Two more miles at full gallop downhill took us to Petropolis, and I was soon in Mr. Miles’s comfortable hotel, and again amongst friends, with whom I had a merry English dinner. Then came two days of rain and cold and loneliness, in which I worked and walked and soaked and froze, and came to the conclusion Petropolis was an odious place, a bad imitation of a second-class German watering place, with its red roofs, little toy houses, and big palace in the midst, the river cut and straightened into a ditch, running down the middle of the principal street, with fanciful wooden bridges crossing it continually, and its banks planted with formal trees; though, when one came to think and thaw a bit, those very trees were in themselves a sight to see: umbrella trees with their large heart-shaped leaves and pink fluffy flowers, and araucarias larger than any in England. My friend Mr. Hinchcliff had written me minute directions how to find one of his favourite walks, where he promised I should see ideal tropical tangles. I paddled through the mud and rain to find, alas! nothing but charcoal and ashes remained; some German women added insult to injury by informing me it was verboten to go farther that way, so I returned to my packing in disgust.
I was glad to see the Gordons arrive, and to hear them say they had taken their and my places in the coach for Juiz de Fora the next morning. Mrs. Miles took charge of my tin box and sketching umbrella, which, I may as well say here, is a perfectly useless article in the tropics; when the real unclouded sun is shining one requires a more solid shade than that of a gingham umbrella, and it is far too heavy to drag about in a hot climate, so I was glad to be quit of it.
It rained all night, and was still raining when we packed ourselves into the coach at six on the morning of October 28, and four splendid mules, after their usual resistance, started suddenly at full gallop with the swinging, rattling old vehicle. A violent jerk brought us to the door of the other inn, and there our fourth place was filled up by a very important person in these pages, Antonio Marcus, commonly called the Baron of Morro la Gloria, who had been for forty years in the service of São João del Key Mining Company, to whose mines I was going. This old gentleman generally commanded “The Troop” that brought the gold up to Rio every two months at least; he was a great character, full of talk and pantomime, either grumbling or joking incessantly, or sometimes even doing both at once. Mary G. was his ideal of perfection and understood how to stroke him the right way, so we had a merry journey through the most splendid scenery.
Such scenery! High trees draped with bougainvillea to the very tops, bushes of the same nearer the ground reminding one of the great rhododendrons in our own shrubberies in May at home, and of much the same colour, though occasionally paler and pinker. There were orange-flowered cassia trees (whose leaves fold close together at night like the sensitive plant) and scarlet erythrinas looking like gems among the masses of rich green; exquisite peeps of the river, winding below its woody banks or rushing among great stones and rocks, came upon us, and were gone again with tantalising rapidity. My friends only laughed when I grumbled at the mules going so fast; now and then a peaked mountaintop pierced its way through the clouds for a moment and was lost again, then came a grey overhanging cliff sprinkled with bracket-like wild pines spiked with greenish flowers; the near banks were hidden by masses of large-leaved ferns and begonias and arums of many sorts, whose young fresh leaves and fronds were often tinted with crimson or copper colour.
The wild agaves too, were very odd: having had their poor centre shoots twisted out, the sap accumulated in the hollow, and a wine or spirit was made from it; the wretched wounded things, sending up dwarfish flowers and prickly shoots from their other joints, formed a strange disagreeable-looking bush, several of which made a most efficient hedge. Under each of these flowers a bulb formed, which when ripe dropped and rooted itself, thus replacing the parent whose life ended at its birth. Another curious plant here abounded, the marica, like a lovely blue iris, which flowers and shoots from the ends of the leaves of the old plant, the leaf being often more than a yard in length, and weighed down to the ground by the bunch at its end. When the flower is over, a bulb forms under it and produces roots; eventually the connecting leaf rots off, so that a perfect circle of young plants succeeds round the original old one. When in flower the appearance was very peculiar; a perfect rosette of bent green leaves and a circle of delicate blue flowers outside them.
The grand coach road we went over had, of course, encouraged emigrants to settle near it; we passed miles of cultivated ground, and the long rows of tidily trimmed coffee and corn gave as much pleasure to my companions as the forest tangles gave to me. We stopped to dine at Entre Rios; here we came to the Don Pedro railway, and the real traffic of our road began.
There was no other way of reaching the rich province of Minas, or of obtaining its minerals, coffee, sugar, or cotton; so from this point we passed a continual stream of mules or waggons till we got to Juiz de Fora and its most comfortable hotel. The last part of the way was lighted by swarms of fireflies. We were two hours after our time, owing to the state of the roads and the overloaded coach; all the baggage was packed on the top in one high pyramid, and the outside passengers were clinging to every ledge, the whole machine swaying from side to side in the most frightful way. The Baron’s head was continually out of the window, shouting directions to the driver and conductor, who of course knew him too well to take the slightest notice; they were both great characters in their way, two German brothers who had driven over that road ever since it was first made, nearly twenty years before.
Juiz de Fora is all one monument to the great and good man who founded it, Señor Mariano Lages; even the excellent hotel was designed and built by him, and a college for agriculture, library, museum, his own pretty villa and gardens, and the grand road itself were all made by him for the good of his country, as well as his own. He did not live long enough to see them prosper, but pined away after the death of his favourite daughter; and his college and other schemes will soon pine away too, for patriots are not common in his country. His garden was full of treasures, not only of plants, but of birds and animals; there was a fence of fifty yards at least, entirely hung with rare orchids tied together; every available tree branch was also decorated in the same way, and many of them were covered when we were there with lovely blossoms of white, lilac, and yellow, mostly very sweet scented. There was also a great variety of palms. I saw one huge candelabra cactus twenty feet in height, and the air was perfumed with orange and lemon blossoms. The village itself looked very comfortable, every cottage having its own luxuriant little garden and shady porch, under which the fair German women and children sat knitting with their hair plaited round their heads.
Everyone said the road to Minas was impassable from the late, heavy rains. We heard of mules being smothered in the mud, a woman killed in it, etc.; but the more I heard the more I determined to see my friends safely through if they were willing to be burdened with me; besides, people had said in Rio I should never really go, some had done their best to keep me from going, and one Scotchman had said I should not find to paint any in Minas!
The first loading of thirty-seven mules is not done in an hour; everything must be weighed and strengthened and hung with stout bands of cowhide, balanced well, or the mules will suffer. When once they are well loaded the things are numbered, and the operation on subsequent mornings becomes a much easier and quicker affair. All these arrangements were our Baron’s glory; he had to think and be responsible for every little item, and made as much fuss as he possibly could getting in and out of a score of terrible rages before midday. When the rain left off, his temper also cleared, and we finally started, forming a party that would not have shone in Hyde Park but was admirably adapted for riding through Brazil in the wet season.
First went the loaded mules