The Crowd Thickens
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Aqui feita do bárbaro gentio A supersticiosa adoração, Direitos vão, sem outro algum desvio, Para onde estava o Rei do povo vão. Engrossando-se vai da gente o fio, Com os que vêm ver o estranho Capitão; Estão pelos telhados e janelas Velhos e moços, donas e donzelas.
Here, the superstitious worship of the barbarous heathen once performed, they go straight on, with no other detour, toward where the King of that vain people was. The thread of the crowd keeps thickening with those who come to see the foreign Captain; along the rooftops and at the windows stand old men and boys, married women and unmarried girls.
Gama and his men have landed at Calicut and been walked through a Hindu temple, which the Portuguese take for a strange Christian church. Now they leave it and head for the Samorin's palace, gathering a crowd as they go.
The stanza moves the embassy out of the temple and into the street. Two motions run against each other: the Portuguese go direitos, straight, without a single desvio, while the crowd around them swells sideways — the fio, the thread of people, getting thicker as it goes. Camões then does something a film director would do: he lifts the camera to the roofs and windows and lists who is up there, old and young, wives and girls. The strangers are being looked at.
The word to watch is vão in line 4, because it is not the same word as vão in line 3. The first is the verb: they go. The second is the adjective: empty, vain. The rhyme makes the two collide, and the second one quietly delivers the narrator's verdict on the whole city they are walking through — a king of an empty people. Camões has just had his sailors mistake a Hindu temple for a church without correcting them; the judgment here is not the sailors' but his, and he slips it in as a rhyme rather than a statement.
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