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on his patients. Often he would abruptly break off a treatment to go feverishly clambering up to the Alto do Mário, the area on the very crest line to which all the cannons of the first column had been hauled up hand over hand. The artillerymen would let him fire the Krupps, even A Matadeira. Teotônio remembers his mentor prophesying: “It is a surgeon who will make the towers of Canudos come tumbling down.” The captain returned to the cleft in the mountainsides below with his spirits refreshed. He was a stout, ruddy, jovial man, devoted to his calling, who took a great liking to Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti from the first day he saw him enter the barracks. His outgoing personality, his cheery good spirits, his adventurous life, his picturesque anecdotes so charmed the student that on the way to Canudos he thought seriously of staying in the army once he received his medical degree, as his idol had. During the regiment’s brief stay in Salvador, Dr. Gama showed Teotônio around the medical school at the University of Bahia, in the Praça da Basílica Cathedral, and opposite the yellow façade with tall blue ogival windows, beneath the coral trees, the coconut palms, and the crotons, the doctor and the student had sat drinking sweetish brandy in front of the kiosks set up on the black-and-white mosaic pavement, amid the vendors hawking trinkets and women selling hot foods from braziers. They went on drinking till dawn, which found them, beside themselves with happiness, in a brothel of mulattas. As they climbed onto the train to Queimadas, Dr. Gama had his disciple down an emetic potion, “to ward off African syphilis,” he explained to him.

Teotônio mops the sweat from his brow as he gives quinine mixed with water to a patient with smallpox who is delirious from fever. To one side of him is a soldier with his elbow joint exposed to the air, and on the other a soldier with a bullet wound in his lower belly and his sphincter shot away so that his feces are leaking out. The smell of excrement mingles with that of the scorching flesh of the corpses being burned in the distance. Quinine and carbolic acid are the only things left in the pharmacopoeia of the field hospital. The iodoform ran out at the same time as the chloroform, and for lack of antiseptics the doctors have been making do with subnitrate of bismuth and calomel. But now these are gone, too. Teotônio Leal Cavalcanti now cleanses wounds with a solution of water and carbolic acid. He squats down to do so, dipping the solution out of the basin in his cupped hands. He gives others a bit of quinine in half a glass of water. They have a large supply of quinine on hand, since many cases of malaria were expected. “The great killer of the war against Paraguay,” Dr. Gama used to say. It had decimated the army there. But malaria is nonexistent in this extremely dry climate, where mosquitoes do not breed except around the very few places where there is standing water. Teotônio knows that quinine will do the wounded no good, but it at least gives them the illusion that they are being treated. It was on the day of the accident, in fact, that Captain Gama had begun giving out quinine, for lack of any other medicines.

Teotônio thinks of how the accident happened, of how it must have happened. He was not there; they have told him about it, and since then, this and the dream about the rotting bodies have been the nightmares that have most disturbed the few short hours of sleep that he manages to snatch. In the nightmare the jolly, energetic surgeon-captain ignites the fuse of the Krupp 34 cannon. In his haste he has failed to close the breech properly, and when the fuse detonates the charge, the explosion in the half-open breech ignites a barrel of projectiles standing next to the cannon. He has heard the artillerymen tell how Dr. Alfredo Gama was catapulted several yards off the ground and fell some twenty paces away, a shapeless mass of flesh. First Lieutenant Odilon Coriolano de Azevedo, Second Lieutenant José A. do Amaral, and three artillerymen were also killed, and five artillerymen received