Since the wind erases your footsteps every four minutes, I used the jade-colored pools like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs, passing from one unique shape to the next so as to be able to find my way back after an hour. Sand conditions vary just as snow does in the mountains. Ocean breezes can harden the windward form into a solid pack and reduce other sections to an ankle-deep powder. Eventually I got to the sea. It seemed odd to have traveled so far and worked so hard to reach the ordinary. When you achieve the outermost space, there is nowhere to go but home again.

From the park to São Luís is a nine-hour drive through arid country. There is a popular literature that celebrates the local cow-punching outlaws, but none of them are around today. The yards are sun-pounded sand. Here and there someone waters a bush. You expect to hear the droplets sizzle as they land, like butter in a frying pan. Bundles of dry wood are for sale by the road. Either ghosts are cooking or someone wants the furnace of the afternoon to be a touch hotter. I tried to imagine life here. It would be like living in a hay bale. A cream-colored, bell-wearing bull was placidly chewing his cud, straddling the yellow line in the middle of the highway. Why not? It is a road with no travelers.

We stopped for refreshments exactly once. Senhor Ramos beheaded a coconut. He inserted a straw and handed it to me: how odd to be drinking a tree.

I was grateful and relieved that the climate was luscious in São Luís. There is so much vegetation here, even in this ancient colonial town, so much water in the air, that a second canopy of green emerges from the steeples of Sanctae Mariae de Victoria, just across the street from my room. Moss gives way to grasses, which in turn spawn vines, and now the highest feature of the 1629 church is not the cross but a layer of ten-foot trees that stand out like a jungle frieze, a great hanging garden against the skyline. The fragrant green petals were whistling as they stirred in a breeze off the Baía de São Marcos.

This is the only city in Brazil founded by the French, who landed in 1612 and were driven out three years later by the Portuguese. The port generated fabulous wealth from the cotton and sugar trades, which relied entirely on slave labor. When Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the wealth was abolished with it. The island city sank into a hundred years of long, slow decline. Only recently, with the awarding of UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1997, has the halting work of restoration begun.

It is the refurbished colonial neighborhoods with their market plazas, Catholic churches, and gleaming white government forts that are now the showpiece of the city. Workers keep the narrow alleyways and winding stairs swept for tourists, but the desiccated landscapes of the Sertao that surround the city remind a visitor of the all too frequent tendency of human beings to ravage and then abandon their land.

Matthew Wakem Chapel at the luxe Porto Preguicas Resort, near Barreirinhas.

The Pousada Portas da Amazônia, in the historic district, is a beautiful example of architectural recycling, a small hotel in a former colonial town house. My wide, silent, and all-white room had three floor-to-ceiling French windows facing the Rio Mearim. The polished planks of the antique floorboards gleamed. The maze at the heart of the old city is miraculously car-free, so you can actually hear scraps of conversation, crockery, whistling from the narrow alleys below. Bleached laundry hangs drying from the balconies. The cleaned and restored facades of the buildings are covered with azulejos, blue-white ceramic tiles.

Most buildings have been painted in historically accurate colors, but these colors were constantly being reworked by the weather. The surfaces were saturated by the nearby sea. Plaster had corroded, chunky patches had fallen away, revealing even lovelier tones beneath. Degas labored for years to get this ripeness into his pastels, a luxuriant ocher, saffron, yeast. Most of the streets are interrupted by sets of stairs. Since the city is also an island, at the top of every staircase is an ocean or a river view.

Here, too, there was dancing almost every night. June is the month of Bumba-Meu-Boi, an extravagant fusion of the Catholic feast day of Saint John (São João), African music, and Brazilian colonial history. Bumba comes from the Portuguese verb bumbar: to beat against, as a storm wave beats the coast, or an enslaved people rumble against their oppression, or an entranced drummer pounds. Boi is an ox or a bull. The tale—equal parts comedy and tragedy, native and European, slave and free—involves the death and magical resurrection of the landowner's prized bull. Fires had been lit in the alleys, and men clustered near them, heating and tightening the skins of their enormous bongos. In the shaded streets of Rua de Estrela and Rua da Fandega, the cafés had set up chairs and tables in the road. The neighborhood was full. Village companies from throughout Maranhão had arrived in the capital city to perform.

The whole celebration is a fusion of human and animal energies; the men are horses and soldiers and bulls, the women birds. Dozens of dancers parade through the town, then re-enact the story in a cobblestoned square. Scenes are narrated by a master of ceremonies who misses no opportunity to satirize the slave owner and glamorize the farmer and his lovely daughter. Everyone knows the words to the songs, and at every chorus the entire city seems to join in. In the humid night, a sweat sheen coats every breast and every thigh. The whole performance is a trance, an hours-long nighttime woken dream.

Having traveled several thousand miles to explore an empty coastline, it was disconcerting to keep ending up at concerts. But the dances turned out to have been an initiation as well as a reintegration. The veil between audience and performers had worn thin. Step by step, the great coast works its way inside you and becomes a state of mind. Without intending to, almost against my will, the dancers implied that nature and human nature are two features of the same condition. The fluctuations of the tides and the flexibility of the bodies are each in their own way expressions of a totality that is ultimately benign. Dances and long walks both mark time.

With all our current obsession about global warming, the first thing we have to cool off is the mind. Ocean, trade winds, deltas, estuaries, rivers, great clouds of galaxies—I had a chance to glimpse what planet earth herself has in mind. The form of it, the shapely, comely, erotic power of it all, generates a longing to treat it as you would your own daughter, with gentleness and tenderness and reverence and respect.

The three provinces on the northeast coast of Brazil—Ceará, Maranhão, and Piauí—are largely agricultural, with scattered pockets of development. Traveling toward the extraordinary beaches is erratic and challenging; deeply rutted sand tracks wind among palm groves and dunes. Multiple river crossings, rain squalls, and even high tide can turn a few miles as the crow flies into a half-day expedition.

The very remoteness and wildness that make this coast so appealing also mean that there are fewer of the amenities associated with modern tourism. This is a good thing. Usually even the most humble local pousada, if it is located in an isolated spot, will have a restaurant attached.

High season in Ceará and Piauí is generally December through February, when the European windsurfing contingent descends on Jericoacoara. Maranhão is best right after the rainy season—which typically ends in May—when the spaces between the dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park are full of clear freshwater.

The country code is 55. Prices quoted are for May 2008.

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