Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 3

replacement provisions of this "Small
Print!" statement.
[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Benedictine
University" within the 60 days following each date you prepare (or
were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic)
tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Benedictine
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island
by Lafcadio Hearn

"But Nature whistled with all her winds, Did as she pleased, and went
her way." ---Emerson
To my friend Dr. Rodolfo Matas of New Orleans

The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
I.
Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass 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
passengers at a point not far from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street,
hard by the sugar-landing, where there is ever a pushing and flocking of
steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts against the
levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But the miniature

steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf never lingers long
in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips into some canal-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 assemblages of cypresses all hoary with the
parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods. Ever
from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or
bayou,--from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and
sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into
wastes of reedy morass 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, scraping 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 passengers, 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 passes 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 passes;--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 shining flood also
kindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets, each with its beach-girdle of
dazzling sand and shells, 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