The City of Saint Thomas
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Aqui a cidade foi que se chamava Meliapor, fermosa, grande e rica; Os Ídolos antigos adorava Como inda agora faz a gente inica. Longe do mar naquele tempo estava, Quando a Fé, que no mundo se pubrica, Tomé vinha prègando, e já passara Províncias mil do mundo, que ensinara.
Here was the city that used to be called Meliapor: beautiful, great, and rich. It worshipped the ancient idols, as the wicked people still do now. In that time it lay far from the sea, when the apostle Thomas came preaching the Faith that is proclaimed throughout the world, having already passed through a thousand provinces of the earth, which he had taught.
On the Machine of the World, the future of Portuguese India is unveiled. The vision reaches Meliapor (Mylapore), the ancient city where the apostle Thomas is said to have preached and been martyred.
On the crystalline Machine of the World, the vision of Portugal's future in India settles on one city, Meliapor (Mylapore, on the coast near modern Chennai). The narrator names it plainly: a rich, idol-worshipping city, and the place where the apostle Thomas once preached. The tense does the work here. Everything about Meliapor is set in the imperfect and pluperfect, a completed past, except the idolatry, which "inda agora" still goes on now.
What a first reader misses is that this is not incidental geography. Camões is planting the claim that Christianity reached India long before the Portuguese did, through Thomas, so that Vasco da Gama's arrival can be framed as a return rather than an intrusion. The small detail "longe do mar naquele tempo" (far from the sea back then) is also a setup: it primes the miracle story of Thomas that Camões is about to tell, in which the sea and a great beam of timber play the central part.
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Os Lusíadas 10.109 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/10.109/