the relations between themselves, crafting a book-long sequence of a single meaning. Such progress is mimicked by the story Recado do Morro ("Message from the Hills"), which, accordingly, occupied the middle of the book, being the fourth story in the original publication. Recado do Morro is also significant in its treatment of the ideia of a language of the sertão itself. In the story, a group of five sertanejos is escorting a German naturalist in an expedition through the state of Minas Gerais. Parallel to their own discovery of the sertão, another journey is recounted, following step by step the march of the travelers: that of a message given by the very backlands that is spread unpretensiously, much in the manner of an anecdote, by the marginal members of the region's society. First heard from a hill by a madman who lives in the caves of the backlands, he recounts the message to his brother, an impoverished traveler, who, by his turns, tells the message to a child. /The child proceeds to tell the message to a travel guide, the guide to a prophetic hermit, who takes it to be a sign of the Revelation and lavishly repeats the message to a city's congregation; it is then heard by a neurotic man who, finally, recounts it to the poet and singer Laudelim. Each time the message is told, its conveyors slightly alter its contents, until the poet ultimately gives it the form a mythical ballad, which he sings at a party attended by the expedition members. Only then it becomes clear that the message all along was a warning to their leader, Pedro Orósio. Pedro, a handsome and viril man, is altogether hated for the relations he maintains with the wives of the other sertanejos. The men who he has fooled intended to have their revenge by letting him drunk and subsequently murdering him. Upon listening to the ballad, Pedro Orósio understands its hermetic symbolism to refer to himself and his pretentious men, which proves to be correct, and he is capable of saving his life after being warned by the "message of the hill". One can see here an illustration by Guimarães Rosa of how he himself understood his writing. Rosa intervenes the descriptions of the landscapes found by the German man's expedition with the successive versions of the story that the madmen, the child and finally the poet