Brazil on the Move Read Online Free Page B

standing in the empty office looking at a map of the valley tacked up on the wall with glassheaded pins in various colors indicating the different services.
    “To produce an island of public health in each place we work,” said Dr. Penido, “first we have to build privies for the people. You see we start from zero in this country. Then we give them pure water.”
    Monty Montanare pricked up his ears at that. Monty was a lanky young American engineer with a long North Italian nose, a graduate of the Seabees in the Aleutians and on Guam. Building water systems was his business. “Don’t touch the water in Vitória” he admonished me gruffly. “Once we get in the valley you can drink all you want.”
    Monty seemed to be executive director of the expedition. After a glance at his wrist watch he announced it was time to eat; he’d ordered the linecar for three. After a tremendous Brazilian luncheon, which started with salad and coldcuts, and proceeded through steak and rice and chicken and beans to culminate in roast pork smothered in fried eggs, Monty shepherded us into two automobiles and we were driven across the iron bridge to the railroad station on the mainland.
    The linecar of course hadn’t arrived yet, though it was after three, so we roamed around looking at the old wood-burning locomotives with their funnelshaped stacks, like the locomotives in prints by Currier and Ives, that were shunting the cars in the freightyard, and at the great piles of wood along the tracks. I wondered how many manhours of work it took to cut all that wood up in the hills and to bring it down by oxcart or on the backs of burros or of men to the railroad.
    At a church on the shore a ringing of bells had started. The steamboats at the docks across the harbor were blowing their whistles. Down the middle of the stream in the sparklingsunlight came a long string of launches and rowboats decorated with green and yellow streamers. From the shore came cheers and the popping of rockets.
Foguetes
are part of the Portuguese heritage. It was from China, probably, the early navigators brought home a taste for fireworks. Somewhere a brass band was playing. It was the procession of some saint being carried by water from one shrine to another. Before we had time to find out the name of the saint the line-car had backed in beside the platform.
    It was a big green stationwagon sort of vehicle mounted on railroad trucks and driven by a diesel engine. We had to hurry to get off in order to meet the passenger train coming down the singletrack line at the proper siding. First we circled the conical mountain on the track the oretrains used. We stopped over the oredocks. Walter Runge, another American, who worked for the company that was repairing the line, stepped out and picked up a piece of heavy blue and red rock.
    “Sixtyeight per cent,” he said. “Just about the richest iron ore in the world. The railroad’s still sketchy. It comes a long way, and it takes a long time, but it gets here. These ore-docks could have been better designed but the ships somehow get loaded. There were times when we wondered if they ever would.”
    At the edge of the yards the bucktoothed mulatto driver had to stop the car suddenly to send his black assistant running back to the station to get his orders. The railroad was operated on the old English block system; only one piece of equipment allowed at a time in a block. At last the boy arrived panting with a green slip in his hand and we went off rattling and lurching over the newlaid rails, past bamboo fences and small thatched huts with mud floors and yards planted with scrawny papayas where a few skinny chickens pecked about and dirty children black and brown and grayishwhite, naked or dressed in rags that barely covered them, rolled and played in the thick dust.
    One set of houses, freshly built for railroad workers, stood out along the track neat and white with scrubbed tiled floors.
    Immediately the town fell away and