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Captain Olímpio de Castro and three or four escorts run up the mountainside and several buglers begin to sound calls until similar calls answer in the distance. Only now does he realize that orders are passed on by means of bugles. He would like to note this down so as not to forget it. But several officers cry out something, in unison, and he begins to watch again. In the open space between the churches, ten, twelve, fifteen red-and-blue uniforms are running behind two officers—he can make out their unsheathed sabers, and tries to identify those lieutenants or captains whom he must have seen many times now—with the obvious intention of capturing the Temple with very tall white towers surrounded by scaffolding, when they are met with heavy fire from all over the building which downs the majority of them; a handful turn and disappear in the dust.

“They should have protected themselves with rifle charges,” he hears Moreira César say in an icy tone of voice. “There’s a redoubt there…”

Many figures have come running out of the churches; they make for the soldiers who have fallen and throw themselves on them. “They are finishing them off, castrating them, plucking out their eyes,” he thinks, and at that instant he hears the colonel murmur: “Those demented fools, they’re undressing them.”

“Undressing them?” he repeats mentally. And he again sees the corpses of the fair-haired sergeant and his men hanging from the trees. He is half dead from the cold. The open space is still enveloped in a cloud of dust. The journalist’s eyes peer about in different directions, trying to make out what is happening down below. The soldiers of the two corps that have entered Canudos, one on his left and the other at his feet, have disappeared in that taut web, while a third corps, on his right, continues to pour into the city, and he is able to measure their progress by the whirlwinds of dust that precede them and rise in their wake along the narrow alleyways, little streets, twists and turns, meanders in which he can imagine the clashes, the thrusts, the blows of rifle butts smashing doors, knocking down planks, palings, staving in roofs, episodes in the war which, on breaking down into encounters in a thousand huts, turns into utter confusion, hand-to-hand combat of one against one, one against two, two against three.

He has not taken a single swallow of water this morning, nor has he eaten anything the night before, and in addition to the hollow feeling in his stomach his guts are writhing. The bright sun is at its zenith. Can it possibly be noon, can so many hours already have gone by? Moreira César and his staff officers walk a few yards farther down the mountainside, and the nearsighted journalist follows along after them, tripping and falling, till he catches up with them. He grabs Olímpio de Castro by the arm and asks him what is happening, how many hours the battle has been going on.

“The rear guard and the Bahia police are there now,” Moreira César says, the field glasses at his eyes. “The enemy is hemmed in on that flank.”

The nearsighted journalist makes out, on the far side of the little houses half hidden by the dust, some blue, greenish, gold-colored patches, advancing in this sector that thus far has been spared, with no smoke, no fires, no people visible. The attack now encompasses all of Canudos; there are dwellings in flames everywhere.

“This is taking too long,” the colonel says, and the nearsighted journalist notes his impatience, his indignation. “Have the cavalry squadron come to the aid of Cunha Matos.”

He immediately detects—from the officers’ surprised, disconcerted faces—that the colonel’s order is unexpected, risky. None of them protests, but the looks they exchange are more eloquent than words.

“What is it?” Moreira’s eyes sweep round the circle of officers and light on Olímpio de Castro. “What is the objection?”

“None, sir,” the captain says. “Except that…”

“Except what?” Moreira César replies sternly. “That’s an order.”

“The cavalry squadron