A City of Bumptious Pride : <i> Cariocas inflexibly say that there’s no place on earth to match their city. Nor in heaven</i> .

The first time you visit Rio de Janeiro, fly. The second time, I suggest that you go by ship. On that first trip, fly into Rio from the south, preferably from Montevideo or Buenos Aires--even from Sao Paulo, Brazil’s thundering, big, industrial metropolis. Book passage aboard a plane scheduled to arrive at sunset or minutes afterward, when the sky will be darkening along the rugged coast, above the steep, deep valleys, with a million city lights coming on.

Time yourself to reach the city at the moment the floodlights illuminate the 126-foot statue of Christ atop the 2,366-foot peak of Corcovado the Hunchback, which will be the moment, too, that Sugar Loaf’s 1,283-foot summit is lighted at the bay’s entrance. Inland from the sea, the lights will spring up in all the twisted canyons caught between the dark, thrusting hills. Then, you will achieve some understanding of the bumptious pride of Rio.

As you’ve doubtlessly observed, most places on earth look quite a lot like someplace else; Buenos Aires looks surprisingly like London, and also Rome, but--here’s my point--Rio de Janeiro is different. Rio is generis . Because of that marvelous, great blue bay, because of those intrusive mountains that steal much of the show in every vista, Rio is an original. Rio de Janeiro looks like nothing but Rio de Janeiro.

Rio people call their town Cidade Maravilhosa (the Marvelous City), which to some may seem an excess of self-esteem; yet, there’s a leavening sense of humor close beside. Rio bristles at criticism from outsiders, but within the family it kids itself unmercifully. A favorite carnival song one season extolled the exquisite beauty of the Cidade Maravilhosa , which, the lyric confessed, “in daytime has no water and at nighttime has no lights.” It’s a fact that this jampacked pleasure resort of 5 million people--nearly the size of Los Angeles and Paris combined--struggles along with ramshackle public services. Water supply, electric-power supply and public transportation are light-years away from dependability. They break down, jam up, blow up. Yet, nobody gets really mad about it; hardly anyone writes letters to the editor. Typically, they compose songs instead and go lie on the beaches until the mains are repaired.

As I said at the outset, arriving at Rio on shipboard is good too. On my very first trip, I huddled on the bridge deck in pre-dawn chill, watching a nearly full, butter-colored moon slip behind the western peaks. I was pleased to recognize Corcovado and the Sugar Loaf. I had not expected the mountains to be so high; I had not expected the city to be so white.

Rio is one thing at dawn, with the sky soft as silk . . . another at noonday, when the searing metallic sun cooks the pavements . . . very much another thing in moonlight, which seems to galvanize both sexes. I can add to the picture only by declaring that Rio’s great bay is one mile wide at the mouth, 18 miles wide at the broadest point and has 100 miles of shoreline. All the navies of the world could be accommodated in this Guanabara Bay, although much of it is shallow, and some navies, at least, would run aground.

On the noonday of my initial arrival at Rio, I lunched with a Brazilian newspaperman at a gracious restaurant called Ouro Verde, overlooking Copacabana beach. We drank a caipirinha cocktail, a tasty concoction of raw rum laced with lime, and ate, of course, Brazil’s national dish, feijoada completa , a sovereign masterpiece of culinary art--black beans, rice, sausages, pork and more . . . much more.

My host talked winningly. “To discuss this city as a place ,” he said, “is misleading. Rather, you should understand that Rio is a spirit, constructed of emotion. I will explain carefully. The facts concerning Rio are simply the dull data of universal urbanization--discovered by so-and-so, founded in the year such-and-such, so many square miles, so much population. I believe that we should all resist such facts.

“I should hate,” he continued, “to know Rio’s per-capita income, because such mundane matters actually impede understanding. Would you seek to comprehend a lovely woman by memorizing her blood pressure and her pulse count? Never!”

Dinner time came, and for dinner I sat in a German restaurant on the Avenida Atlantica, in Copacabana, and listened to further searching observations, these from an American advertising man called Red. Red loves Rio; he swears that he’ll never leave there. In a tone that would brook no argument, Red said: “Rio is the sexiest city in the world.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I suppose . . . .”

“Let us not be obvious about it,” Red interrupted. “In two minutes, any able-bodied visitor will observe that Rio is absolutely full-up with stimulating, brown-skinned young women in latchstring bathing adornment, and also, at night, in dresses worn with know-how. But what I am trying to tell you is subtle, like swamp honey on the tongue. Rio is Saturday-night perfume every night of the week. It is the milk-blue eyes of a girl who is sometimes African but always Mediterranean--plus something extra. I think it has a lot to do with this damned perpetual, caressing summer. Up on the hills, people chant over drums; you could stick needles into the dancers and they wouldn’t notice.”

“Rio,” Red said, “is the town where the waves rolling up on the beach whisper not ‘ whoosh’ but ‘Nice to see you, honey; lotsa luck.’ Listen!”

Another word about the people who live on the hills and beat drums. In their precarious shantytown settlements, called favelas , the samba was born and is constantly being reborn. Long years ago, these very poor people were crowded off level ground--always scarce and in high demand for the mansions of the wealthy. Predominantly black, they retained, along with other West African practices, a fetishistic dance named quizomba , admirably designed to lift the spirits. At Carnival season, the period preceding Lent, the agile denizens of the favelas transfer their quizomba to the main streets of the lower town. A few tones of European restraint have been laid on with the years, and the samba is the result.

Carnival is, first and foremost, samba. Rio’s Carnival is samba songs, samba dancing, samba clubs, samba virtuosi. Carnival is samba-nutty, and I would be remiss if I did not warn my readers against Carnival in Rio. It is brazen, brassy, overdressed, underdressed, vulgar, semi-hysterical mass exhibitionism. If Pablo Picasso had painted it, his model would have been a great, big, soft woman with one eye screwed shut in a lascivious wink and her skirt hiked up above her thighs. A million feet beating time, shuffling on down. Sweet smell of ether everywhere. And three tunes or maybe four shrilled on trumpets over and over until you come up screaming. I mean to say, it’s coarse. But I also mean that it’s compelling.

If you think that people everywhere are pretty much the same, you haven’t been to Carnival in Rio. In Nice and New Orleans, the Mardi Gras rite is mainly a spectator sport, but in Rio, more often than not, there’s nobody to watch a parade because everybody’s in costume and parading. Visitors who check into downtown (as opposed to beachside) hotels will have the main show--Rio’s masses, rolling along like a heaving rug beneath their windows. At any time of year, perfumed sea breezes and South Atlantic surf are lovely, almost exactly as advertised. You needn’t wait for Carnival time to ascend Corcovado to record matchless views with your camera. As for shopping, Rio makes easy the acquisition of pretty kickshaws of gold and diamonds; emeralds abound, along with bargains (if you have a knowledgeable and wary eye) in aquamarines, amethysts and such. Most travelers covet at least one figa --an esteemed Brazilian good-luck charm shaped like a closed fist, with thumb caught between index and middle fingers, carved in bone or wood or cast in gold, available in souvenir shops all over town. If, in your view, the figa’s local reputation seems in no way to have softened the nation’s bad luck in financial affairs (currently a foreign debt of more than $100 billion and an annual inflation rate well above 200%), all right, never mind--that shining bit of gold fist dangles so beautifully from girlish wrists.

It’s been a subject of reproach against some cities (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde) that they’re lacking in completeness. I have heard serious men say Rio is superficial, its literature thin, its music all Carnival and no Bach, its culture a bikini pose. It would be tiresome to quarrel. The really important things are these: The night is very full of southern stars; there is laughter along the beaches; the holy hunchback mountain Corcovado pronounces a benediction from an elevation difficult to attain.

Out near the airport one recent afternoon, a taxi driver, watching the big planes take off, pulled at my sleeve in a friendly fashion. “Tell me, boss,” he said. “What’s the price of a trip from the U.S.A. to Rio in one of those monsters?”

“Lots of bucks,” I said. “Lots and lots of bucks.”

“I’m here for nothing,” he said and grinned.