Another of the few much-travelled roads of the colonial or indeed any period of Brazilian history, until the opening of the flat lands of the extreme south by imported European colonists, was one built by the Jesuits from the coastal colony of São Vicente to their own mission settlement at São Paulo; this highway negotiated the mangrove swamps of the flat belt edging the sea and then climbed the rocky barrier of the Serra do Mar to the cool interior plateau. Before the construction of this _Caminho do Padre José_ the ascent must have taxed even the stout spirits of those indomitable priests. The good Padre Vasconcellos wrote, three hundred years ago, of the journey:— “The greater part of the way one cannot really travel, but must make one’s way with hands and feet, clinging to the roots of trees, and this amongst such crags and precipices that I confess I trembled whenever I looked downwards. The depth of the valleys is tremendous and the number of mountains rising one above another appear to leave no hope of reaching the climax.... It is true that the labour of the ascent has its compensations now and again, for when I rested upon one of the rocks and looked below it seemed as if I were gazing from the heaven of the moon and that the whole round universe lay spread beneath my feet.” When Fletcher (_Brazil and the Brazilians_) visited São Paulo in 1855, he made the trip from Santos on horseback over a Serra road, remarking on the excellence of the section on the flat to Cubitão; he was two days on the journey and says that the road “which traverses this range of mountains is probably the finest in Brazil, with the exception of the Imperial highway to Petropolis.” This was not the first road constructed to bridge the barrier range, for in 1790 the Portuguese Governor superseded the Jesuit highway by a new one which included four miles of solid pavement and had more than one hundred and eighty angles before it reached the plateau. It was still too steep for wheeled traffic and the troops of mules which traversed it in thousands, bringing coffee from the interior after this product became a commercial factor and before the railway was built, often slid down the steep slopes on their haunches. It is said that both this and the first road were lined with the bones of mules that died by the way. Similar stories are told of the Imperial road, built by that genuinely progressive ruler, Dom Pedro _segundo_, from Rio de Janeiro to his pet colony and residence Petropolis, a lovely nook in the heart of the Serra behind Guanabara Bay. This road, too, traversed flat, marshy ground before it began to climb the terrible Serra, and the latter section remained in use for some years after a railroad was constructed over the flats to the foot of the mountains: engineering difficulties were considered too great for a railroad until eventually Swiss engineers applied the same methods as had solved the problem in their own mountain country.