The Mountain that Runs
Presently, the current of traffic turned aside from the Bay, tore through a ringing tunnel where everyone tooted all the time, and broke out on a stretch of Mulzenberg beach — the rollers from the full South Atlantic aligned under the stars, and crumbling along ivory sands up to the electric footlights.
Here all who were not on wheels were walking by myriads along a mosaic pavement flush with the sea. Facing the beach were costly detached dwellings whose owners had gone amok in every order, detail, trimming, devilment attribute and curio of what is called “architecture” that their minds or purses could compass. And since the buildings were like nothing on this earth, they exactly fitted the inexplicable scene beneath the high heavens regarding them.
“This is called Copacabana,” said my companions. “It has not been developed very long. No. It is not the City. It is only one of the suburbs. The City is several miles away. There is more of this ahead, but — ”
They turned back at leisure so that one could get the impression of the milky-mouthed rollers coming in, the movement of the gay multitudes along the sand, the throb of the packed cars — radiator to tank — the overhang of the mountains that one could but guess at, and the goblin-like houses that posed in the glare. It was apiece with the unreality of it all that some of the cars should be filled with joyous, singing people in fancy-dress. “That is because Carnival will be here in a week. They are getting ready for it. But look!, If you watch the shape of that mountain with the light above, you will see that, at first, we leave it behind.” Upon which the mountain stood still; we making thirty-five knots. “Now it will run alongside us.” The obedient thing started off and did so at once. “Now it will finish by going on ahead. Then it will wait for us at the end of the next bay.” This, too, came to pass, and the mountain halted in just that place, showing no signs of fatigue. Men have been burned at the stake for making much smaller magics.
The First Dawn
The ride ended opposite stage-green lighted foliage, in a marble hotel that faced the serene waters where one dully lighted tramp was kicking herself out to sea. But the traffic beneath the windows went on till that glassy dead time after day-break when there is neither land nor sea-breeze, and the trees get what they can of rest. In this suspension of pulse and movement, the City swam up with the divinely-heated dawn — enormous, opulent, spotless, and, in spite of her new-sought modernity, ancient and set. The lights on a moored battleship’s gangway switched off; a North American pattern ferry-boat plying to suburbs across the water laid out faint furrows on the flat blue floor; fussy Government launches put from a fortified island close by, and fled round a flat point of land which had once been a red hill, but was now turning into an esplanade; a sailing ship began to fiddle with her gear, and a last trail of mist smoked off to let the eye choose what it would of Rio Bay.
There may be lovelier waters somewhere, but neither Sydney nor Cape Town, which I have always held supreme in their kinds, can compare to these for size — which after all does not matter so much — for indescribable diversity, colour, amplitude and splendour of setting. A range of vertical cloud-topped mountains walled it in on one edge, thirty or forty miles away. They were evidently attending to the work of an ordinary monsoon. Mountains do not wrap themselves in cloud-blankets of that particular breadth and thickness for a few hours’ shower. Peaks stabbed up out of the smother, waked distant thunder growls, and vanished again. Certain gigantic cliff-faces pushed forward like cattle through mist, stood at gaze, and flung back again behind the veil. Somewhere over yonder would be Petropolis, a pleasure-city where Ambassadors and Administrators live to-day, but whither in the past everyone who could escaped from the fever every evening by train. The passengers on the steamer said that the fare there now was almost five shillings — cheap enough for a place obviously in communication with the Gods, and, as obviously overlooking their private pleasure-grounds.
Almost directly beneath the hotel window a little squadron of grave and silent fishermen in log-canoes slid up and took positions which one felt had been apportioned to their several families when the Pope first gave The Brazils to the Portugals. Have you ever noticed that, in every proper seaboard town, there is always this same unchanging assembly at dawn; and that it vanishes when the day’s life begins, as those too shadowy Shapes in the crystal ball vanish when the Visioa comes?
Along the immaculate embankment where the ‘buses were seeking their prey strolled a family — Papa, Mama, and some children in gay dressing-gowns. Another family sauntered through a little park. They joined forces and went on past a tarring-machine and a crane to some steps that led to the water. Never having noticed many English households bathing off, say, the Embankment, this interested me strangely; as did the gentleman in a bathing-suit on a motor-bike; and the two girls so wet from their dip somewhere further down the road, that they were very justly put on either running-board of the family car, where they clung like heraldic supporters and discoursed in their damp dressing gowns across it.
Then one recalled that in sane climates one bathes always and often, and anywhere that the water is safe; which accounts for the mass cleanliness of the local crowds. And it was pleasant to see once more how rain is detestable to properly born and brought-up people. A sprinkle of it sends them to cover as would a Maxim; and I watched with joy a whole family about to bathe defeated by a light shower, scuttling to refuge under the trees.
The city wakes at reasonable hours. Men were fleeing to business in their private cars about eight o’clock, after the ‘buses and trams had gone on ahead with their employees; and the hotel was alert and willing when half-alive English housemaids would have been filling black corridors with icy draughts and sooty-smelling fluff. All of which proved the rightness of real life, and sent one in haste to the Botanical Gardens before waves of impending hospitality should descend and wash out private engagements.
The Lily and the Forest
The basest of us have an ideal! Mine, cherished since extreme youth, was to see the Victoria Regia lily at home, and, if possible, that bird with the very long toes (Jacara might have been its name) represented in the same picture-book as walking on its leaves. The taxi-driver, except that his manners were an example to Princes, was not helpful. He knew the Gardens, but lilies — not so well, Senor. And he drove and drove for ever through the early morning freshness. After he had finished with the merely opulent or beautiful houses and villas, he spun us through miles of humbler quarters, where people come out and stand at their doors, and one notices how they live and do up their hair. One saw what could be done with little houses, in that light, by distempering them blue, yellow, rose, and magenta; or, when they are unrelieved drab, how splashes of blood-red, purple, or gold-flowering shrubs or trees pull everything into beauty and effect. Then one began to understand the common sense of the goblin-houses on Copacabana beach the night before, and (which may be the secret of the Latin) that in real sunshine you must over-play and over-act.
But always, on one side or the other, some great mountain forested from chin to toe, stooped down upon us; and when we had run under the flank of the tallest that shuttered off every breath of air, we found the Gardens — utterly empty, utterly still, and lovely beyond the power of telling.
All things were in their places that should have been, and growing naturally in their own atmosphere — the fruits, flowers, trees, and smells that awake rememberance, sorrow, or delight, in all parts of the earth, from the twinkly-leaved mango, which in my early beliefs was inhabited after dark by “Things,” down to jack-fruit — that durian which reeks like a corpse, but makes those who have once tasted eager as ghouls to eat again. Through the dark arches of the trees, and from under the blossomed cornices of overhanging thickets, floated forth, rarely, butterflies as big as bats, but made of tinted moonshine. They set a lustre upon the glory of the day, and then, like visiting souls, signalled and wafted upwards. People catch them, snip their wings into crazy-quilt patter
ns, and stick them under glass ash-trays for sale to tourists, of whom, Allah, forgive me! — I was one, and an offender.
Adding to these were all the air-seeking palms and the air-stifling bamboos from everywhere; and growing as weeds, bananas, of which one’s ayah used to tell that, if you got up very early and found a single new frond, neither split by wind nor dried by sun, you could wish a wish and the Gods would grant it. But that variety is not included in this collection. Nevertheless, Providence arranged my business generously enough. The great Lily lived in a pond, and was all that the books had said. Five to six feet across were her pads, and turned up at the edges in three-inch rims. The blossom — one had only to wish for anything in that land and it was given — her blossom is the size of an effective hat-box, and dwarfs half an hotel apartment. As to the bird Jacara, next morn I found two of him in cages, for sale, over against the Fish-Market, were they sell miracles. And their toes were exactly as long as they had been drawn in my own picture-book.
There was more sense in my visit to the Victoria Regia than appears; for the Gardens cried aloud — just like politicians — that they could produce everything man requires between certain degrees of latitude. Put in slip or seed, and it would thrive continuously. To which the dense green of the mountain-wall, where sloths hang up within two miles of the capital of Brazil, made answer: “ — But if you cease even for a month to fight my creepers and undergrowth, they will wipe out all your fine works, and in a half year you will go out under mel” One had forgotten how easily man lives with ancient Earth at Fifty North; and one had to recall that, in tropical forests, there is no spot, unless he hacks it out with an axe, where he can turn aside from his path or his field and cast himself down at ease in Her lap. As we went home in the still forenoon, and saw the steamers coming and going, it looked as though ocean might be easier to handle than trees. Later, several Brazilians confirmed this opinion. So it would appear that the Land, like the Sun and the gay-painted houses, over-plays and over-acts its part in the immense, florid drama of this World-by-Itself.
But before dealing with these trifles, we must consider a little city, three hundred miles down the coast, of nine hundred thousand people, which is called San Paulo, where, among other things, there is a power and light factory reported as “rather worth looking at.” The cities of Brazil have, like many an English town, jumped direct from oil and candles to electricity, but electricity in a climate already supercharged with all sorts of it, differs a little from the meek steam-generated stuff which works vacuum-cleaners and toast-racks elsewhere. We will go and see.
III
THE FATHER OF LIGHTNINGS
How Power came to Paulo
Light and Power
A visit to the “Hooded Devil”
who dwells above San Paulo
introduction
notes on the text
Song of the Dynamo
HOW do I know what Order brings
Me into being?
I only know, if you do certain things,
I must become your Hearing and your Seeing
Also your Strength, to make great wheels go round,
And save your sons from toil, while I am bound!
What do I care how you dispose
The Powers that move me?
I only know that I am one with those
True Powers which rend the firmament above me,
And, harrying earth, would save me at the last —
But that your coward foresight holds me fast!
Light and Power
Such as are desirous to pass between Rio and San Paulo by sea, repair to the foot of the main Avenida and hail a steamer, because steamers there are plentiful as ‘buses.
We took ours one evening when the City had lit up. The wonder of her lights began as we worked out through the harbour and before the main town. It swept back in jewelled loops along the scalloped sea fronts and the diamond-dusted heights behind them; broke for a few minutes like a snapped necklace, while we thumped round an intercepting headland, and caught the breath in the triple glories of Copacabana beach, with a monstrous square of white light from a high ivory building for central gem. It ended, far along the coast under the nearer mountains, while these themselves were outlined against liquid hazes that hung above hidden sections of the tiaraed city. When, at last, the revelation closed, it was as though one had watched Balkis herself draw the curtain after viewing the treasures of King Solomon.
A weak moon handed us over to the coastal lights all down the velvet-soft, milky-warm dark, with now and then some small, palm-crowned islet sprawling in the moon-glade.
Ancient Santos
We reached Santos, port of San Paulo, beneath the brassy glare of a West African sky; loafed up a Dutch-like river that twisted through too-green flats; and tied at a wharf where all the world’s steamers were unloading goods of luxury, mechanism, and apparel, or taking in coffee-bags that slid along furlongs of moving floors, and decanted ,themselves, like headless Gadarene swine, into their proper holds. Stacks of unripe bananas came downstream in barges and added to the arsenic-green deck-loads of cream-coloured steamers with black and scarlet funnels. The atmosphere was that of Southern India, but the men only wore straw hats, for sunstroke is not. In the old days, ships could lose their crews twice over at Santos from yellow fever; and the bankers and merchants of the port fled every evening to the hills a dozen miles inland, that they might live till next day. At the worst of things, when the Port lay immobilised, and someone up-country wanted a consignment badly enough to risk sending for it, it was the custom that he might snatch whatever first came to his hand in the silent, unmanned warehouses, and settle the bill with the executors. “Believe me, we didn’t waste time looking for private marks on packages.” Later, they drained the marshes, and fought out the fever, and lorries took the place of mules, and everything is now clean. But the ancient fierce city, with its light-coloured houses and choking coffee godowns, still seems to talk under its breath of the slave-barracoons and the sickness. People use the place now as a sort of Brighton, and come down for the day from San Paulo, fifty miles away, and race about the hard sand beaches in varnished cars.
The Attack on the Hillside
We headed out of it by a red road beside a two-track railway — chaired, not spiked — and ran across a country of planted bananas towards a range of cloud-capped mountains which wall in the back of Santos, as they do Rio, and, indeed, all the coast from Bahia down. One spur showed a pinkish chafe divided by a vertical black line. “That’s the new Power Station where we are going. The train will be hauled up the range by cable. So will you, but not in the train. ‘Pity those clouds are so low. They’ll spoil the view.” The car swerved into a side-road like the foothills of the Himalayas, though the climate was more than ever Madras. One smelt construction-works in the banks and cutting under the purple flowering scrub of the hills, and the raw drains alongside ran red and busy. We halted in a red basin at the foot of enormous downward-plunging pipes that came out of a flat-floored cloud-ceiling two thousand feet above. Tile and concrete bungalows were going up on all sides — proof that this would be some permanent headquarters; but there were also wood and tin buildings — one of them an unmistakable, and grateful, mess-shed — which suggested Canada, but did not account for cranes that leaned over a little, astonished river who was obviously carrying far more water than she had been made for.
The mix-up of countries and associations was sorted out at mess, as the talk distributed itself among men who had been hanging on to the face of the wooded cliff above them for the past two years. They had suffered most things — the treachery of the soil, which resembles Roquefort cheese; the forces of wet and dry; the failure of stuff to arrive, and when, at last, it did, the humouring and coaxing of it into place; the heart-breaking devilries of side-issues developed in an instant, and met by stick-and-string devices - possibly in the dark with mud up to the knees. (Those ripped and gashed rain-gullies looked as if they could b
e made in a very few minutes.) But now the ringed pipes had come all the way from Silesia, and had been got into position on their five-thousand ton concrete blocks that dive sixty feet into the dirt; the valves had been tested and the rebel waters let in; and the men had wiped the wet out of their eyes and were already looking for something fresh to curse. It was a soul-expanding lunch in the Engineer’s shack, and all the while the pipes said nothing but climbed up, parallel as old-fashioned twelve bores, into the flat clouds, while small red-dyed men tinkered beneath the five-foot bellies.
Decency v. the Dynamo
We moved over to the new Power House where some few gallons of the floods impounded above are being used. The terrific mile-length of water dives two thousand feet on to wheels armed at their tips with split buckets, set edge-on to six and a half inch jets. The whole contraption — it is called a Pelton Wheel — then goes round rather quickly. Two such wheels give life to a Hooded Devil — Abu Bijl’ — the Father of Lightnings — who must be approached bare-headed, or the mere intake of his breath will snatch your hat from off your head. He is known to his servants as a Dynamo (of many thousand horse-power) and he spins upon the largest bearings in the world.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 742