Man, a mere extra
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Tudo é grande e pomposo neste scenario que a natureza, sublime artista, decorou para os dramas magestosos dos elementos, em que o homem é apenas um simples comparsa.
Everything is grand and stately in this stage-set, which nature, sublime artist, adorned for the majestic dramas of the elements, in which man is only a simple extra.
The thesis of the whole opening: everything here is grand and stately — a stage nature, the sublime artist, dressed for the majestic dramas of the elements, in which man is only a bit-player. Alencar's cosmology, in one sentence.
Here Alencar says the quiet part aloud. The whole valley has been a 'scenario', a stage; nature is its 'sublime artista', its set-designer; and the plays it mounts are 'os dramas magestosos dos elementos' — storm, fire, flood. In that theatre, 'o homem é apenas um simples comparsa' — man is only a walk-on. It is a startling thing to place at the threshold of an adventure novel: a warning that the human story you're about to read is a small thing inside a vastly larger one, and that the elements the chapter has been personifying — this living, leaping, sleeping river above all — will, in the end, take the stage and end the drama. The flood that closes O Guarani is already implied in this sentence.
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