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By Root 2155 0

and from there to Caraíba and Pontal and finally back again to Serrinha, being met with nothing but indifferent glances, contrite negatives, a shrug of the shoulders on the part of the cowherds, peasants, craftsmen, and women whom they came across on the road, they felt as though they were trying to lay their hands on a mirage. The band had not passed that way, no one had seen the dark-haired, dark-skinned man in the deep-purple habit and nobody remembered now that decrees had been burned in Natuba, nor had they heard about an armed encounter in Masseté. On returning to the capital of the state, safe and sound but thoroughly demoralized, the police officers reported that the horde of fanatics—fleetingly crystallized, like so many others, around a deeply devout woman or a preacher—had surely broken up and at this point, frightened by their own misdeeds, its members had no doubt scattered in all directions, after having perhaps killed their ringleader. Hadn’t that been what had happened so many times in the region?

But they were mistaken. Even though events apparently repeated old patterns of history, this time everything was to be different. The penitents were now more united than ever, and far from having murdered the saint after the victory of Masseté, which they took to be a sign sent to them from on high, they revered him all the more. The morning after the encounter, the Counselor, who had prayed all night long over the graves of the dead rebels, had awakened them. They found him very downcast. He told them that what had happened the evening before was no doubt a prelude to even greater violence and asked them to return to their homes, for if they went on with him they might end up in jail or die like their five brothers who were now in the presence of the Father. No one moved. His eyes swept over the hundred, hundred fifty, two hundred followers in rags and tatters there before him, still in the grip of the emotions of the night before as they listened to him. He not only gazed upon them but appeared to see them. “Give thanks to the Blessed Jesus,” he said to them gently, “for it would seem that He has chosen you to set an example.”

They followed him with souls overcome with emotion, not so much because of what he had said to them, but because of the gentleness in his voice, which had always been severe and impersonal. It was hard work for some of them not to be left behind as he walked on with his great strides of a long-shanked wading bird, along the incredible path he chose for them this time, one that was a trail neither for pack animals nor for cangaceiros; he led them, rather, straight across a wild desert of cactus, tangled scrub brush, and rough stones. But he never hesitated as to what direction to take them in. During the first night’s halt, after offering the usual prayers of thanks and leading them in reciting the Rosary, he spoke to them of war, of countries that were killing each other over booty as hyenas fight over carrion, and in great distress commented that since Brazil was now a republic it, too, would act like other heretical nations. They heard him say that the Can must be rejoicing; they heard him say that the time had come to put down roots and build a Temple, which, when the end of the world came, would be what Noah’s Ark had been in the beginning.

And where would they put down roots and build this Temple? They learned the answer after making their way across ravines, river shallows, sierras, scrub forests—days’ treks that were born and died with the sun—scaling an entire range of mountains and crossing a river that had very little water in it and was called the Vaza-Barris. Pointing to the cluster of cabins in the distance that had been peons’ huts and the broken-down mansion that had been the manor house when the place had been a hacienda, the Counselor said: “We shall settle there.” Some of them remembered that for years now in his nightly talks he had been prophesying that before the last days the Blessed Jesus’ elect would find refuge in a high and privileged land, where no one who was