Brazil on the Move by John Dos Passos Read Free Book Online Page B

clouds to lift we drove round the old town that climbed up steep red ridges to a suburb of neat new houses for the skilled workmen and to the big concrete hangar which could house the new machine shops. The valleys below were full of tattered mist. The weather had settleddown to a cold drizzle. The hunks of wet ore shone as they thundered down the chutes into the orecars.
    Gil Whitehead had a selfeffacing manner and a slow drawl. Now and then his smoldering sort of humor would let out a sudden flash. He explained how production had increased and how, with the improvement of the railroad, production would increase still more. For Brazil the iron ore, which was going to steel mills in the United States and Canada, where they used it instead of scrap, would mean essential dollars in the world market. And when the new rockcrushing machinery came production would really spurt.
    “Meanwhile,” he said and pointed to a little brown man with a hammer trudging up the road in the rain, “we are using the only rockcrusher that, in these parts, never gets out of order.”
    He glanced out of the window. The rain had stopped but the clouds hung lower than ever. “Let’s go on up anyway.” He drove me up the broad zigzag road that vanished into a ceiling of cloud. “You’ve heard them speak of metaling a road,” he said. “Well this road is sixty per cent pure iron.”
    When we stepped out of the car the driven clouds snapped like wet toweling in our faces. He told me I was standing on top of two hundred and fifty million metric tons of hematite. The trouble was it was such a long way to Pittsburgh.
    He pointed to a quarrylike face of rock. “Simplest operation in the world. All we have to do is blast it down. Since we started in 1944 we’ve taken twentythree meters off the top of the peak.” My eyes followed the sweep of his hand. Under the glistening rock face men were at work among the piles of ore with little sledgehammers, making small ones out of big ones.
    Here and there they lit fires of sticks or broken boards for a little warmth. There were spindling white men and tall broadshouldered Negroes and small compact wiry men in allshades of coffee and copper and bronze. Some wore sandals and some were barefooted. Many had gunnysacks tied around them against the cold. A few had tattered cloaks or mud-caked ponchos. As they worked away their hammers rang on the dense ore.
    That was my first sight of the Brazilian working man in the mass, of the longsuffering happygolucky nomadic hordes who spread over the vast extent of the country moving from plantation to mine to lumbermill or construction camp, illnourished, ridden with illness, enduring cold and heat and hunger, tightening their belts, and singing their sambas and breeding children and somehow getting the work done.
The Brazilian West
    A few days later, five hundred miles to the west I saw the same people under happier conditions. This was at Ceres, a new agricultural settlement which the great roadbuilder Bernardo Sayão was opening up on the Rio das Almas in the western part of the State of Goiás.
    Flying west through the bumpy air over the knotted snarl of the mountains of Minas Gerais there were mighty few towns to look down on and almost no roads. You saw below you a lioncolored landscape of burnedover slopes with green strips of cultivated land spreading up the river bottoms. Rarely a tiny house shone white as sugar in the slanting morning light. The hills were a tangle of wandering mule and cattle tracks. Men and animals had walked there for centuries.
    This infinity of wandering tracks testified to the still nomadic life of the backlands. A man and his family would live in some cabin in the hills until the land they worked was worn out and then they would have to pull up stakes and walk, with their few possessions on their heads, for hundreds of miles to find some patch of virgin brush which they could burn over for a new plantation. They burned the larger trees