Chita: a Memory of Last Island Part 1

Chita: A Memory of Last Island.

by Lafcadio Hearn.

The Legend of L'Ile Derniere

I.

Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pa.s.s through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some one of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receive pa.s.sengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street, hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pus.h.i.+ng and flocking of steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white b.r.e.a.s.t.s against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But the miniature steamboat on which you engage pa.s.sage to the Gulf never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into some ca.n.a.l-mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre mazes of swamp-forest,--past a.s.semblages of cypresses all h.o.a.ry with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-G.o.ds.

Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into ca.n.a.l or bayou,--from bayou or ca.n.a.l once more into lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away from these sh.o.r.es into wastes of reedy mora.s.s where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surging in stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appalling chorus of frogs! ....

Panting, screaming, sc.r.a.ping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For the sake of pa.s.sengers, she travels by day only; but there are other vessels which make the journey also by night--threading the bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering by the North Star,--sometimes feeling the way with poles in the white season of fogs,--sometimes, again, steering by that Star of Evening which in our sky glows like another moon, and drops over the silent lakes as she pa.s.ses a quivering trail of silver fire.

Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you into thin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminous color;--bayous open into broad pa.s.ses;--lakes link themselves with sea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,--keen, cool, and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins to swing,--rocking to the great living pulse of the tides. And gazing from the deck around you, with no forest walls to break the view, it will seem to you that the low land must have once been rent asunder by the sea, and strewn about the Gulf in fantastic tatters....

Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an oasis emerging,--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the rounded foliage of evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the s.h.i.+ning flood also kindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets, each with its beach-girdle of dazzling sand and sh.e.l.ls, yellow-white,--and all radiant with semi-tropical foliage, myrtle and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malay fishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to inspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy bronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them.... Further seaward you may also pa.s.s a Chinese settlement: some queer camp of wooden dwellings cl.u.s.tering around a vast platform that stands above the water upon a thousand piles;--over the miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white sign-board painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in the sun; and the fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean: "Heap--Shrimp--Plenty." ... And finally all the land melts down into desolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by the melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that sound which shakes all sh.o.r.es when the weird Musician of the Sea touches the ba.s.s keys of his mighty organ....

II.

Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel by steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enter the Gulf by Grande Pa.s.s--skirting Grande Terre, the most familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept gra.s.ses and sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decaying things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.

Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, above which rises the angular ruddy ma.s.s of the old brick fort, whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsolete cannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustation of oyster sh.e.l.ls....

Around all the gray circling of a shark-haunted sea...

Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flames like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in one wild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny gra.s.ses all covered with something like husks,--wheat-colored husks,--large, flat, and disposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down farther off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ... a whirling flower-drift of sleepy b.u.t.terflies!

Southwest, across the pa.s.s, gleams beautiful Grande Isle: primitively a wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained, diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed its own;--the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramways wind to the smooth beach;--the plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and the negro-quarters remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander.

its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is reiterated by most of the other islands,--Caillou, Ca.s.setete, Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the gray pelican,--all of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wiry gra.s.ses, prairie-cane, and scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Ile Derniere),--well worthy a long visit in other years, in spite of its remoteness, is now a ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying nearly forty miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far more populated a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated island of the group, but also the most fas.h.i.+onable watering-place of the aristocratic South;--to-day it is visited by fishermen only, at long intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled that of Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much similar, although finer: a charming village of cottages facing the Gulf near the western end. The hotel itself was a ma.s.sive two-story construction of timber, containing many apartments, together with a large dining-room and dancing-hall. In rear of the hotel was a bayou, where pa.s.sengers landed--"Village Bayou" it is still called by seamen;--but the deep channel which now cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not exist while the village remained. The sea tore it out in one night--the same night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into the Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found there after the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary cow survived the fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the island in twain has ever remained a mystery ...

III.

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees--when there are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry: far out you can see, through a good gla.s.s, the porpoises at play where of old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--whole forests of drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress.

Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.

And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,--usually at some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a mult.i.tude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,--some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white growths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument.

These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that the sh.e.l.l-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;--and beside these are others which have kept their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,--is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind beating among reeds: a marvellous creeping of "fiddlers," which the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks, shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach, lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted ma.s.ses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,--like the reaching arms of cephalopods....

... Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,--slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land.

Last Island has gone! How it went I first heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been tropically warm; we had sought the sh.o.r.e for a breath of living air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,--a sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in the darkening horizon,--wind and water began to strive together,--and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voices--voices of drowned men,--the muttering of mult.i.tudinous dead,--the moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch call of storms....

IV.

The charm of a single summer day on these island sh.o.r.es is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was G.o.d;--it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the Pneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and s.p.a.ce you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away forever....

And this day-magic of azure endures sometimes for months together.

Cloudlessly the dawn reddens up through a violet east:

there is no speck upon the blossoming of its Mystical Rose,--unless it be the silhouette of some pa.s.sing gull, whirling his sickle-wings against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats higher, the flood s.h.i.+fts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray, yet flickering with the morning gold, it is the vision of John,--the apocalyptic Sea of Gla.s.s mixed with fire;--again, with the growing breeze, it takes that incredible purple tint familiar mostly to painters of West Indian scenery;--once more, under the blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of broken emerald. With evening, the horizon a.s.sumes tints of inexpressible sweetness,--pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and fire; and in the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flus.h.i.+ngs as of nacre. Then, if the sea sleeps, it dreams of all these,--faintly, weirdly,--shadowing them even to the verge of heaven.

Beautiful, too, are those white phantasmagoria which, at the approach of equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over the rim of the sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It rises; and others rise with it, to right and left--slowly at first; then more swiftly.

All are brilliantly white and flocculent, like loose new cotton.

Gradually they mount in enormous line high above the Gulf, rolling and wreathing into an arch that expands and advances,--bending from horizon to horizon.

A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge arching the empyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn, as on a pivot of air,--always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind following after. Day after day, almost at the same hour, the white arc rises, wheels, and pa.s.ses...

... Never a glimpse of rock on these low sh.o.r.es;--only long sloping beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem with vitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant susurration, a blattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all the sea there is a ceaseless play of silver lightning,--flas.h.i.+ng of myriad fish.

Sometimes the shallows are thickened with minute, transparent, crab-like organisms,--all colorless as gelatine. There are days also when countless medusae drift in--beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelops: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have the semblance of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, just beginning to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy sproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is not more painful... Within an hour or two after their appearance all these tremulous jellies vanish mysteriously as they came.

Perhaps, if a bold swimmer, you may venture out alone a long way--once!

Not twice!--even in company. As the water deepens beneath you, and you feel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers--touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards sh.o.r.e. The farther you advance, the more thickly you will feel them come; and above you and around you, to right and left, others will leap and fall so swiftly as to daze the sight, like intercrossing fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you, circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss, the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you; the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee glimmering by will enter into you also...

From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant sawfish or the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises, or from the grande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net may hold,--all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black, with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered, would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self, without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical caresses of the sea ...

V.

Thirty years ago, Last Island lay steeped in the enormous light of even such magical days. July was dying;--for weeks no fleck of cloud had broken the heaven's blue dream of eternity; winds held their breath; slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kisses and whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of the village and beyond the hearing of its voices,--the vast silence, the vast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, these transparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: they are 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 awful beauty ...

But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long days,--days born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the height of the season.

The long myrtle-shadowed village was thronged with its summer population;--the big hotel could hardly accommodate all its guests;--the bathing-houses were too few for the crowds who flocked to the water morning and evening. There were diversions for all,--hunting and fis.h.i.+ng parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games, promenades. Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach, seaming its smoothness noiselessly, as if m.u.f.fled. Love wrote its dreams upon the sand...

... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the quicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vast motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and approached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water, moving swift as a cloud-shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had looked formidable only by startling contrast with the previous placidity of the open: it was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as it neared the beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with a low, rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit another followed--a third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a little, and stilled again. Minutes pa.s.sed, and the immeasurable heaving recommenced--one, two, three, four ... seven long swells this time;--and the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly the phenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier billowing and briefer intervals of quiet--until at last the whole sea grew restless and s.h.i.+fted color and flickered green;--the swells became shorter and changed form. Then from horizon to sh.o.r.e ran one uninterrupted heaving--one vast green swarming of snaky shapes, rolling in to hiss and flatten upon the sand. Yet no single cirrus-speck revealed itself through all the violet heights: there was no wind!--you might have fancied the sea had been upheaved from beneath ...

And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge would not appear in these lat.i.tudes to be utterly without foundation. On the fairest days a southeast breeze may bear you an odor singular enough to startle you from sleep,--a strong, sharp smell as of fish-oil; and gazing at the sea you might be still more startled at the sudden apparition of great oleaginous patches spreading over the water, sheeting over the swells. That is, if you had never heard of the mysterious 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 splendid surf made the evening bath delightful. Then, just at sundown, a beautiful cloud-bridge grew up and arched the sky with a single span of cottony pink vapor, that changed and deepened color with the dying of the iridescent day. And the cloud-bridge approached, stretched, strained, and swung round at last to make way for the coming of the gale,--even as the light bridges that traverse the dreamy Teche swing open when luggermen sound through their conch-sh.e.l.ls the long, bellowing signal of approach.

Then the wind began to blow, with the pa.s.sing of July. It blew from the northeast, clear, cool. It blew in enormous sighs, dying away at regular intervals, as if pausing to draw breath. All night it blew; and in each pause could be heard the answering moan of the rising surf,--as if the rhythm of the sea moulded itself after the rhythm of the air,--as if the waving of the water responded precisely to the waving of the wind,--a billow for every puff, a surge for every sigh.

The August morning broke in a bright sky;--the breeze still came cool and clear from the northeast. The waves were running now at a sharp angle to the sh.o.r.e: they began to carry fleeces, an innumerable flock of vague green shapes, wind-driven to be despoiled of their ghostly wool. Far as the eye could follow the line of the beach, all the slope was white with the great shearing of them. Clouds came, flew as in a panic against the face of the sun, and pa.s.sed. All that day and through the night and into the morning again the breeze continued from the north. east, blowing like an equinoctial gale ...

Then day by day the vast breath freshened steadily, and the waters heightened. A week later sea-bathing had become perilous: colossal breakers were herding in, like moving leviathan-backs, twice the height of a man. Still the gale grew, and the billowing waxed mightier, and faster and faster overhead flew the tatters of torn cloud. The gray morning of the 9th wanly lighted a surf that appalled the best swimmers: the sea was one wild agony of foam, the gale was rending off the heads of the waves and veiling the horizon with a fog of salt spray. Shadowless and gray the day remained; there were mad bursts of las.h.i.+ng 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 of a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the moonless night came.

Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world,--hooting,--uttering nightmare sounds,--Whoo!--whoo!--whoo!--and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness. From the northwest the breakers of the bay began to roll high over the sandy slope, into the salines;--the village bayou broadened to a bellowing flood ... So the tumult swelled and the turmoil heightened until morning,--a morning of gray gloom and whistling rain. Rain of bursting clouds and rain of wind-blown brine from the great spuming agony of the sea.

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

Even today, in these Creole islands, the advent of the steamer is the great event of the week. There are no telegraph lines, no telephones: the mail-packet is the only trustworthy medium of communication with the outer world, bringing friends, news, letters. The magic of steam has placed New Orleans nearer to New York than to the Timbaliers, nearer to Was.h.i.+ngton than to Wine Island, nearer to Chicago than to Barataria Bay. And even during the deepest sleep of waves and winds there will come betimes to sojourners in this unfamiliar archipelago a feeling of lonesomeness that is a fear, a feeling of isolation from the world of men,--totally unlike that sense of solitude which haunts one in the silence of mountain-heights, or amid the eternal tumult of lofty granitic coasts: a sense of helpless insecurity.

The land seems but an undulation of the sea-bed: its highest ridges do not rise more than the height of a man above the salines on either side;--the salines themselves lie almost level with the level of the flood-tides;--the tides are variable, treacherous, mysterious. But when all around and above these ever-changing sh.o.r.es the twin vastnesses of heaven and sea begin to utter the tremendous revelation of themselves as infinite forces in contention, then indeed this sense of separation from humanity appalls ... Perhaps it was such a feeling which forced men, on the tenth day of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six, to hope against hope for the coming of the Star, and to strain their eyes towards far-off Terrebonne. "It was a wind you could lie down on," said my friend the pilot.

... "Great G.o.d!" shrieked a voice above the shouting of the storm,--"she is coming!" ... It was true. Down the Atchafalaya, and thence through strange mazes of bayou, lakelet, and pa.s.s, by a rear route familiar only to the best of pilots, the frail river-craft had toiled into Caillou Bay, running close to the main sh.o.r.e;--and now she was heading right for the island, with the wind aft, over the monstrous sea. On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,--with a great whiteness wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,--a tempest-whirl of spray;--ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke--the wind devoured it! The excitement on sh.o.r.e became wild;--men shouted themselves hoa.r.s.e; women laughed and cried. Every telescope and opera-gla.s.s was directed upon the coming apparition; all wondered how the pilot kept his feet; all marvelled at the madness of the captain.