Backlands by Euclides da Cunha Page B

giving the place the look of an old, abandoned garden. On the edge a tall quixabeira tree towers over the frail vegetation. 13
    The setting sun has cast the broad shadow of the foliage across the ground, and under its protection, arms akimbo, his face turned to the sky, a soldier is resting.
    He has been resting for . . . three months.
    He died during the attack of July 18. The butt of his Mannlicher rifle had been cracked, his cartridge belt and cap tossed to one side, and his uniform was in tatters. All this pointed to the fact that he had died in hand-to-hand combat against a powerful adversary. He had fallen, most certainly, from a blow to his forehead, which had left a black scar. And when the other dead had been buried, days later, he had not been noticed. He did not share, therefore, the common grave, less than three feet deep, into which, together in one last formation, his comrades fallen in battle had been buried. The fate that had taken him away from his abandoned home had given him one last concession: It had spared him the gloomy closeness of the repugnant ditch. It had left him lying there for three months, arms outspread and face to the sky with its burning suns and its pale moons, its gleaming stars. . . .
    And he was intact. He had only withered. He was mummified, his facial features preserved in such a way as to suggest a weary warrior getting his strength back with a bit of sleep in the shade of that beneficent tree. No worm, that most common of tragic analysts, had damaged his tissues. He was being returned to life’s whirl without any repugnant decomposition, imperceptibly flushed out. He was a sort of apparatus that was showing in an absolute but suggestive way the extreme dryness of the air.
    The horses that had been killed on that day had the appearance of stuffed museum specimens: their necks a bit longer and thinner, their legs desiccated, and their skeletons showing, shriveled and hard.
    At the entrance to the Canudos encampment one of them stood out impressively from the rest. It had been the mount of a brave man, Second Lieutenant Wanderley, and it had fallen along with its rider. As it slid down the steep incline, badly wounded and struggling, it came to a stop and remained there, facing frontward halfway down the slope, caught between two boulders. It was almost upright, its feet firm on a stone outcropping. . . . And there it stood, transformed into some fantastic animal, upright on the hillside, almost in a halted leap in the last attack of a paralyzed charge, with every appearance of life, especially when the harsh blasts of the northeasterly wind caused its long and wavy mane to flutter. . . .
    When those gusts, coming on suddenly, are joined by the columns of updraft in wild whirlwinds that are like miniature cyclones, the dehydration of that stark environment can be felt to an even greater degree. Every particle of sand hanging over the hard, furrowed soil irradiated out in every direction, transformed into a hot glow of light. This was the quiet combustion of the earth.
    Along with that, during the long periods of calm some bizarre optical phenomena occur.
    From the top of Mount Favela the sun pierces straight down, and nature is still in the heavy atmosphere. As we look out over the open, distant plains the ground is invisible.
    Our fascinated look is disturbed by an imbalance in the unequally worn layers as we seem to be peering into the distance through a huge, intangible prism, and we are unable to catch sight of the base of the mountains, as though they were suspended there. Then, to the north of Canabrava, in an enormous expansion of quivering plains, we see sparkling undulations, a strange throbbing of distant waves, the magical illusion of a gulf of the sea, broad and upon which, with the colors of the rainbow, the scattered light falls, refracts, and leaps back in blinding sparkles. . . .

IV
Droughts
    The backland of Canudos stands as an index to all the backlands of the North.