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turned his head to look at us. Holding onto his hand was a little towhaired boy three or four years old who was dressed in short pants and a little striped sweater, a sort of grimy replica of what a little boy of his age would be wearing in some distant northern home. Looking after them I was remembering what a geographer friend had told me in Rio: “Brazil is the greatest experiment in the settling of European man in the tropics, but that doesn’t mean it is always successful.”
Islands of Public Health
    Above Aimorés next day the valley was narrower and dustier and drier. Fires burned more fiercely in the hills. A streaky ceiling of smoke and dust hung over the river. On steep eroding pastures, which were a network of dry cowpaths, big zebucattle grazed in herds. Gangs were working on the line. Occasionally we had to stop while the section gang ahead lowered a new length of track into place. The settlements had a raw backwoods look.
    At the little stations where the linecar had to wait for the oretrains coming down, there was a great deal going on. There were ferries on the river, flatboats, that traveled on a cable, ingeniously propelled by the force of the current. A shriek of mechanical saws came from the sawmills. Carts were bringing in cut firewood for the railroad or bags of charcoal to be shipped to the charcoalburning iron furnaces up the valley. At every siding the oxteams were churning the dust as they dragged the trunks of peroba trees up from the water’s edge. At a place called Conselheiro Pena three men were maneuvering the great logs up onto a platform with a team of eleven yokes of zebu oxen, and rolling them onto flatcars. Their only tool was the slender poles they used to handle the oxen.
    At a place called Timiritinga, which, so the station master proudly explained, had just changed its name from Tarumirím, there was a long wait for the daily passenger train down from Valadares. Monty and I roamed through the ankledeep dust between the two rows of forlorn low houses of plastered adobe, looking at the pigs and the scattered garbage and the open square of sunscorched weeds that was laid out for the
praça
to be.
    “You see,” Monty was saying dreamily, “this work can be expanded indefinitely. We are just in the shape now where we know how to do things … We’ve had five years to make our mistakes and to work up a system. We’ve got the blueprint and all we need to do now is expand it. At first it was all by guess and by God as they used to say in the Navy … When my contract expired I went back home and intended to stay but I got to thinking that this work was about as important as a man could find to do and I said to my wife could she stick it … with the baby and everything … and she said sheguessed she could … so back we came. And now when we’re all rearing to go down here and Brazilian organizations are really interested in putting up money for more public health work, it looks as if the American end was petering out, as if there wasn’t much interest in Washington. The folks back home are forgetting about Brazil.”
    We went into a little bar to get one of the tiny cups of strong black coffee that are sprinkled through every Brazilian day. An incredibly tattered young white woman with her hair in a ratsnest and her breasts blobbing out of her grimy dress brought us our coffee. There was a tobaccocolored man with a felt hat and a mustache sitting at the only other table. Right away he told us that Timiritinga had not only changed its name but it had just this day been created a city. Now there would be money to appropriate for public health.
    We heard the siren blow from the linecar. That meant that the driver had his orders to proceed. Swallowing the scalding thimbleful of coffee we hurried over to the station. Our friend with the mustache followed us all the way to the linecar explaining how much the people of the new founded city of Timiritinga wanted Sespe to help them