Mud-Walled Jerusalem, Mud-Walled Troy - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 61

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Mud-Walled Jerusalem, Mud-Walled Troy
Euclides da Cunha, sharply attired and armed with the fashionable theories of his day
about race, history, and landscape, was prepared to see an epic contest between Civiliza-
tion and Barbary. He spent six weeks in Bahia, from late August to October, much of it
well behind the front lines, and he was worried that he had arrived so late that he would
not see battle. He knew little beyond what his friend Sampaio had suggested to him of
the Sertão history and his own imaginary of the French Vendée uprising transposed to the
Bahian outback.
AsdaCunhamadehisqueasywayupthecoastwiththeSãoPaulomilitia,hemightnot
yet have known that another severe drought, what we now know as El Niño, was searing
the backlands, parching the lost corpses of the earlier Canudos expeditions into unburied
mummies. True to da Cunha's grisly description of a soldier “at his ease” splayed under
an umbazeiro tree,hisdesiccatedchargerwedgedforeternityintheviseofanearbystone
outcrop, long mane wafting on the slightest breeze, the Sertão had become a world of
spectralinhabitants.Localfolklorewasconfusingthedead,thesoontobedead,andthose
merelytransitingthroughinthelongyearsofthedrought.TheavianiconofCanudoswas
the urubú , the large, carrion-eating buzzard, a macabre trickster who in the popular songs
and poems ofthe time kept asking the government to send more troops, as he complained
that his palate had become so refined on his steady diet of lieutenants, captains, and gen-
erals. 1
Da Cunha was with the São Paulo battalions of the fourth expedition, part of an army
of eight thousand men who dug in very carefully, watched their supply lines, and concen-
trated on siege tactics and bombardments. 2 They positioned themselves in the early sum-
mer of 1897 and suffered significant losses through the ensuing ruses and ambushes of
the sertanejos . The descriptions of the military dynamics that unfolded in the environs of
Canudoshavetheflavorofdeepinterdigitation.The jagunços prowledaroundthe“legal”
Brazilian forces all the time. 3 Care had been taken this time around to include far fewer
Northeasterners than in previous expeditions. Local army men were more likely to see in
thefacesofthe sertanejos asorrowfulreflectionofthemselves,sincetheaveragefighting
man was from the same social stratum as the backland guerrilla and perhaps might have
had kin, belief, and history in common with him, and at the critical moment might de-
sist through some secret solidarity. Instead, gaúchos from southern Brazil and battalions
from the Amazon (including from Amazonas Commander Cândido Rondon) formed the