Chita: A Memory of Last Island Read online

rushespast with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast andvoiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic ofall those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into youalso...

  From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant sawfishor the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises, or from thegrande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net may hold,--allhelmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from the hideous devilfishof the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins everoutspread like the pinions of a bat,--the terror of luggermen, theuprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsterslikewise--goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, asequilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which,unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and wavelessferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils areforgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self, withoutfear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical caresses ofthe sea ...

  V.

  Thirty years ago, Last Island lay steeped in the enormous light of evensuch magical days. July was dying;--for weeks no fleck of cloud hadbroken the heaven's blue dream of eternity; winds held their breath;slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kissesand whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of thevillage and beyond the hearing of its voices,--the vast silence, thevast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, thesetransparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: theyare omens sometimes--omens of coming tempest.Nature,--incomprehensible Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage,ever puts forth her divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awfulbeauty ...

  But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long days,--daysborn in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the height of the season.The long myrtle-shadowed village was thronged with its summerpopulation;--the big hotel could hardly accommodate all itsguests;--the bathing-houses were too few for the crowds who flocked tothe water morning and evening. There were diversions for all,--huntingand fishing parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games,promenades. Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach,seaming its smoothness noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote itsdreams upon the sand...

  ... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn overthe world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched thequicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vastmotion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at thesky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened andapproached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water,moving swift as a cloud-shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had lookedformidable only by startling contrast with the previous placidity ofthe open: it was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as itneared the beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with alow, rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit anotherfollowed--a third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a little,and stilled again. Minutes passed, and the immeasurable heavingrecommenced--one, two, three, four ... seven long swells thistime;--and the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly thephenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier billowingand briefer intervals of quiet--until at last the whole sea grewrestless and shifted color and flickered green;--the swells becameshorter and changed form. Then from horizon to shore ran oneuninterrupted heaving--one vast green swarming of snaky shapes, rollingin to hiss and flatten upon the sand. Yet no single cirrus-speckrevealed itself through all the violet heights: there was nowind!--you might have fancied the sea had been upheaved from beneath ...

  And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge would notappear in these latitudes to be utterly without foundation. On thefairest days a southeast breeze may bear you an odor singular enough tostartle you from sleep,--a strong, sharp smell as of fish-oil; andgazing at the sea you might be still more startled at the suddenapparition of great oleaginous patches spreading over the water,sheeting over the swells. That is, if you had never heard of themysterious submarine oil-wells, the volcanic fountains, unexplored,that well up with the eternal pulsing of the Gulf-Stream ...

  But the pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a"great blow" somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled; and a splendidsurf made the evening bath delightful. Then, just at sundown, abeautiful cloud-bridge grew up and arched the sky with a single span ofcottony pink vapor, that changed and deepened color with the dying ofthe iridescent day. And the cloud-bridge approached, stretched,strained, and swung round at last to make way for the coming of thegale,--even as the light bridges that traverse the dreamy Teche swingopen when luggermen sound through their conch-shells the long,bellowing signal of approach.

  Then the wind began to blow, with the passing of July. It blew fromthe northeast, clear, cool. It blew in enormous sighs, dying away atregular intervals, as if pausing to draw breath. All night it blew; andin each pause could be heard the answering moan of the rising surf,--asif the rhythm of the sea moulded itself after the rhythm of theair,--as if the waving of the water responded precisely to the wavingof the wind,--a billow for every puff, a surge for every sigh.

  The August morning broke in a bright sky;--the breeze still came cooland clear from the northeast. The waves were running now at a sharpangle to the shore: they began to carry fleeces, an innumerable flockof vague green shapes, wind-driven to be despoiled of their ghostlywool. Far as the eye could follow the line of the beach, all the slopewas white with the great shearing of them. Clouds came, flew as in apanic against the face of the sun, and passed. All that day andthrough the night and into the morning again the breeze continued fromthe north. east, blowing like an equinoctial gale ...

  Then day by day the vast breath freshened steadily, and the watersheightened. A week later sea-bathing had become perilous:colossal breakers were herding in, like moving leviathan-backs, twicethe height of a man. Still the gale grew, and the billowing waxedmightier, and faster and faster overhead flew the tatters of torncloud. The gray morning of the 9th wanly lighted a surf that appalledthe best swimmers: the sea was one wild agony of foam, the gale wasrending off the heads of the waves and veiling the horizon with a fogof salt spray. Shadowless and gray the day remained; there were madbursts of lashing rain. Evening brought with it a sinister apparition,looming through a cloud-rent in the west--a scarlet sun in a green sky.His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body ofa belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and themoonless night came.

  Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voicemoaning across the world,--hooting,--uttering nightmaresounds,--Whoo!--whoo!--whoo!--and with each stupendous owl-cry themooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, throughall the hours of darkness. From the northwest the breakers of the baybegan to roll high over the sandy slope, into the salines;--the villagebayou broadened to a bellowing flood ... So the tumult swelled and theturmoil heightened until morning,--a morning of gray gloom andwhistling rain. Rain of bursting clouds and rain of wind-blown brinefrom the great spuming agony of the sea.

  The steamer Star was due from St. Mary's that fearful morning. Couldshe come? No one really believed it,--no one. And nevertheless menstruggled to the roaring beach to look for her, because hope isstronger than reason ...

  Even today, in these Creole islands, the advent of the steamer is thegreat event of the week. There are no telegraph lines, no telephones:the mail-packet is the only trustworthy medium of communication withthe outer world, bringing friends, news, letters. The magic of steamhas placed New Orleans nearer to New York than to the Timbaliers,nearer to Washington than to Wine Island, nearer to Chicago than toBarataria Bay. And even during the deepest sleep of waves and windsthere will come betimes to sojourners in this unfamiliar archipelago afeeling of lonesomeness that is a fear, a feeling of isolation from theworld of men,--totally unlike that sense
of solitude which haunts onein the silence of mountain-heights, or amid the eternal tumult of loftygranitic coasts: a sense of helpless insecurity.

  The land seems but an undulation of the sea-bed: its highest ridges donot rise more than the height of a man above the salines on eitherside;--the salines themselves lie almost level with the level of theflood-tides;--the tides are variable, treacherous, mysterious. Butwhen all around and above these ever-changing shores the twinvastnesses of heaven and sea begin to utter the tremendous revelationof themselves as infinite forces in contention, then indeed this senseof separation from humanity appalls ... Perhaps it was such a feelingwhich forced men, on the tenth day of August, eighteen hundred andfifty-six, to hope against hope for the coming of the Star, and tostrain their eyes towards far-off Terrebonne. "It was a wind you couldlie down on," said my friend the pilot.

  ... "Great God!" shrieked a voice above the shouting of