Word: serra
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...Recognizing three of his own regimental officers, he waved the cars inside the gate. But the cars also carried a score of workers from Lisbon's suburb of Almada, and such sworn foes of the Salazar regime as ex-Army Captain João Varela Gomes and Manuel Serra, former head of the Catholic youth movement...
...necessarily a distant vision. A Brazilian would-be Castro has already appeared. Francisco Juliâo is a Socialist state deputy from Pernambuco and founder of Brazil's mushrooming Peasant Leagues, which are already driving the landowners from their ranches and plantations. The "unknown serra" that Quadros envisions is also a real place. It is the overcrowded, underwatered, sugar and cattle land of the eight northeastern states of Brazil's Atlantic bulge...
Sixteenth century Portuguese explorers heard rumors of unusually primitive Indians in the state of Paraná. They saw none of them, and the steep, jungle-tangled Serra dos Dourados mountains in the western part of the state deflected both settlers, missionaries and slave hunters. Nothing more was reported about the primitives until 1906, when a Czech scientist named Albert Fritsch made a field trip into the region and met some comparatively advanced Indians dragging three captives who spoke an unknown tongue. He discovered that the captives called themselves Xetsá (pronounced shee-tahss). He studied their language superficially and then...
...both settlers and scientists knew that something very strange lived in the Serra dos Dourados. In 1955 an unusual frost hit northern Parana, destroying jungle fruit and game. Starving Indians crept out of the jungle to pillage the vegetable garden of the Fazenda Santa Rosa, a backwoods farmhouse. The frightened manager sent for help from the Indian Protection Service...
What apparently happened, says Professor Loureiro, was that the small, timid Xetás were driven into the rugged Serra dos Dourados by stronger tribes. Some time during the last four centuries they must have had terrifying brushes with European frontiersmen. Their demonology is dominated by an ogre named Möul who shows in figurines as a tall, long-legged, wide-eyed person, probably a white man grown into a tribal devil. Having seen enough of Möul and his violent ways, the Xetás retired into the tangled heart of the Serra dos Dourados and managed...