Backlands (6 page)

Our intent was to sketch out even in some pale sort of way and for the eyes of future historians the most expressive characteristics of the subraces that inhabit Brazil’s backlands today. This we do because of the unstable combination of factors that have come together with the vicissitudes of history and the deplorable mental state in which these people are found. This situation could well lead to their disappearance in the face of the growing demands of civilization as well as the strong material influence of the waves of immigration that have begun to invade our land.

The
jagunço
, bold gunman, the
tabareo
, ingenuous greenhorn, and the
caipira
, simple rustic, will soon be vanished types from extinct traditions.
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The first effects of various ethnic crossings were perhaps needed for the formation of the seeds of a great race. Absent this, there was a stagnant period, a balance impossible later on because of the swift advance of people entering in this century. The laggards of today will be completely gone tomorrow.

Civilization will advance across the backlands, driven by that implacable “motive force of history” that Gumplowicz, much wiser than Hobbes, foretold in a flash of genius: the inevitable crushing of the weak races by the strong.

With the Canudos campaign, therefore, we catch the undeniable feeling of the first attack in what could be a long engagement. Nor is this assertion diminished in any way by the fact that it has been put forth by those of us who inhabit this same soil, because undefined as to ethnicity, with no uniform national traditions, we live as parasites on this Atlantic shore of the civilizing principles drawn up in Europe and armed by German industry. Our part in this action is the singular role of unconscious mercenaries, connected also in a vague sort of way to those outstanding founders, in a land that is only partially known.
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Time, a coordinate of history, has separated us from them completely.

The campaign looked at here was a regression to the past.

And, in the most basic meaning of the word, it was a crime.

Let us therefore call it to account.

And as far as our strength of spirit will permit us, let us do justice to Taine’s admirable concept of the sincere narrator, who must face up to the story in the manner it deserves:

São Paulo, 1901
Euclides da Cunha

PART I

THE LAND

CHAPTER I

THE LAND

Along the southern coast of Brazil the central plateau descends in high, steep escarpments. It towers over the waves and moves back in ridges, leveling off from the peaks of the coastal ranges, extending from Rio Grande do Sul to Minas Gerais. As it continues along to northern regions, however, it gradually decreases in altitude. Descending eastward to the coast in a series of flatlands, it is stripped of its primitive grandeur, which is left considerably farther back in the interior.

So that if one follows it along toward the north, one will observe notable changes in the relief of the land: at first a continuous and dominant line of mountains, whose ridge stands out above the beaches protruding into the water. Farther on along the segment of seashore between Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo a disjointed arrangement of shoreline is formed by an irregular stretch of mountains, bristling with ridges and broken by inlets, opening up into bays, dividing into islands, and breaking off into naked reefs. It is something like the rubble left over from the eternal conflict between land and sea. Immediately following, as we cross the fifteenth parallel, there is a decrease in the ruggedness as the lines of the slopes become softened and rounded off, breaking into hills with less of an incline, in a panorama that grows wider and wider until we come to the full coastal band of Bahia, where one’s gaze, free of the mountain ramparts that cut it off up till then, limiting it, can take in a full view westward into the heart of the broad terrain that slowly emerges in distant waves of rolling uplands.

This geographical facies sums up the morphogeny of the continental massif.

A closer analysis can be made along a southern line by following the basin of the river São Francisco.

What can be seen actually is that we have here three quite dissimilar geological formations of indeterminate age. They supplant each other or intermingle in a discordant stratification, which makes for the exclusive predominance of some or a combination of all. This has imposed a variety of characteristics on the makeup of the land. What first appear are the mighty granite masses that begin in the south and curve into a huge amphitheater. This gives height to the wonderful panoramas that so enchant and deceive the inexpert eye of outsiders. From there the seashore proceeds in successive chains without spurs up to the edge of the shoreline of São Paulo. These form a broad supporting wall that contains the sedimentary formations of the interior. The land rises up lordly over the sea, dominating it from the summit of the cliffs. And whoever reaches the top, like someone coming out onto a majestic stage, will have to agree with any exaggeration in the description, from Sebastião da Rocha Pita’s Gongorisms to Henry Thomas Buckle’s wild extravagances, which make of this region a privileged place where nature has installed her finest atelier.
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The fact is that nowhere else has anything been assembled in such a threefold astronomical, topographical, and geological combination.

After crossing the mountains, under the blazing tropical meridian, one can see, stretching out to the west and the north, broad expanses of level land with a network of horizontal layers of clay-like sandstone interspersed with limestone outcroppings or rock wall fissured with lava. This also goes to explain the unequaled superabundance of the vast level areas. The land has an irresistible attraction for man, drawing him along by the very current of the rivers themselves, as from the Iguaçú to the Tietê, they trace out a quite original hydrographic network that reaches from the coast into the backlands. It is as though they had been born in the sea and had cannibalized its eternal energies for the benefit of the hidden opulent forests. They move along easily over those layers, in uniform lines, with no enfeebling meandering, and they give the main body of the terrain the form of broad, endless, undulating flatlands all the way to beyond the Paraná.

Nature is quite different to the east, however.

It is harshly sketched out like a map over rigid plates of gneissic outcroppings, and the slopes of the plateau drop down along the Mantiqueira ledge where the Paraíba flows, or it breaks up into spurs that ring the summits, with Mount Itataia in the center, and which bring the Alpine landscapes of the coast all the way to the heart of Minas Gerais. Upon entering there, however, one will notice that in spite of a jumble of ridges there is a gradual descent to the north. In like manner on the high plains of the states of São Paulo and Paraná all the main tributaries show a slightly perceptible inclination to flow in twisted beds as they get around the resistance of the mountains. The Rio Grande breaks out and tears the Canastra Range with the full strength of its current. If we follow along the meridian, opening up ahead will be the broad eroded valleys of the Rio das Velhas and the São Francisco. Leaving the uplands that extend from Barbacena to Ouro Prêto, behind, we will see primitive formations disappear, even in the larger spurs, as they come to lie beneath a complex series of metamorphic schists that have been infiltrated by rich veins in this legendary region of gold.

The structural change brings on more imposing natural scenes than those along the coast. The region is still Alpine. The character of the exposed rocks on the rims of the quartzite hills or the ridges where itacolumite plates cover the summits brings out the uneven lines of the massifs that extend from Ouro Branco to Sabará, the diamond region, continuing on northeastwardly in rolling tablelands that level off at the heights of the Espinhaço Range. The latter, despite Eschwege’s suggestive term, barely stand out among the ridges that dominate and define the landscape.
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Descending from there in an easterly surge, dropping in cataracts or leaping over barrier after barrier, are all the rivers that seek the lower levels of the plateau, from the Jequitinhonha to the Doce. They hug the Aimorés Mountains and become calmer waters to the west as they head into the catch basin of the São Francisco. In this valley, after passing the interesting calcareous formation of the Rio das Velhas to the south, there is a sprinkling of lakes, undermined by subterranean sinks and streams, where the caverns of the prehistoric man of Lund can be found. Here one comes across other transitions that stand out in the texture of the surface soil.

In fact, the layers we saw previously superimposed on granitic rocks have decayed in turn and are buried under more recent ones, composed of thick layers of sandstone.

A new geological horizon reappears with an original and interesting picture. As soon as one studies it, however, it takes on a notable orographic significance because the dominating mountain ranges to the south die there, entombed in a magnificent burial by powerful and more recent layers that encase them. The land, however, retains its elevation, extending out in broad plains or clumping up into denuded mountains that descend along steep slopes. These then flatten out into plains that level off to the horizon on the east, where distant mountain chains appear all the way to the coast.

What is evident here, then, is a tendency toward a general leveling.

As the interior highlands and the depression of Archean formations meet, the mountainous region of Minas Gerais, with no salient features, begins to take on the look of the northern tableland.

The Grão Mogol Range, which marks the borders of the state of Bahia, is the first specimen of those splendid uplands that take on the look of mountain ranges, a great bother for careless cartographers. Other neighboring ones, from the Cabral Range, closer by, to the Mata da Corda, which reaches all the way to Goiás, have these same contours. The furrows from erosion that cut through them are distinct geological marks. One after the other, on a vertical plane from their base, they reveal the same rocks that we have seen, in a lengthy route along their surface. Down below are the granitic products that have fallen to the bottom of the valleys, forming scattered hillocks. Halfway up the slopes, at a tilt, are the more recent schistose layers, and on top, over them, or reaching around their flanks in monoclinic valleys, are sheets of sandstone that stand out and offer climatic agents a wonderful plasticity as they take on the most capricious forms. Without any lines of mountain ridges, the main ranges are really nothing but high plains, extensive tablelands that suddenly end in an abrupt drop under the torrential pounding on the permeable and mobile terrain. Centuries ago strong, heavy showers fell there, at first causing uncertain lines of drainage, slowly deepening them and carving them into gullies that became canyons and valleys. They grew ever deeper until those elevated plains were bordered by cliffs and escarpments. Consequently, the resistance of the affected materials varied according to their makeup. In one place they stand stiffly over the level areas and are the last fragments of the buried boulders unveiled in pieces. A feeble attempt to recall their height has named them the Brazilian Himalayas, even though they have collapsed through continuous disintegration all through the ages. More capricious farther on, they rise up along the broken lines of colossal menhirs or in enormous circles to mimic in their disposition of great superimposed fissured blocks the collapsed walls of some coliseum in ruins or, perhaps, from the look of the escarpments hanging obliquely over the plains surrounding them, huge staves, the remains of the monstrous vault of the ancient range that has been pulled down. . . .

At several points they disappear, however.

Vast plains then stretch out. Going past these along the slopes that lift them and give them the look of hanging flatlands, after a few hundred yards one will encounter broad areas that widen out in a rounded way in all directions, like some sort of prolongation of the sea. This is the most beautiful landscape of the
campos gerais
, going off far and wide in a wave of hills—great platforms where the rugged cow herders roam. . . .
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