Januaries, nature greets our eyesexactly as she must have greeted theirs:every square inch filling in with foliage--big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,blue, blue-green, and olive,with occasional lighter veins and edges,or a satin underleaf turned over;monster fernsin silver-gray relief,and flowers, too, like giant water liliesup in the air--up, rather, in the leaves--purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,rust red and greenish white;solid but airy; fresh as if just finishedand taken off the frame.
A blue-white sky, a simple web,backing for feathery detail:brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;and perching there in profile, beaks agape,the big symbolic birds keep quiet,each showing only half his puffed and padded,pure-colored or spotted breast.Still in the foreground there is Sin:five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonburstssplattered and overlapping,threatened from underneath by mossin lovely hell-green flames,attacked aboveby scalding-ladder vines, oblique and neat,"one leaf yes and one leaf no" (in Portuguese).The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyesare on the smaller, female one, back-to,her wicked tail straight up and over,red as a red-hot wire.
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,tiny as nails, and glinting,in creaking armor, came and found it all,not unfamiliar:no lovers' walks, no bowers,no cherries to be picked, no lute music,but corresponding, nevertheless,to an old dream of wealth and luxuryalready out of study when they left home--wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.Directly after Mass, humming perhapsL'Homme armé or some such tune,they ripped away into the hanging fabric,each out to catch an Indian for himself--those maddening little women who kept calling,calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
