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#19 & 20
Prospect from the summit of Mt.
Corcovado, near Rio
de Janeiro
Latin translation by
Ben Hennelly
Each of the two etchings
that I present to you under this title, kind reader, is a smaller imitation
of a magnificent picture that my dear friend Thomas Ender, a companion
on my journey, drew with his surpassing skill from the summit of Mt.Corcovado and, along with his other illustrations of regions in Brazil,
committed to the keeping of the Viennese Academy of the Arts. They provide
an outstanding view of how that most beautiful part of Rio
de Janeiro's bay looks, the varied, truly grand character and
shape of which is all but the stuff of common proverbs. But I must yet
again lament that these my etchings, inasmuch as they lack color, stand
deprived of the amazing loveliness of that pellucid sky, and the living
warmth of its brilliance.
The upper part of Mt.
Corcovado on the side facing the sea is precipitous and so
steep that, to someone approaching from the ocean, it looks like a fragment
of some immense ruin; the demonic force that long ago impressed upon
the land its present form seems to have split the mountain asunder perpendicularly,
in order to sink the other part in the sea's depths. No plant is able
to take hold on these steep walls, which offer nothing but rocks of
a purplish-white color, granite and foliaceous granite (in which apatites and garnets are encrusted here and there); these glitter with colors
that vary with changes in the light, or are hidden by the clouds that
pass before them.
On the side opposite from the ocean, toward the west and toward Africa,
the mountain descends down several steps or, so to speak, banks to the
bay and the city itself, whence the ascent is not difficult. The road
from the city to the mountain top leads through cultivated hills, claimed
from forest and marked off by hedges, up until the first embankment,
where
A view of Carioca aqueduct from the suburb of Mato Cavallos
we come across what they call the Carioca aqueduct, a
magnificent work.  Now you will pass through bare places, where the bright
gleam of the sun reflects off deep-green tree fronds and grassy clumps
adorned with flowers, now you will enter the pleasant cool of a dusky
wood. After you have done this for a while, you will come to the place
where the font itself, not yet enclosed within the arched sides of the
conduit, descends from the forest freely across granite rocks; climbing
from this point you will be encircled entirely by genuine, chaste nature.
 
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