The False Welcome and the Rosy Dawn
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Aqui foram de noite agasalhados, Com todo o bom e honesto tratamento, Os dous Cristãos, não vendo que enganados Os tinha o falso e santo fingimento. Mas assim como os raios espalhados Do Sol foram no mundo, e num momento Apareceu no rúbido horizonte Da moça de Titão a roxa fronte,
Here they were lodged for the night, with every good and honest treatment, the two Christians, not seeing that the false and holy pretense had deceived them. But as soon as the scattered rays of the Sun spread over the world, and in a moment there appeared on the ruddy horizon the rosy brow of Tithonus' maiden,
At Mombasa the two Portuguese sent ashore are lodged overnight under a warm, seemingly Christian hospitality that is in fact a trap. The stanza closes by turning to daybreak.
The two Portuguese sent ashore are given a comfortable, courteous overnight welcome, and the narrator states plainly what they cannot see: the hospitality is a trap. The phrase that carries the whole stanza is "o falso e santo fingimento" — the false yet holy-seeming pretense. Then, at the fifth line, the poem drops the ambush mid-air and pivots to sunrise, leaving the danger hanging over the coming day.
What a first reader misses is that the closing image is a dressed-up way of saying "dawn broke." "A roxa fronte da moça de Titão" is Aurora, the Dawn, wife of the mortal Tithonus — Camões reaches for the Homeric and Virgilian rosy-dawn formula rather than naming morning outright. The sting is that the welcome is staged as Christian piety precisely because these are Christians being lured: this is Mombasa, whose Muslim king, stirred by Bacchus, means Gama's men harm.
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