Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (995 page)

Somewhere at the bottom was a glare of sun through mist, and a prospect of illimitable ravines. A heap of rubbish lay near our foot-board. A man who knew about hard woods identified the different sorts, and touched a root with his foot. It went down and down as a suicide rolls over a cliff. There was a note in the air of some immense stringed instrument, under-run by a touch of crying metal. It came from the yard, and when we loafed over there, we saw that it was sung by wire cables running over sheaves in the centre of tracks that pitched off the end of the yard, just as water pitches out of a spillway, and vanished round a corner. The sheaves were set at various angles to humour the ringing, humming cables. Layers of oily air wandered up from Santos till one almost smelt the steamers down there.

Suddenly the cables stopped for a few minutes; a special type of loco with an exaggerated belly took charge of its appointed block of coaches and drew them neatly above the stilled rope. A bell tinkled; there was a jar from the loco gripping the rope; it moved on once more, and the procession went over the spillway.

They told me that all trains are broken up into these threes, and worked down the drop, up-coaches balancing the down — worked on the cable through five separate hauling-stations, by locomotives who are mostly grips and brakes. The grips lay hold of the wire of each stretch, till near the end of it; then they release and pick up the next stretch and so on down to the bottom. If the cable snaps and the wire jumps the sheaves and wraps round wheels and things, the loco-brakes, plus those of the three coaches, ought to bring everything up at once. Nothing, it was demonstrated, could be simpler, and to prove it, traffic kept pouring in behind us, broke up into threes and pitched over, while the disintegrated up-traffic coalesced into complete trains and pounded on for San Paulo, with the passengers all reading their papers inside.

The Pulse of the Machine

“And what works the cable?” “A Corliss! Come and look at him.” There are many beautiful man-made things in God’s world, but among the most perfect for Strength, Beauty and Silence is a thousand-horse Corliss engine at its duty.

This one lived by himself. In front of him were the huge grooved drums on which his section of cable ran, evenly, slowly to all appearance, and noiselessly. High up on his back was the bridge of an ocean-liner — dials, levers and electric bells complete, and one lone man at his trick. He was linked with the next station down the chute, and stood untouchable as a priest, while the cables coming up tautened themselves, took the rim of the drum, and went out into the open, stiff as the shafts of sunrise, and the clock-pointers told out the minutes and seconds of ascent and descent. An almost inaudible click of levers settled these matters.

“Does it ever stop?” I whispered. “For a few hours between midnight and morning. That’s when we change and repair. Sundays? Oh, no! Sunday means excursion-traffic from both ends. I wonder how the old Brighton and South Coast would like having to drop their Pullmans down ten Devils Dykes into Hove. And, if there’s three minutes delay up here, San Paulo wants to know whether we’re asleep. We handle our freight at night mostly. In any weather? What do you think? Naturally, you can’t see your hand before your face in real rain. And we live in a shower-bath at times, here.”

A Shift of Scenery?

He told a tale of a big engine-fitting that had to be shifted and replaced in the scanty four-hour lull of traffic. All the actors rehearsed the drill till they were timed perfect, and knew to the split second when to lay hands on their properties. At the instant traffic laid off, they leapt on to a stage, lighted as no theatre dares to be; unbolted, jacked up, and slung clear what they had to; and sweated the new part into place, effective for its duty, on the very tick when the two towns woke up and wanted to go trading and travelling, and wooing and bathing, same as yesterday. It was an epic. I had the honour of being introduced to Ulysses, who had laid it all out in advance; to Chiron, who had had to rein in his steam-horses and swore a lot; and to Achilles, who said it could never be done to time, but took off most of his apparel to make sure that it should be. Translated out of the Greek, they were untemperamental Yorkshiremen and Scots; for the reason that all vital bearings in human machinery must run on the hardest jewels in the market.

“And now, if you please, we’ll go down.” On which our car joined two friends and ducked over the spillway into tropical heat and scenery, to the music of the skirling sheaves.

There must be worse railway country in the world; but I had not seen any. Every yard of those fallacious mountain-sides conspired against man from the almost vertical slopes out of sight above, to the quite vertical ravines below. One could not help admiring the fiend’s own skill with which water always attacks the weakest points of trestle-abutments, tunnel-mouths, and curves. All pitches and banks were flashed, stoned, concreted, and, where possible, diverted; the guttering was ample as town-cisterns and the culverts corresponded. All ground that offered room for anything, except a snow-shed, had been brought into the fighting-line. Nothing in Nature was trusted to stay put or to be left unwatched. And there were steel trestles that launched out across gulfs where you could drop a hundred feet into fifty-foot forest before your rolling-stock really began to roll.

The whole section was a work that, properly, one ought to have studied on foot, with guides and alpenstocks, instead of from an easy chair. I think the men liked showing off their bad child. One of them observed to an equal: “Now in the Argentine, nothing much matters. It’s all flat, and you can see your train coming over the curve of the world.” “Yes, but how about the Cordilleras, old man?” “Ah, that’s different, but, anyhow, they’ve got rock there. You can blast all day if you like.” “I didn’t like. I don’t like earthquake-country.” At this point a man swung off at a hauling-station that clung to the side of the track by pure suction. I know that he went to make sure that the throb of its winding-gear had not unseated the vacuum, but he told me he was “looking at a bit of track for himself,” and I saw the staff on that eagle’s nest of a platform stiffen in the sun.

We had risen seven or eight degrees of heat in a quarter of an hour’s drop. When we reached the flat ground near Santos and the respectable loco who took us there; the shut mountains behind us showed no sign by, or through, what miracles we had descended. 

VII

A WORLD APART

A People with their own God

How the Founders’ Strain Survives

A World by Itself

Brazil’s Mystery and Wonders in review      

introduction 

notes on the text 

Two Races

I SEEK not what his soul desires.

He dreads not what my spirit fears.

Our Heavens have shown us separate fires.

Our dooms have dealt us differing years.

Our daysprings and our timeless dead

Ordained for us and still control

Lives sundered at the fountain-head,

And distant, now, as Pole from Pole.

Yet, dwelling thus, these worlds apart,

When we encounter each is free

To bare that larger, liberal heart

Our kin and neighbours seldom see.

(Custom and code compared in jest —

Weakness delivered without shame —

And certain common sins confessed

Which all men know, and none dare blame.)

E’en so it is, and well content

It should be so a moment’s space,

Each finds the other excellent,

And — runs to follow his own race!

A World by Itself

It happened to me to be taken in a mute electric launch among islands and waterways, fringed with purple and gold turbanned forest trees, and a whole undergrowth of striving vegetation. Here and there thickets of guavas, run wild, appeared beside the royal bamboos; and breadths of lost pasture tilted steeply from the woods to the winding waters. The islands closed behind us till all sense of direction was lost, or ushered us into miniature lakes within this lake. Once we stole up a dead-end, hung with lianas, where a little waterfall, in palest green light, babbled to itself as it dropped, slow-descending scallops of silver down an emerald rock-face. Yet the fairy islands were but tops of little hills, and the waterways valleys of land, which twenty years before had been sunk up to make a lake to feed some hydro-electric works for Rio.

At this point a blunt, wary head broke water without sound and a nightmare rat, four foot long, ran up a bank. They said he was a capybara — a worthless rodent who harboured the carapata which gives trouble to cattle. This gentleman turned out to be a cow-tick about the size of a pea, and I had met his brethren before among cattle in Asia — the very same cattle, hump and all, as grazed round the countryside here. So, what with him once again, and the Sacred Cow where one didn’t expect her, and the capybara-heads that were copied from alligator-heads, and hot spice breaths out of the woods, the day was a confusion of overlapping wonders. It ended in an Assam planter’s bungalow; minute jewelled birds flashing round the trumpet-flowers till the bats came on, and every night-blossom gave its soul to the globed stars.

There were iced, sliced mangoes for breakfast, and thereafter a joyous family of young folk played like trouts in the big bathing-pool, and scarcely troubled comment when the corpse of a vicious little snake was swept down a gutter. “All right! He’s dead,” said Fourteen in a pair of shorts, and returned to diving after plates. One comes into pleasant lives like these the world over, where young folk ride and swim by nature; and the elders talk in the deep moon-slashed verandahs. But how is one to translate this adequately? Or what follows?

There was a gathering, in a big city, of the local survivors of a South American contingent, which came over to the War. They were joyous and sincere, but each must have carried his own bitterness or nostalgia beneath all the light and laughter. “Joking apart, what life was it for them?” And the answer, with local insets and allusions, was: “It’s a good life. It is a good life. Of course we grouse at it, but on the whole it’s as good a life as you can want. There’s no need to be sick, and there’s no need for separations if the money runs to it. But it’s full of temptations, you know, whether one has money or not.” With which one must be content. Another gathering elsewhere was made up of some of the English men, women, and children at ease after the day’s work in a beautiful Club. Here one seemed to come a little closer to hints and half-confidences of life. But convention — more’s the pity — forbids cross-examining people as they pass, and asking them: “How do you truly live? What do you think about things here — business, marketing, servants, children’s ailments, education, and everything else?” So the river of faces flows placidly enough, and one can only guess at what underlies the ripples and dimples.

The Brazilian and his Possessions

The Brazilians I met were interested in and entirely abreast of outside concerns, but these did not make their vital world. Their God — they jested — was a Brazilian. He gave them all they wanted and more at a pinch. For instance, once when their coffee-crop exceeded bounds, He sent a frost at the right moment, which cut it down a quarter and comfortably steadied the markets. And the vast inland countries were full of everything that anyone wanted, all waiting to be used in due time. During the War, when they were driven in upon themselves for metals, fibres, and such, they would show a sample to an Indian and ask him: “Where does one find more of this?” Then he would lead them there. But, possessing these things, they gave one to understand, does not imply their immediate development by concessionaires. Brazil was a huge country, a half or third of which was still untapped. It would attend to itself in time. After a while, one fancied that, somewhere at the back of the scenes, there was the land-owning breed’s dislike of the mere buyer and seller of commodities, which suggested an aristocratic foundation to the national fabric.

The elaborate rituals of greeting and parting among ordinary folk pointed the same way. Life being large, and the hours easy-winged, they expatiate in ceremonial. On the other hand, widespread national courtesy is generally due to some cogent reason. I asked if that reason existed here. Oh yes. Naturally. Their people resented above all things rudeness, lack of consideration, and injury to their “face.” It annoyed them. Sometimes it made them see red. Then there would be trouble. Therefore, mutual accomodation from highest to humblest was the rule.

Carnival in Rio

I had proof of this later at Carnival time, when the city of Rio went stark crazy. They dressed themselves in every sort of fancy-kit; they crowded into motors; they bought unlimited paper serpentines, which, properly thrown, unroll five fathoms at a flick; and for three days and three nights did nothing except circulate and congregate and bombard their neighbours with these papers and squirts of direful scent. (I made good practice against five angels in orange and black; a car-load of small boys not very disguised as young devils; and a lone, coroneted divinity in turquoise and silver.) The pavements were blocked with foot-folk all bearing serpentines, and wearing their fancy in clothes. City organisations and guilds assembled and poured out of their quarters, in charge of huge floats and figures, which were guarded by amateur cavalry; and companies of negro men and women fenced themselves inside a rope which all held, formed barbaric cohorts and platoons of red, green and yellow, and so advanced, shaking earth and air with the stamp and boom of immemorial tunes as they Charlestoned through the crowds. It was Africa — essential and unabated. The forty-foot floats that cruised high above the raging sea dealt raw-handedly with matters that the Press might have been too shy to discuss — such as a certain State railway, which is said to be casual in its traffic. Hence it was represented by twin locomotives butting like rams. To all appearance, the populace was utterly in charge of everything, and one bored one’s way, a yard at a time, into it, while it shouted whatever came into its well-informed head, and plastered everybodywith confetti. The serpentines hung like wreckage after flood on the branches of trees in the avenues; lay in rolls and fringes on the streets like seaweed on a beach; and were tangled and heaped over the bows of the cars till these resembled hay-carts of the operatic stage. But at no time, and in no place, was there anything approaching disorder, nor any smell of liquor. At two o’clock of the last night I saw a forty-foot avenue masked from kerb to kerb with serpentines and confetti. At five that same morning they were utterly gone — with the costumes and the revellers. There wasn’t even a headache hanging over in the clean air! Talking of this, people told me that drink was not a Brazilian failing, nor, as the state of the streets after Carnival proved, did men normally throw litter about. For one thing, they were racially neat-handed, as those are who deal in strong sunlight with wood, fibres, cane and rattan; and their fight against fever in the past had most practically taught them tidiness. Unpleasant things happen to the householder to-day if his cisterns and rubbish-heaps attract mosquitos in the city, and hard-handed Municipal chiefs see that he pays up. And that is the reason why it is so hard to find a bad smell in Rio.