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How many hours has it been raining now? It began at nightfall, as the vanguard was starting to take up positions on the heights of Canudos. There is an indescribable explosion of joy throughout the regiment; men from the ranks and officers leap about, clap each other on the back, drink out of their kepis, stand with outstretched arms beneath the deluge from the sky; the colonel’s white horse whinnies, shakes its mane, stamps its hoofs in the mud that is beginning to form. The nearsighted journalist manages only to raise his head, close his eyes, open his mouth, his nostrils, incredulous, sent into ecstasies by these drops that are pelting his very bones. He is so absorbed, so overjoyed that he hears neither the shots nor the cries of the soldier rolling about on the ground alongside him, moaning with pain and clutching his face. When he finally becomes aware of the chaos round about him, he stoops over, picks up the portable writing desk and the leather pouch, and puts them over his head. From this miserable refuge he sees Captain Olímpio de Castro shooting his revolver and soldiers running for shelter or flinging themselves face down in the mud. And between the muddy legs scissoring back and forth he sees—the image is frozen in his memory like a daguerreotype—Colonel Moreira César grabbing the reins of his horse, leaping into the saddle, and with saber unsheathed charging, not knowing if any of his men are following him, toward the patch of scrub from which the shots have come. “He was shouting ‘Long live the Republic,’ ‘Long live Brazil,’” he thinks to himself. In the lead-colored light, amid the pouring rain and the wind whipping the trees back and forth, officers and men break into a run, echoing the colonel’s shouts, and—forgetting the cold and his panic for a moment, the correspondent from the Jornal de Notícias laughs to himself, remembering—he suddenly finds himself running, too, right alongside them, toward the thicket, to confront the invisible enemy, too. He remembers thinking as he stumbled along how stupid he was to be running toward a battle that he was not going to fight. What would he have fought it with? His portable writing desk? The leather pouch containing his changes of clothes and his papers? His empty inkwell? But the enemy, naturally, never appears.

“What did appear was worse,” he thinks, and another shiver runs down his spine, like a lizard. Once again he sees the landscape, in the ashen afternoon that is beginning to turn to dusk, become a phantasmagoria, with strange human fruit hanging from the umburanas and the thornbushes, and boots, scabbards, tunics, kepis dangling from the branches. Some of the corpses are already skeletons picked clean of eyes, bellies, buttocks, muscles, privates by vultures or rodents, and their nakedness stands out sharply against the spectral greenish-gray of the trees and the dark-colored earth. Standing rooted to the spot for an instant by the incredible sight, he then walks in a daze amid these remains of men and uniforms adorning the caatinga. Moreira César has dismounted and is surrounded by the officers and men who have followed him as he charged. They are petrified. The shouts and the mad dashes of a moment before have been succeeded by a deep silence, a tense motionlessness. They are all standing staring at the sight before them, and on their faces stupefaction, fear gradually give way to sadness, anger. The young fair-haired sergeant’s head is still intact—though the eyes are gone—and his body a mass of dark purple bruises and protruding bones, with swollen wounds that seem to be bleeding as the rain streams down. He sways back and forth, very slowly. From that moment on, even before being overcome with pity and horror, the nearsighted journalist has thought about what he cannot help thinking about, what is gnawing at him this minute and preventing him from sleeping: the stroke of luck, the miracle that kept him from being there too, naked, hacked to pieces, castrated by the knives of the jagunços or the beaks of