all to be in turn outdone by the peerless royal palm. They call it the “imperial palm” in Brazil, because João VI of Portugal, first European emperor to cross the sea to reign in his American domain, to which he fled before the conquering Napoleon, caused this monarch of trees to be brought from the West Indies, and decreed that all seeds that could not be used by the royal family should be burned, lest they fall into the hands of the common people. Slaves stole the surplus turned over to them for destruction, however, and sold them to any who cared to buy, so that to-day the imperial palm is the crowning glory of nature along all the coast of Brazil. In Rio it is never absent from the picture. It grows in the courtyards of _cortiços_, those one-story tenement blocks of the Brazilian capital, and in the patios of decaying mansions of former Portuguese grandees; it stretches in long double rows up many a street and private driveway; it shades the humblest hovels and the most pompous villas of the newly rich with that perfection of impartiality which only nature attains; it thrusts itself forth from between the rocks along the seashore wherever waves or wind have carried a bit of sustaining soil; it clusters in deeply shaded valleys and climbs to the summits of the encircling mountains, there to stand out in regal isolation above the tangle of tropical creepers and impenetrable jungle that is constantly threatening to invade the tiny kingdom of puny man below. This great city-dwelling forest is one of the chief charms of the Brazilian capital. It seems to grasp the city in its powerful embrace, now affectionately, as if its only purpose were to beautify it, sometimes, as if bent on thrusting man back into the sea from whence he came, insinuating itself into every open space, spreading along every street like the files of a conquering army, invading the parks and the interior courts of houses, where marble pavements in mosaics of bright colors gleam amid great masses of jungle flowers, gigantic cool ferns, and fragrant orange-trees, overtopped by the majestically rustling imperial palm. It is illegal to cut down a tree within the limits of Rio, and the forest makes the most of its immunity by crowding the heels of the human creatures who soft-heartedly spare it; trees, shrubs, bushes, lianas, creepers, a veritable tidal wave of forest and jungle sweeps from the edge of the sea to the summits of the encircling hills, like multitudes gone to demand of the sun the renewal of their strength and energy.

My job took me out through older avenues lined with portentous dwellings dating back to colonial days; it dropped me with time to spare beside little _praças_, slumbering in the sunshine beneath rustling fronds, that carried the mind back to old Portugal, or at the foot of streets which ran up narrowing valleys until they encountered sheer impassable wooded hillsides; it left me at the beginning of rows of houses of every conceivable color, shape, and situation, which twisted their way up gullies or draped themselves over the lower flanks of the hills, some seeming ready to fall at the first gust of wind, some tucked immovably into evergreen tropical settings, the loftiest overtopped only by the imperial palms or by the mountains in the far background. So swift are many of these byways of Rio that a street-lamp in the next block is sometimes well above the moon; so closely are nature and man crowded together that there is absolute primeval wilderness within half an hour’s walk of the Avenida central, and one may come upon clusters of jungle cabins lost in the bucolic calm of the virgin _matta_ almost in the heart of the city limits.

Some of our lines passed through long dark tunnels bored in the granite hills, to reach one or another of those pretty, seaside towns that make up the outskirts of Rio. One ran the full length of Copacabana with its mile upon mile of peerless beach directly facing the Atlantic a short square back of the main street; still others hurried on and on through suburbs that scarcely realized they were part of the city. There was Ipanema, for instance, where the track was lined more often than not with uninhabited cactus desert, the car breaking out every little while from behind a hill upon the welcome perpetual sea breeze, or passing scattered shanties bearing such pathetically amusing names as “Casa Paz e Amor,” or “A Felicidade da Viuvinha,” with a goat and a few hens scratching in the beach sand before them. The Ipanema line was particularly attractive, for it ran so far out that I could take a dip in the sea between inspecting trips without going to the expense of acquiring a bathing-suit.

Many a visitor to Brazil has returned home convinced that her capital has no slums. It is an error natural to those who do not stay long or climb high enough. The traveler who subsidizes the exertions of a pair of chauffeurs or who scuffs his soles along the mosaics of the Avenida Rio Branco, justly admiring the Theatro Municipal for all its imitation of the Paris Opéra, admitting that the Escola de Bellas Artes and the Bibliotheca Nacional are worthy of their setting, and that the Beira Mar and the seascape beyond are unrivaled, often leaves without so much as suspecting that there is a seamy side to this entrancing picture, that he who has seen Rio only on the level knows but half of it. Indeed, even the leisurely wanderer who covers the entire network of tram-lines within the city has by no means completed his sight-seeing; to do so he must frequently strike out afoot and climb.

For the slums of Rio are on the tops of her _morros_, those rock hills which, each bearing its own musically cadenced name, rise everywhere above the general level. The _Carioca_—the inhabitant of Rio is more apt to call himself by this name than by the more formal term _Fluminense_—hates physical exertion such as the climbing of hills, and the flat places of the city are in high demand for residential as well as business sites. A few sumptuous villas clamber a little way up them within automobile reach, but the upper flanks and summits of the _morros_ are left to the discards of fortune. Here the poorer classes congregate, to build their shacks and huts of anything available,—fragments of dry goods boxes, flattened out oil cans, the leaf base of the royal palm—every shape and description of thrown-together hovels, inhabited by washerwomen, street hawkers, petty merchants, dock laborers, minor criminals, victims of misfortune, and habitual loafers. Barely two blocks back of the justly admired Municipal Theater there rises such a hill, so densely crowded with makeshift dwellings that only men of moderate girth can pass comfortably along the dirt paths between them; it would take a persistent walker weeks to investigate all the other congested hilltop towns within the city. There the stroller from below finds himself in quite another world than the Avenida at his feet, a world whose inhabitants stare half-surprised, half-resentfully at the man with even a near-white collar, yet many of whom have such a view from the doors of their decrepit shanties and such a sea breeze through the cracks in their patchwork walls as the most fortune-favored of other lands may well envy.

These scores of _morros_ rising above Rio’s well-to-do level are of many shapes, some only a little less abrupt and striking than the “Sugar Loaf” at the harbor’s entrance, others great rounded knolls over which the town has spread like fantastic unbroken jungle, those in the older part of town terminating in feudal looking castles or former monasteries turned to modern republican use, some of them so high that the sounds of the traffic and the trafficking below are drowned out by the hilarity of negro boys rolling about the dusty shade in old frock coats and what were once spotless afternoon trousers, gleaned from the discard of the city beneath. There are white people living on the summits of the _morros_,—recent immigrants, ne’er-do-wells of the type known as “white trash” in our South—but easily four out of every five of the hilltop inhabitants are of the African race, and he who thinks the negro is the equal of the white man under equality of opportunity should climb these slum-ridden hills and see how persistently the blacks have risen to the top in Rio, though there is so slight a prejudice against the negro in Brazil that his failure to gain an eminence in society similar to his physical elevation must be just his own fault. It is chiefly from her hilltops, too, that come what Rio calls her _gente de tamanco_, wearers of the wooden-clog soles with canvas slipper tops which are the habitual footwear of the poorer sockless _Cariocas_. The falsetto scrape of _tamancos_ on the cement pavements is the most characteristic sound of the Brazilian capital, as native to it as its perpetual sea breeze and its sky-piercing _palmeiras imperiaes_.

It was dusty on the _morros_ at the time of my “slumming,” for Rio was suffering from what the authoritative “oldest inhabitant” called the worst drought in forty years, and long lines of the hilltop inhabitants were constantly laboring upward with former oil cans full of water on their heads. The shortage of water had grown so serious that even down on the level the supply was shut off from dark until daylight; the ponds in the Praça da República and similar parks were so low that the wild animals living there in a natural state of freedom were in danger of choking to death. But hardships are familiar to the people of the hilltops, and there was an air of cheerfulness, almost of hilarity, about the long row of public spigots on the Largo da Carioca behind the Avenida Hotel at the end of the old Portuguese aqueduct, to which the _morro_ dwellers descended for their water, as slaves once carried from the same spot the supply for all the city.

The unavoidable excursion for all visitors to Rio is, of course, the ascent of the “Sugar Loaf.” For centuries after the discovery of Brazil and the founding by Mem da Sá of the village of São Sebastião at the mouth of the putative “River of January” this enormous granite thumb, its sides so sheer that they give no foothold even to aggressive tropical vegetation, was considered unscalable. But in time this, like so many of mankind’s impressions, was proved false and by the middle of the last century it had evidently become a favorite feat to salute the city from the summit of the Pão d’Assucar. At any rate, in running through an old file of the _Jornal do Commercio_ at the National Library I found in a number dated “Corte e Nitherohy, December 8, 1877,” among many appeals to “His Gracious Majesty in the shadow of whose throne we all take refuge,” the following item:

This morning the American Senhores—here followed four American names—set out at 5 A.M. and climbed to the top of our Pão d’Assucar, arriving at 7:11. This climbing of the Sugar Loaf is getting so frequent that before long no doubt someone will be asking for a concession for a line of bonds to that locality.

The writer, of course, considered this the height of sarcasm, and a clever thought improved by its connection with the burning question of the hour, for in the same issue there was a notice that more street-car bonds were about to be offered for sale, and the sheet was strewn with complaints against the “Botanical Garden Rail Road, which is not living up to the concession which His Gracious Majesty was pleased to grant it in 1856, but is oppressing the people of this Court for the benefit of a heartless corporation.” Yet if that particular scribe were permitted to peer out for a moment from the after world of newspaper writers he would find that his bon mot has entirely lost its sting, for that is exactly what someone has done, and to-day there is a line of “bonds” to the top of the “Sugar Loaf.”

Traveling out to the end of the Beira Mar, continuing on around the harbor instead of dashing through one of the tunnels leading out upon the open Atlantic, one comes to a station beyond the Ministry of Agriculture—set on this rocky neck of land, no doubt, so that the ministers may have a constant sea breeze and catch no scent of the tilling of soil. On the way the massive Pão d’Assucar, here suggestive rather of a loaf of French bread stood on end, grows more and more gigantic, the long span of cable to the summit swinging across the sky like a cobweb, and the timid have often been known to turn back at this point rather than risk their lives in the aërial journey before them. There are many of these striking forms of granite monoliths along the coast of Brazil, though of them all Rio’s “Sugar Loaf” is probably the most dramatic. The cable tram had been in operation about a year, the company being Brazilian and the machinery German. At the station visitors are sold tickets at once—after which they are incessantly pestered by hangers-on of the company to buy beer and the like at the station café until a car is ready for the journey. The conveyance is similar to a small closed tramcar, with wire-grated windows, the end ones open, a locked door, and benches on two sides, except that instead of having wheels beneath there are rollers above, which run on two cables of about two inches in diameter. Sliding smoothly upward at nearly a 45-degree angle, the first car carried us to the top of a rock hill called the Penedo da Urca, 220 meters high, where we were let out to walk a few hundred yards—and given ample opportunity to quiet our nerves with beer and sandwiches. From this another car swung us across the bottomless wooded chasm between the two peaks on a cable that sagged considerably of its own weight and set us down on the bald rock top of the Pão d’Assucar, 1250 feet above the sea.

At this late afternoon hour the “Sugar Loaf” casts its own shadow far out across the entrance to the harbor. The city is apt to be a bit hazy, the sun, or the moon, often just red blotches in the dusty air in time of drought, but its hills and the countless islands of the bay seem solid rocks with woolly wigs of forest and jungle. The ferry crawling across the bay to Nictheroy, ocean-going steamers creeping in and out of the harbor, leave their paths sharp cut and clear behind them as the trail of a comet shooting across the sky. Almost directly below, the Morro Cara de Cão (“Dog’s Face”) stretches upward in a futile effort to rival the giant above. On its projecting nose the Fortaleza São João faces that of Santa Cruz, inaccessible on the Nictheroy side opposite, midway between them is a little island bearing the Fortaleza da Lage, and still farther in, completing the quartet of watchdogs that guard the entrance to Brazil’s chief harbor, lies the fortified island of Villegaignon, named for the Frenchman who once installed his forces here and disputed possession of the bay with Mem da Sá. One can look as directly down into every activity of São João Fortress as from an airplane, the roll of drums rising half-muffled to the ears as tiny ants of soldiers, drilling in squads, take minutes to march across the two-inch parade ground. As the sun goes down behind the bandage of clouds along the lower horizon, the scene clears somewhat of its bluish dust-and-heat haze and discloses the myriad details of the vast spreading city, strewn in and out among its _morros_ until it resembles some fantastic and gigantic spider. Evening descends with indescribable softness, the world fading away out of sight through a gamut of all known shades of color, the wash of the sea on a score of sandy beaches and on the bases of rocky islands and hills coming up like hushed celestial music. Then a light springs out of the void, another and another, quickly yet so gradually as to seem part of nature’s processes, until at length all the city and its suburban beach towns, the very warships in the harbor, are outlined in twinkling lights—for each and all of them do distinctly twinkle—like sparkling gems of some fantastically shaped garment of dark-blue stuff, of which nothing else is seen but the dim jagged silhouette of the mountain background, whence blows the caressing air of evening.... But only the foolhardy would attempt to paint such scenes in words; like all the regal beauties of Rio they reveal themselves only to those who come to look upon them in person.

Yet there are many who regard the view from the Corcovado as still more striking. The “Hunchback,” rising a thousand feet higher than the “Sugar Loaf,” leaning over the city as if it were half-amused, half-disgusted by the activities of the tiny beings below, is more easily accessible. A little independent tram-line runs out along the top of the old Portuguese aqueduct bringing water to the Largo da Carioca, crossing high above a great gully filled with town and metropolitan bustle, winding away among wooded hills strewn with costly residences, to Aguas Ferreas; or one may walk there by any of several routes lined by old mansions and scattered shops and, if courage is equal to physical exertion in the tropics, climb in a leisurely three hours to the summit. But a rackrail train leaves Aguas Ferreas at two each afternoon, and he who can more easily endure the cackling of tourists may spare himself the ascent afoot. A powerful electric engine thrusts the car up the mountainside before it, by a route so steep that the city below seems tilted sharply away from the sea. Much of the way is through dense, jungled forest, that militant tropical Brazilian forest which comes down to the very gates of Rio and pursues the flabby-muscled urban population into the very downtown streets of the capital. Sometimes the road is cut through solid rock, at others it glides through long tunnels of vegetation, to emerge all at once in the clear blue sky a few steps from a sight that is not likely to be forgotten in one brief life-time.

From the cement platform that has been built out to the edge of the summit one might look down from daylight until dark without seeing all the details of the city at his feet, the tumult of jungled hills about him, the bay with its countless islands of every possible shape, all spread out as upon some huge relief map made with infinite care upon a flat, turquoise-blue surface from which everything protrudes in sharp-cut outline. Nictheroy, several miles away across the bay, seems close at hand, the “Sugar Loaf” is just one of many insignificant rocks bulking forth from the mirroring blue surface below, and the roar of the beaches comes faintly up from all sides.... But the funiculaire company is apparently jealous of their view, or of its competition with other things demanding attention, for the visitors are soon hurried down again—as far as a hotel and café built in the woods by the thoughtful corporation, where one may follow the old Portuguese aqueduct for miles through thick damp forest, if one has the energy and strategy necessary to escape the ubiquitous purveyors of beer and sandwiches.

Perhaps the finest experience of all—for there are so many vantage points about Rio that the visitor is constantly advancing his superlatives—is the ascent of Tijuca, highest of all the summits within the city limits, more than a thousand feet above the Corcovado and 3300 above the sea, its top not infrequently lost in the clouds. This may be reached from front or rear, as a single hurried trip of three or four hours or as the climax of one of those many all-day walks that may be taken within the bounds of Rio without once treading city pavements; and its charm is enhanced by its freedom from exploiting companies or too easy accessibility.

A prolongation of a principal boulevard lifts one quickly into the hills, or one may strike out from the end of the Gavea car-line upon an automobile road that winds and climbs for nearly fifteen miles along the cliffs above the sea, always within the city limits yet amid scenes as unlike the familiar Rio as the Amazon jungle. Here and there are tiny thatched cabins all but hidden beneath the giant leaves of the banana, pitched away up 45-degree hillsides, climbing as high as their energy endures, the huts inhabited by shade-lolling negroes as free from care for the morrow as the gently waving royal palm trees far above them. Now and then one passes a rambling old house of colonial days, perhaps a mere _tapera_ now, one of those abandoned mansions fallen completely into ruin after the abolition of slavery, of which there are many in the fifty-mile periphery of Rio. Then for long spaces there is nothing but the tumultuous hills heavily clothed with dense, humid green forest piled up on every side, the square, laborer’s-cap summit of Gavea, the Roman nose of its lofty neighbor, and other fantastic headlands in ever bluer distance, with the ultra-blue sea breaking in white lines of foam far below and stretching to the limitless horizon. The ascent is often abrupt, sometimes passing a tropical lagoon with waving bamboo along its edges, perpendicular walls here and there rising to summits as smooth as an upturned kettle, sheer slopes of rock, so clear of vegetation as to be almost glassy in appearance, standing forth into the sky as far as the eye can follow, while everywhere the imperial palms wave their plumage, now high above, now on a level with the eye, their cement-like trunks stretching down to be lost in the jungle of some sharply V-shaped valley.

But the more ordinary way to Tijuca is to take the Alta Boa-Vista car out one of the many fingers of Rio, past the formerly independent town in which once lived José d’Alencar, Brazil’s most prolific novelist, to a sleepy suburban hamlet well up the mountainside and of the same name as the peak above. Most travelers call that the ascent of Tijuca, or at least are content with a climb, by automobile preferably, a few hundred feet higher to a charming little waterfall almost hidden in tropical verdure. But the real excursion begins where the automobile road and the average tourist leave off. For two hours one marches steadily upward through cool dense tropical forest, its trees ranging from tiny to immense giant ferns, bamboos, and palms lining all the way. The trail grows steeper and more zigzag, winding round and round the peak until it breaks forth at last frankly in steps cut in the living rock and climbs, between two immense chains that serve as handrails, straight up to the summit, a bare spot like a tonsure or an incipient baldness in the otherwise unbroken vegetation.

Here is a view in some ways superior even to that from the Corcovado, for one sees not only all Rio, no portion of it hidden by the range beneath, but the whole seven hundred square miles of the most extensive federal district on earth, and mile upon mile away up country, over chaotic masses of hills, through the villages along the “Central” and “Leopoldina” railways, to the haze-blue mountains of Petropolis and the “Organ” range. Every island in Guanabara Bay, from huge Gobernador in the center of the picture to the tiniest rock sustaining a palm-tree, all Nictheroy and its woolly and rumpled district beyond, stand out in plain sight; and on the other side of hills that seem high when seen from the city but which from here are mere lumps on the surface of the earth, are beaches without number, the soft, tropical Atlantic spreading away to where sea and sky melt imperceptibly together.