Four thousand feet up, and back from all sight of the harbor, you reach Petropolis, built first as the summer residence of the Emperor, Dom Pedro, and named for himself. It is a beautiful town, the home of rich Brazilians, foreign merchants and foreign legations, for it is the diplomatic center. While you stay at the English Pensáo Honoria, some ship-friends are near by at the Hungarian Pensáo Central, both with unusually good food and service. In the garden great bushes of the camelia are covered with waxen blossoms and the poinsettia blazes beside a hedge of heliotrope. Humming-birds dart in and out among the shrubs. Through the middle of every street runs the mountain stream in a stone-curbed channel, spanned by Indian-red bridges at the street crossings.
Dom Pedro was the "village improvement society," and the main street is still called the "Rua Imperador" although it was renamed when he was banished. The town follows the narrow valleys between hills always green. The gardens are bewildering in their profusion of flowers. Lilies blossom as they do in California. Orange trees perfume the air. The verandas are but a step up from the ground, and the rooms open upon the verandas. You feel little need for a house. Only hotels and palaces are two stories high; the rest are one.
The British Minister, the American, the Swedish, the Belgian, the German, the Argentine, with their suites, are soon recognizable. You go to call on your American Minister, find it is an afternoon "at home," and imagine you know what the confusion of tongues was like, for all the other kinds of foreigners are there. You go also to call on the Methodist missionary, sent by the Southern Church from Georgia. He is the only Protestant minister living in this region except the German Lutheran, who is the shepherd of a colony of good German workers imported by the Emperor long ago.
These Methodists have begun with a school instead of a church, and have honored their work by buying a beautiful building in beautiful grounds for a seminary, which is the only rival of the school of the nuns in the old imperial palace. These are both boarding as well as day-schools. You smile when you become conscious of some of the difficulties these teachers have in preparing text- and explaining general literature, for the North Star is not visible—the Southern Cross has taken its work. December, January and February are the hottest months; Christmas will probably be scorching; the sun shines in at the north windows, and the farther south you go the colder it grows; for you are south of the equator. Have Australia and South Africa and South America had to read all our best literature all these years with a commentary to make it intelligible!
The Portuguese days of the week suggest Old and New Testament instead of the heathenish origin of Anglo-Saxon names:
MondaySegunda FeiraSecond Market Day.
TuesdayTera FeiraThird Market Day.
WednesdayQuarta FeiraFourth Market Day.
ThursdayQuinta FeiraFifth Market Day.
FridaySexta FeiraSixth Market Day.
SaturdaySabbadoThe Sabbath.
SundayDomingoThe Lord's Day.
You have made several friends among coffee, insurance, banking, exchange, diplomatic and missionary people, and have discovered mutual friends "at home"; so you have had visits and invitations to drive and to walk, and now have one for a breakfast at one o'clock on Sunday. Really just what would the Sabbath Observance Committee do here? There is no English service till four in the afternoon, to be held in a hall over a grocery store by the missionary of the Methodist Church. A Frenchman comes to mind who mentioned with bewildered disgust the American plea for closing the Exposition on Sunday: "What do they expect us to do, then! Sit on a bench in the park all day!"
The business men are all at home, glad to rest one day in seven from the three hours' journey to their Rio offices and the three hours back, besides their exciting markets. Through the week they have little chance for exercise, for the only train down the mountain leaves at seven in the morning, and one cannot reach home much before seven at night. The early coffee has thoroughly wakened and fortified the system against malaria. You see with what keen pleasure the various parties start off on horseback or a-wheel. They will ride until they are healthily tired and come back to be entertained in little groups at hospitable boards. What will you do? accept the invitation and join one of the groups? or stay in your own garden, and eat your own hotel breakfast?
In any case you attend the service in the hall, in company with thirty or forty others. Double this number in town are English or Americans. One of the Methodist schoolteachers plays the harmonium. Moody and Sankey hymns are sung. It is more nearly a piece of North America than anything you have seen since you left that beloved spot, but the setting is foreign, from the different wall-paper patterns to the very wide boards of very hard wood which compose the bare floor, and the foreign-looking houses you see through the window. Your missionary preacher has held a Portuguese service, attended by the poor, in the morning, and a collection keeps this English service self-supporting, so far as room-rent goes.
You must make another trip to Rio. This time your first objective point will be the Botanical Garden, with its magnificent alley of palms, its more beautiful alley of bamboos, old tamarind trees and other attractions. You will not be disappointed in the beauty, but you will be surprised to find yourself there almost alone. The "bond" has taken you through interesting streets, and quite a long distance on the edge of the bay. You have skirted hills built to the top and others too steep for that. You return to the heart of town in time for a late breakfast, one o'clock, which you may have invited some friends to share at a capital restaurant on "the Ouvidor." You climb a long flight of stairs to a large, cool, pleasant room with many open windows. Every room by law must be at least fifteen feet high, whatever its floor dimensions, and public rooms are always frescoed with old-time panels and bunches of flowers.
What is the Ouvidor? A very narrow street, too narrow for vehicles, lined on both sides for seven or eight blocks with the best stores of Rio. It is also a meeting-place for politicians and newsmongers, gentlemen of leisure and fashion.
When I went to Rio first in 1884 it was not proper for a woman to go in the street without some man to take care of her. She certainly could not go to shop alone in the Ouvidor as she sometimes does now.
When Prof. Agassiz visited Brazil, "on the occasion of his first lectures delivered in the capital, he earnestly requested the emperor that ladies might be allowed to be present,—a privilege till then denied them on grounds of etiquette. The request was granted, and the sacred domain of science for the first time was thrown open to the women of South America."[3]
[3]Reminiscences. Julia Ward Howe.
Now she is verily a new woman, being far less restricted. The sanitary conditions of the streets have been improved. The sights do not shock her ideas of propriety. Rio is fast becoming a city like any in Southern Europe, never forgetting its superior natural charms. Whoever would have thought that the probable presence of women on the streets of a town could work a revolution! Even the negro porters and little children are now reasonably clad. I used to apostrophize the coffee-sack, ripped a little way at the bottom and a little way on each side to let a head and pair of arms through, as the only garment of the poor man, but now the coffee-sack serves only its original purpose. The curious tin trumpets projecting from the level of the second floors no longer, so far as I have seen, discharge the pails of water which were thrown on the floors and swept out through these convenient vents into the street. There are no longer bonds labeled "descalos," (barefooted) in which such were compelled to ride.
This time you must climb the mountains back of Rio for the night. Had ever an emperor such a park as Dom Pedro made of these mountains of Tijuca! Thirty miles of park r swept every week, lighted by gas, winding in and out, up and down the precipitous slopes of mountains green to the top! And such green! the green of palms and tree ferns, of trees with orchids and sipos. Every few yards brings you to a distinctly new view: sometimes it includes the Atlantic, sometimes the Rio harbor, sometimes the distant city, more often a lovely valley, a waterfall, a height of rock all covered with ferns and mosses, and another stretch of your winding rwith a railing of tall, graceful bamboos growing at some dangerous place. You are shown the spots which Agassiz specially studied and stay in the old hotel where he stayed. Why do people go to Petropolis with this beautiful spot so much nearer? Because, in the summer-time, between December and April, yellow fever has been known to get a little lodgment even here; rarely, it is true, but the foreigner who knows his new home never takes any risks. He will not stay in Rio during fever-time after sundown. He will not go out in the early morning without his coffee. If he has the slightest intimation of fever he takes castor oil without a moment's delay. If he has taken the fever he goes at once to the hospital in Rio, not risking the change to the cool heights of Petropolis, lest he might not have strength to rally in the cold when the period of collapse comes. You say you would not live in a place where such a sword hung over your head, but they read New York and Chicago papers in July with records of hundreds of deaths from sunstroke while their temperature is hardly varying five degrees from seventy, and in February, when their fever is at its worst, they read the numbers of victims of pneumonia, grippe, diphtheria, and find the ills of life not so unevenly distributed after all. Men on salaries large enough to live in Petropolis need have little fear of yellow fever. But the missionaries in Rio, the secretaries of Y. M. C. A., Bible Society, etc., and the under-clerks of foreign establishments must have it once. How these men and women have nursed each other through the sharpness of the fever and the awful weakness afterwards! Do you wonder that friendships spring up under these circumstances between people who would hardly find their affinity at home?
Kipling voiced the spirit of such comradeship in a small community in a foreign land, when he wrote:
"I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine,
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
And the lives that ye lead were mine.
"Was there aught that I did not share,
In vigil, or toil, or ease,
One joy or woe that I did not know,
Dear hearts across the seas?
"I have written the tale of our life,
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise—but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth."
This book is provided by FunNovel Novel Book | Fan Fiction Novel [Beautiful Free Novel Book]