for charcoal.The first few years the scorched forest loam gave them good crops, but the winds blew it off and the rains washed it away and the crops ate it up and after a while they had to move on again.
The copilot, a dapper young man from Rio who spoke very good English, came back into the cabin to explain that the state of Minas was one of the oldest settled sections of Brazil, a little stagnant now, but—he spread out his arms—with an immense future. Far to the north on the indigosmudged horizon, he pointed out the clouds that hid Caué, the iron mountain. I told him I had just come from there. “Before it was gold,” he shouted excitedly, putting his lips against my ear. “Now it is iron … The iron deposits stretch across the state of Minas in the shape of a gigantic dollar sign.”
He went back to his place when the plane began to lose altitude over Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. Spiraling down for a landing we had glimpses of the regular avenues lined with trees and the tall white buildings of the city which was started fifty years ago on a plan based on L’Enfant’s plan for Washington.
Nearer the airfield shone the angular constructions of glass and concrete designed by Niemeyer and some other pupils of Le Corbusier’s for a suburban development round the lake of Pampulha. Among these buildings at Pampulha are some of Niemeyer’s most original and imaginative works. It is odd that a professing Communist should have designed such a pretty church. Unfortunately the project, suffering the fate of so many projects in this land of magniloquent blueprints, received a setback from a most unexpected cause. The lake was discovered to be full of snails infested by the wicked little schistosoma. Until some way is found of killing the parasite or the snail, the development of Pampulha was said to be at a standstill.
After leaving Belo Horizonte we flew west for hours and hours. The few tiny settlements were out of sight of the airfields, which become more and more rudimentary as we advanced into the rolling country, interspersed by great plains, of the then new state of Goiás. After seven hours flight from Rio we were in Goiânia. This new capital of a new state was only fifteen years old. It consisted of an avenue of feathery trees to the governor’s palace, some public buildings and a few cross streets of rough stuccoed houses, a new hotel already falling to pieces, and some very nicely printed booklets of plans for the future.
The hotel was a collector’s item. This was a time in South America when the more cheerful travelers collected bad hotels as a sort of hobby. I kept thinking of Dr. Penido’s reflections about how much education it took to keep a toilet clean. One of the oddities of this particular bathroom was that the doorknob would come off in the hand of the unhappy guest, thereby trapping him in the malodorous precinct. Banging on the door brought no response. The procedure was to escape by climbing over the transom that led into the adjoining kitchen. Busy clouds of flies buzzed back and forth over that transom.
Though pigs still rooted in the muddy streets, Goiánia already boasted a school of music and an academy of letters. I sat in the hotel’s tiny bar, drinking excellent cold beer with a couple of congenial members of the Goiánia academy, while waiting for a suitable hour to call on the governor, who had hospitably offered to send me out to the federal agricultural colony the next day on one of his planes. They had brought along some magnificent booklets describing the plans for the new federal capital of Brazil which was to be established on a high plateau about a hundred miles to the north, a plateau that boasted, they told me, a delicious temperate climate, where wheat grows in abundance and where all the plants andanimals of the temperate zone, including European man, would flourish.
The development of Brazil has been blocked for three hundred years by the colonial
The copilot, a dapper young man from Rio who spoke very good English, came back into the cabin to explain that the state of Minas was one of the oldest settled sections of Brazil, a little stagnant now, but—he spread out his arms—with an immense future. Far to the north on the indigosmudged horizon, he pointed out the clouds that hid Caué, the iron mountain. I told him I had just come from there. “Before it was gold,” he shouted excitedly, putting his lips against my ear. “Now it is iron … The iron deposits stretch across the state of Minas in the shape of a gigantic dollar sign.”
He went back to his place when the plane began to lose altitude over Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. Spiraling down for a landing we had glimpses of the regular avenues lined with trees and the tall white buildings of the city which was started fifty years ago on a plan based on L’Enfant’s plan for Washington.
Nearer the airfield shone the angular constructions of glass and concrete designed by Niemeyer and some other pupils of Le Corbusier’s for a suburban development round the lake of Pampulha. Among these buildings at Pampulha are some of Niemeyer’s most original and imaginative works. It is odd that a professing Communist should have designed such a pretty church. Unfortunately the project, suffering the fate of so many projects in this land of magniloquent blueprints, received a setback from a most unexpected cause. The lake was discovered to be full of snails infested by the wicked little schistosoma. Until some way is found of killing the parasite or the snail, the development of Pampulha was said to be at a standstill.
After leaving Belo Horizonte we flew west for hours and hours. The few tiny settlements were out of sight of the airfields, which become more and more rudimentary as we advanced into the rolling country, interspersed by great plains, of the then new state of Goiás. After seven hours flight from Rio we were in Goiânia. This new capital of a new state was only fifteen years old. It consisted of an avenue of feathery trees to the governor’s palace, some public buildings and a few cross streets of rough stuccoed houses, a new hotel already falling to pieces, and some very nicely printed booklets of plans for the future.
The hotel was a collector’s item. This was a time in South America when the more cheerful travelers collected bad hotels as a sort of hobby. I kept thinking of Dr. Penido’s reflections about how much education it took to keep a toilet clean. One of the oddities of this particular bathroom was that the doorknob would come off in the hand of the unhappy guest, thereby trapping him in the malodorous precinct. Banging on the door brought no response. The procedure was to escape by climbing over the transom that led into the adjoining kitchen. Busy clouds of flies buzzed back and forth over that transom.
Though pigs still rooted in the muddy streets, Goiánia already boasted a school of music and an academy of letters. I sat in the hotel’s tiny bar, drinking excellent cold beer with a couple of congenial members of the Goiánia academy, while waiting for a suitable hour to call on the governor, who had hospitably offered to send me out to the federal agricultural colony the next day on one of his planes. They had brought along some magnificent booklets describing the plans for the new federal capital of Brazil which was to be established on a high plateau about a hundred miles to the north, a plateau that boasted, they told me, a delicious temperate climate, where wheat grows in abundance and where all the plants andanimals of the temperate zone, including European man, would flourish.
The development of Brazil has been blocked for three hundred years by the colonial
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