This time I had taken the branch line that runs a hundred and twenty miles eastward to Curityba, capital of the state of Paraná, with an elevation of nearly three thousand feet. It had all the earmarks of an up-to-date city,—electric-lights and clanging street-cars, automobiles and uniformed policemen, a large brewery to emphasize the German element, though other Europeans were more conspicuous. Shops and offices opened late, the dusting being barely commenced by nine, while schools, as everywhere in Brazil, began at ten-thirty, a splendid training in indolence for after life. It is often asserted that the predominance of the white race is some day assured in southern Brazil, that all the country below São Paulo bids fair to become a land of blonds. It will scarcely be a pure white race, however, though the mixture that is constantly going on makes it difficult to guess what the final amalgam will be. Curityba certainly had no color-line prejudices. Here a coal-black negro girl and a rosy-cheeked young Swedish woman lolled in a doorway gossiping and laughing together like bosom companions; a Pole with a negro wife showed off his mulatto children as if he were proud of their quaint mahogany complexions; tow-headed Polish brides on the arm of jet-black grooms stared proudly out upon the passer-by from the windows of photograph galleries. Attractive blond girls of twenty strolled the streets in bare legs and slippers as nonchalantly as the slovenly race among whom they had been thrown; women from eastern Europe, their heads covered with kerchiefs and driving little wagonettes filled with country produce, halted to pass the time of day with African street loafers; once I passed a girls’ school in which a teacher who was almost an albino had an arm thrown affectionately about another who would have been invisible against a blackboard.
Nearly half of Brazil consists of an immense plateau between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, falling abruptly into the Atlantic and gradually flattening away northwestward into the great Amazon basin. Though it is somewhat larger than the United States without its dependencies, Brazil has almost no mountains except an insignificant range along the coast, and almost no lakes. Many of its rivers rise very near the Atlantic, but instead of breaking through the low coast range they flow inland, those in the southern part of the country finally emptying into the Plata and those beyond the divide into the Amazon.