Like a tapir
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Ahi, o Paquequer lança-se rapido sobre o seu leito, e atravessa as florestas como um tapir, espumando, deixando o seo pello esparso pelas pontas do rochedo, e enchendo a solidão com o estampido de sua carreira.
There, the Paquequer hurls itself swiftly over its bed, and crosses the forests like a tapir, foaming, leaving its hide scattered on the points of the rock, and filling the solitude with the thunder of its running.
The free river in motion: it hurls itself over its bed and crashes through the forest like a tapir, foaming, filling the empty wild with the thunder of its run. Every image is a native animal, in furious life.
The prose now runs as fast as the river. Alencar piles gerund on gerund — hurling, crossing, foaming, leaving, filling — so the sentence never stops for breath, and reaches, twice, for the native world to picture it: the river charges 'como um tapir', and its white foam is the beast's own torn hide. This is the Romantic-Indianist imagination at full power: not a European landscape politely admired, but a wild American one felt from inside, alive and animal. The solitude it fills with thunder is the same empty grandeur the estate down in Escrava Isaura has only begun to tame.
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