Acidilio Ramos, who was assigned to us by Trip da Areia, a travel outfitter based in Fortaleza, is as dignified as a Portuguese count, with the mild and courteous disposition of an old scholar or a saint. He said he used to be a butcher before taking up guiding. An adulthood in the sun has cured his skin to something approaching moccasin. He is as laconic as a cowboy in a silent western. A bird and the shadow of the bird crossed the empty coastline, a huge white form and its black copy. "Garças," said Senhor Ramos. A few hours later, during a water break, he stooped on the damp sand and drew the webbed feet and enormous six-foot wingspan, and we settled on egret as the English translation.

Jericoacoara appeared on the horizon as a great elongated barrow rising above the flatland and the even flatter sea. In the middle of a white-hot afternoon, it was a long, low isosceles triangle of earth whose flock-nibbled grasses were the color of Andrew Wyeth's Pennsylvania landscapes. The name means "Crocodile Basking in the Sun," and that is precisely the impression it gives. Clearly the indigenous Tupi-Guarani peoples who settled it, who named it, must have felt its insistent power. The sea, now a bright magenta color, with plenty of whitecap foam—and the sound of the sea—was everywhere. The vehicle startled a flock of gulls or egrets. They rose and scattered in the energized atmosphere, like thoughts or words or emotion. As we approached, an approach that had taken all day, three Brazilians on horseback went by. They were smiling as if the daylight were comical.

The village was splayed out in the heat, living its siesta life forever. No more than a tiny cluster of homes, the community is only four streets wide. There are no paved roads, no streetlights, not even docks for the fishing fleet. The fishermen leave their boats tilted on the sand like those in a Van Gogh painting. The Vila Kalango was located just inside the tight perimeter, and we dropped our bags in the sand courtyard and were shown to the semi-detached brick and straw-thatch rooms. In the past twenty-five years, a small colony of canny European dropout capitalists have established enough of an infrastructure so that now, along the waterfront for maybe a hundred yards, the scene resembles a transplanted Mediterranean resort from about, say, 1927. There are three or four outdoor cafés, a few seafood restaurants, a couple of nightspots for music and dancing. In the sand alleys are a handful of surf shops and sunglass kiosks, but during our visit in June, the off-est of off-seasons, there were hardly any tourists about.

I grabbed a rucksack, field glasses, and a notebook and headed out for a quick reconnaissance of the immensity beyond town. Almost without knowing why, I began to walk uphill. The grasses seemed frail from a distance, but when I walked on them, they were incredibly tough, sewn onto the surface of the sand like hemp, or even wire. There were narrow tracks that were nothing but sand, so in a short while, I felt the climbing in my calf muscles and the front of the thighs. Up. Up. Here and there were enormous boulders, then sand clearings and cactus and shrikes perched on them, staring. In 1984, reacting intelligently to the overpowering beauty of the place, the Brazilian government declared Jeri and its surroundings to be an Environment Protection Area, safeguarding the treasure for all time.