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yard and the foot.
    One morning in 1893, as they entered Natuba, the Counselor and the pilgrims heard a sound like angry wasps buzzing: it was coming from the main square, where the men and women of the town had congregated to read, or to hear the town crier read, the decrees that had just been posted. They were going to collect taxes from them, the Republic wanted to collect taxes from them. And what were taxes? many townspeople asked. They’re like tithes, others explained to them. Just as, before, if an inhabitant’s hens had fifty chicks he was obliged to give five to the mission and one bushel of grain out of each ten that he harvested, the edicts decreed that a person was to give to the Republic part of everything inherited or produced. People had to go to the town hall of their community—all municipalities were now autonomous—and declare what they owned and what they earned in order to find out how much they would have to pay. The tax collectors would seize and turn over to the Republic everything that had been hidden or declared at less than its real value.
    Animal instinct, common sense, and centuries of experience made the townspeople realize immediately that this would perhaps be worse than the drought, that the tax collectors would be greedier than the vultures and the bandits. Perplexed, frightened, enraged, they nudged each other and communicated to each other their feelings of apprehension and wrath, in voices that mingled and blended into one, producing that belligerent music that was rising heavenward from Natuba as the Counselor and his shabby followers entered the town by way of the road from Cipó. People surrounded the man in the dark purple habit, blocking his way to the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição (repaired and painted by him several times in the last few decades), toward which he had been heading with his usual great long strides, in order to tell him the news. Looking past them with a grave expression on his face, he scarcely seemed to have heard them.
    And yet, only seconds later, just time enough for a sort of inner explosion to set his eyes afire, he began to walk, to run through the crowd that stepped aside to let him through, toward the billboards where the decrees had been posted. He reached them and without even bothering to read them tore them down, his face distorted by an indignation that seemed to sum up that of all of them. Then he asked, in a vibrant voice, that these iniquities in writing be burned. And when, before the eyes of the dumfounded municipal councillors, the people did so, and moreover began to celebrate, setting off fireworks as on a feast day, and the fire reduced to smoke the decrees and the fear that they had aroused, the Counselor, before going to pray at the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, announced to the people of that remote corner of the world the grave tidings: the Antichrist was abroad in the world; his name was Republic.

    “Whistles, that’s right, Senhor Commissioner,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira repeats, surprised once again at what he has experienced and, no doubt, remembered and recounted many times. “They sounded very loud in the night—or rather, in the early dawn.”
    The field hospital is a wooden shack with a palm-frond roof, hastily thrown together to house the wounded soldiers. It is on the outskirts of Juazeiro, whose streets parallel to the broad São Francisco River lined with houses that are either whitewashed or painted in various colors can be seen between the partitions, beneath the dusty tops of the trees that have given the city its name.
    “It took us only twelve days from here to Uauá, which is practically at the gates of Canudos—quite a feat,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira says. “My men were dead-tired, so I decided to camp there. And in just a few hours the whistles woke us up.”
    There are sixteen wounded, lying in hammocks lined up in two rows facing each other: crude bandages, bloodstained heads, arms,