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By Root 2160 0

hearts. He told them things that they could understand, truths that they could believe in. That this calamity was no doubt the first forewarning of the arrival of the Antichrist and the devastation that would precede the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment. That if they wanted to save their souls they should ready themselves for the battles that would be waged when the demons who obeyed the Antichrist—who would be the Dog himself appearing on earth to recruit proselytes—spread out across the backlands like wildfire. Like the cowhands, the peons, the freedmen, and the slaves, the cangaceiros pondered his words. And a number of them—Pajeú with the slashed face, the enormous brute Pedrão, and even the most bloodthirsty one of all, Satan João—repented of their evil deeds, were converted to good, and followed him.

And as had happened with the brigands, he gained the respect of the rattlesnakes that as though by a miracle suddenly appeared by the thousands in the fields because of the drought. Long, slithering, writhing, their heads triangular, they abandoned their lairs and they, too, migrated, like the human folk; and in their flight they killed children, calves, goats, and had no fear of entering settlements in broad daylight in search of food. There were so many of them that there were not enough acauãs to finish them off, and in those topsy-turvy days it was not a rare sight to see serpents devouring that predatory bird rather than, as in days gone by, the acauã taking wing with its snake prey in its mouth. The people of the backlands were obliged to go about night and day armed with clubs and machetes and there were migrants who managed to kill a hundred rattlesnakes in a single day. But the Counselor nonetheless continued to sleep on the ground, wherever night overtook him. One evening, on hearing those accompanying him talking of serpents, he explained to them that this was not the first time that such a thing had happened. When the children of Israel were returning from Egypt to their homeland and were complaining of the hardships of the desert, the Father visited a plague of snakes upon them as punishment. Moses interceded on behalf of the children of Israel, and the Father ordered him to make a bronze serpent, which the children had only to gaze upon to be cured of its bite. Ought they to do the same? No, for miracles are never repeated. But surely the Father would look upon them with favor if they carried about the face of His Son as an amulet. From then on, a woman from Monte Santo, Maria Quadrado, bore in a glass case a piece of cloth with the image of the Good Lord Jesus painted by a boy from Pombal whose piety had earned him the name of the Little Blessed One. This act must have pleased the Father, since none of the pilgrims was bitten by a snake.

The Counselor was spared as well from epidemics which, as a consequence of drought and famine, fed, in the months and years that followed, on the flesh of those who had managed to survive. Women miscarried shortly after becoming pregnant, children’s teeth and hair fell out, and adults suddenly began spitting up and defecating blood, swelled up with tumors, or suffered from rashes that made them roll in the gravel like mangy dogs. The gaunt man, thin as a rail, went on his pilgrim’s way amid the pestilence and wholesale death, imperturbable, invulnerable, like a veteran ship’s pilot, skillfully skirting storms as he makes for a safe port.

What port was the Counselor heading for with this endless journeying? No one asked him, nor did he say, and probably he didn’t know. He was accompanied now by dozens of followers who had abandoned everything to devote themselves to the life of the spirit. During the many months of drought the Counselor and his disciples worked unceasingly, burying those dead of starvation, disease, or anguish whom they came across along the sides of the roads, rotting corpses that were food for wild beasts and even humans. They made coffins and dug graves for these brothers and sisters. They were a motley group, a chaotic mixture of races,