At the foot of the hills
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Era um edificio de harmoniosas proporções, vasto e luxuoso, situado em aprazivel vargedo ao sopé de elevadas collinas cobertas de mata em parte devastada pelo machado do lavrador.
It was a building of harmonious proportions, vast and luxurious, set in a pleasant meadow at the foot of high hills covered with woodland, in part already felled by the woodsman's axe.
The great house itself: a vast, graceful mansion in green bottomland below wooded hills — hills whose forest is already being cut away by the woodsman's axe. The taming of the wild land, quietly begun.
The sentence moves from grace to violence in a single breath: 'harmonious proportions… vast and luxurious… pleasant meadow' — and then the axe. <em>Devastada</em>, a word of war, for the felling of the forest that clears the way for the plantation. Guimarães is doing on the land what his whole book does with people: showing how much force it takes to make something 'civilized' out of something free. The half-cut hillside behind the beautiful house is the estate's real biography — and a mirror of the human bondage the title has already promised.
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