One day I was puzzled at hearing him continually calling “Pedro,” in a coaxing tone of voice; at last up trotted a tapir, like a tall pig with a cover to its nose; he got something he liked out of the director’s pocket and a good scratch from the director’s stick, and followed us as long as he dared. I found some difficulty about food for luncheon; if I put meat into a tin box it went bad, but if I took it in paper the ants ate it up for me, even eggs they contrived to get into, and at last I came to the conclusion that oranges and bread were the best provisions to take.
One day I asked the director if I could get a cup of coffee at the little inn near the gate. “Gott bewahr!” was his answer; he would not let his daughters even walk in the road alone among such people. Poor girls, they must have had a dull life of it; they were so thoroughly German and isolated, they had hardly ever been even into Rio. We had some pleasant scrambles together in the woods and up the hills; for they were nice simple girls, full of information about the plants and other natural curiosities of the neighbourhood. They collected marvellous caterpillars—some hairy, some with the most delicate moss or feather-like horns on their heads and tails—and fed them till they turned into the gorgeous butterflies or moths, which abound in these gardens.
At Rio I made my first acquaintance with a very common inhabitant of the tropics, a large caterpillar, who built himself first a sort of crinoline of sticks and then covered it with a thick web; this dwelling he carried about with him as a snail does his shell, spinning an outwork of web round a twig of his pet tree, by which his house hung, leaving him free to put out three joints of his head and neck, and to eat up all the leaves and flowers within his reach; when the branches were bare he spun a bit more web up to a higher twig, bit through the old one, jerked his whole establishment upstairs, and then commenced eating again. He had a kind of elastic portico to his house that closed over his head at the slightest noise, his house shutting up close to it like a telescope; and then when all was quiet again, out came his head, down dropped the building, and the gourmand again set himself to the task of continual eating. He ate on for some months incessantly, using his claws to push and pull dainty bits down to him, and shifting his moorings in a most marvellous way. At last the sleep of the chrysalis overtook him, and he finally became a very dowdy moth.
Some other caterpillars cover themselves in a much less artistic way with bits of their favourite leaves strung on a frame most clumsily, as a child strings paper to the tail of its kite. These creatures are very quick in their movements; I have often seen them cross the room and drag themselves up my dress and on to my knee in search of a bunch of rose branches I laid there to tempt them—in a wonderfully short space of time.
The lady in whose garden I first found these caterpillars lived on the hill of Santa Teresa and, instead of blinds, had her windows shaded with creeping plants trained across and across them. Through the spaces left one could see the bay of Rio with its endless islands, strange Sugarloaf mountain, and many of the same odd form seeming to mimic it in the distance. The quivering haze and blueness of the whole scene was indescribably lovely, and the little terrace below was crowded with bright flowers. Daturas, bananas, cypress, and palm trees gave form to the foreground, whilst the orange Bignonia venusta— the orange trumpet vine, the blue petraea, bougainvillea, and rhynchospermum climbed over both trees and balustrades in great masses, the latter helping the gardenias, carnations, and jasmines to scent the air almost too deliciously. It was a small paradise, and though my friend grumbled at the nine long years of bad health and discomfort she had spent there, she will miss all this abundant beauty when she returns to foggy old England.
I spent some days in walking and sketching on the hills behind the city; its aqueduct road was a great help to this enjoyment, being cut through the real forest about a thousand feet above the town and sea. A diligence took one halfway up to it every morning; the road itself and the grand aqueduct by its side were made two hundred years ago by the Jesuits, and the forest trees near it have never been touched, in order to help the supply of water that is collected there in a great reservoir. In this neighbourhood I saw many curious sights. One day six monkeys with long tails and grey whiskers were chattering in one tree and allowed me to come up close underneath and watch their games through my opera glass; the branches they were on were quite as well worth studying as themselves, loaded as they were with creeping plants and grown over with wild bromeliads, orchids, and ferns; these bromeliads had often the most gorgeous scarlet or crimson spikes of flowers. The cecropia, or trumpet tree, was always the most conspicuous one in the forest, with its huge white-lined horse chestnut–shaped leaves, young pink shoots, and hollow stems, in which a lazy kind of ant easily found a ready-made house of many storeys. The most awkward of all animals, the sloth, also spent his dull life on the branches, slowly eating up the young shoots and hugging them with his hooked feet, preferring to hang and sleep head downwards. Some of the acacia trees grow in tufts on tall slender stems and seem to mimic the tree ferns with their long feathery fronds, whose stems were often twenty to thirty feet high. Mahogany, rosewood, and many less-known timber trees might be studied there; the knobby bombax, grey as the lovely butterfly that haunted them, were planted at the edge of the road in many places, and under them one got a really solid shade from the sun.
It was the favourite home of many gorgeous butterflies, and they came so fast and so cleverly that it was no easy task for a collecting maniac to make up his mind which to try to catch and which to leave; before the treasure was secured, more came and tempted him to drop the half-caught beauties for other, perhaps rarer, ones that he would probably miss.
One happy mortal lived up in this neighbourhood and collected calmly, with his whole heart and time in the work, thereby gaining a good livelihood; he had drawers full of the different specimens, which were worth a journey to see: alas! when I went he had just sold the whole collection to the Imperial Princess, so I kept my money, as well as a most fascinating occupation for odd hours, which would have gone if I had, as I intended, done my collecting by deputy. He lived on a lovely perch just under the Corcovado Crag, with a glorious view of the city and bay beneath, and a rare foreground of palms and cacti, one huge mamen tree in front of all, its thick umbrella of leaves supported by great pear-shaped fruit growing close to the stem. The common snail of Brazil introduced itself to me on that road; it was as large as a French roll, and its movements were very dignified. It had a considerable appetite for green leaves (as I afterwards found after keeping one as a pet in a footpan for a month), and its eggs were nearly as large as a pigeon’s; the first I met was taking a walk on the old aqueduct amongst the begonia and fern leaves, and moved on at least fifty yards whilst I made a two hours’ sketch.
Of course (again), like all other visitors to Rio, I walked up to the top of the Corcovado and looked down on the clouds and peeps of blue sea and mountains seen occasionally through them, and on the splendid yellow and white amaryllis clinging to the inaccessible crannies of the rock; the whole way was a series of wonders and endless beauties.
On that expedition I met, for the first time, Mr. Gordon and his daughter, who asked me to come and see them in Minas Gerais, to which they were returning in about three weeks. I liked their looks and manner of asking me, and it seemed a grand opportunity of seeing something of the country, so I said I would come for a fortnight, at which they laughed, and with reason, for I stayed eight months!
On October 25, I sent down my three portmanteaux in a return cart drawn by eight oxen, and followed myself the next day, in pouring rain, to Rio. After some necessary shopping and other business, I crossed the bay and its lovely islands for Mawa, where a train was waiting to take us over the marsh to the foot of the Petropolis hills; in this same marsh were many fine plants, but the most conspicuous was the real Egyptian papyrus, growing with even greater vigour than it does at the source of the Cyane, near Syracuse. Tall white lilies and scarlet erythrinas also made me long to cry stop as we passed.
At last we reached a more healthy-looking region, and stopped at Raiz da Serra, where I was put into a carriage with three Brazilians and conveyed up the ten miles of zigzag road, dragged by four mules, who kept up a continual trot, the rise of three thousand feet being well graduated. The mules were changed at a station halfway