Since the land was almost all disposed of, the company had turned to producing and marketing agricultural products. Of course, our guide admitted, they had their difficulties. The roads were bad. The railroad service couldn’t be worse. The state and national governments were far away. He brought his fist down on the table and burst out with the oft repeated adage: “Brazil grows at night when the politicians sleep … Eeneetiative!” He smiled broadly. “We do it ourselves.”
Opposite the hotel we found them laying the foundations for the cathedral of Maringá. Inside a little shed we saw the maquette. It was to be the tallest cathedral in South America, a concrete cone three hundred and seventytwo feet high, set on twelve pointed gables, one for each of the twelve apostles. It would cost thirty million cruzeiros. Already they had raised five million. Their bishop was a young man, very enterprising, our guide pointed out. He gave us a colossal wink. The bishop was promising the coffee planters five years without a frost if they put up the funds.
Old Maringá
We continued our tour. He drove us out into the outskirts to show us a row of ramshackle stores and a bar or two along a rutted road. They were frame buildings with clapboard false fronts all deeply coated with the cloying red dust.
“Like western cinema, not?” He made bang bang noises with appropriate gestures. We agreed it did look like the set for a Western. “This is old Maringá,” he said in a tone of disgust, “builded ten years o’clock.” He gave a snort. “Soon we tear down.”
Inside the city the dust had been bad enough but in the outskirts you strangled in it. Our handkerchiefs were stained red from trying to wipe it off our sweaty faces. Our guide noticed that we were choking. We must not worry about the dust he told us consolingly. They had a doctor there, a very good doctor, who had discovered that the dust of Maringá was rich in terramycin. Maybe we had some infection; the dust of Maringá would cure it.
V
THROUGH BRAZIL’S BACK DOOR
From the Snowpeaks into Amazonas
In the summer of 1962 my wife and daughter and I took the jet flight from New York which landed us, long before we had become accustomed to the thought of arriving there, in Lima. After a couple of weeks amid the mystifications of Peruvian politics and the marvels of ancient textiles and sculptured ceramics in the Lima museums and the grandeur of the Stone Age architecture of the Andes, we are heading for Brazil.
Our plane left the old Faucett airport before dawn, circled over the dim city and the shrouded ocean and turned sharply into the daybreak. Now we are boring into the glare of the risen sun as we climb over the cocoacolored mountains that thrust up like islands through the cottony overcast which hangs eternally over the seaboard desert of the Pacific slope. No more vegetation on them than on the face of the moon. The first waters we see below us, thin trickles taking a northward course down the far slopes of the coastal cordillera, are already bound for the Amazon.
Except for some high thin cirrus the air is clear beyond the coastal range. The further mountains rear rock faces of up-ended strata, black organshapes in the shadow. Beyond, crystal sharp against a green horizon, tower the snowpeaks.
Between the heaving slopes of the second and third ranges the Urubamba River, tumbling northward in glassclear rapids out of the southern confines of Peru, drains the valleys and canyons which were the seat of the Andean civilizations. There we had walked panting among the earthquake-battered remnants of Spanish Cuzco which totter precariously on the unshakable foundations fitted together stone by stone by the ancient Indian builders. We had seen the huge citadel of Sacsahuamán squatting on the mountain above Cuzco and, in the valley beyond, Ollantaytambo’s pyramid of ruins guarding its circus of green hills terraced in prehistoric days to the very summit. A few miles downstream we had scrambled around the stony masses of Machu Picchu, perched two thousand feet above the brawling river on a toothed height as steep as the mountains the Chinese painters imagined for their landscapes.
Two hundred miles north of Machu Picchu the Urubamba joins the Tambo to form the Ucayali which becomes navigable for river boats at Pucallpa. Already you can reach Pucallpa by truck or jeep or with luck by car from Lima. The Peruvians are pushing through a paved road from the coast to Pucallpa and its Brazilian extension is already groping its way through the wilderness of the new state of Acre to reach Pôrto Velho on the Madeira River six hundred miles to the east.
From Pucallpa barges and small river boats take five or six days to reach Iquitos. Iquitos, still in Peru, twentythree hundred miles from the Atlantic, is head of navigation for oceangoing steamers on the Amazon. From the junction of the Ucayali with Rio Marañón some fifty miles from Iquitos the Peruvians call the great river the Amazon, but the Brazilians insist that it is the Rio Solimoes until, more than a thousand miles downstream, it joins the Rio Negro below Manaus.
A Rainforest Economy
The only practical way of reaching Iquitos is by air. The head of ocean navigation of the Amazon is still an island inaccessible by road. After flitting between the jagged snowteeth of the highest Andes the plane starts to toboggan downward through the massed cumulus clouds that steam up incessantly from the rainy eastern slopes.
After rumbling for a long time amid a churn of mist we begin to see trees through rents in the clouds. The wooded slopes below us heave in ridges cut by swift straight streams occasionally barred by the white spume of rapids. As the hills subside the rivers seem for a while to strangle in the rainforest.
Now we are flying low over what seems a mossy plain, only the tendrils of the moss are gigantic trees. The rivers have broken through below us, muddy and turgid now, and flow in restless curves from oxbow to oxbow. As far as you can see in every direction the forest is cut by the meanderings and the arabesques of rampaging rivers.
We are looking down on an unending struggle between the weight of the hurrying water and the fibrous density of the treepacked land. This titanic wrestling match has left the jungle scarred by the scratches of old riverbeds as if by the claws of some vast jaguar. The rivers slither like great snakes between the tottering trees, leaving their castoff courses to one side or the other in lagoons and sickleshaped backwaters. In some places the subsiding waters have left reedy ponds or palegreen savannas. Every shape you see results from the war between land and water. There’s still not a sign of human occupation. Not a canoe, not a hut, not a smoke.
We are headed east flying low above the olivegreen coils of the Rio Marañon when, along the broadly curving silty beaches, a different green appears which could be rice that human hands have sown. A log half pulled up on a beach might be a dugout. A pile of dry palm leaves might be a thatched hut. There is smoke from brush fires.
Now there is an unmistakable canoe, the flash of the paddle of a man paddling in the bow. A long thatched object moving upstream must be a motorboat. There’s a road below with toy trucks, tin roofs, tiled roofs under palms, a beach hatched with rows of dugouts, a wide stretch of river full of canoes and launches; and the plane is spiraling down into the airfield.
Iquitos turns out to be two towns. There’s the outpost Peruvian city: a gridiron of streets of stone and rubble houses, stores, banks, a motion picture theater, markets, a hotel on a bluff overlooking the river run by the Peruvian Government to encourage tourists; and then there’s the Amazonian river town. This they call the port of Belén.