Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 5

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 glass, 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 multitude
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
shell-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 masses 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 shore 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 multitudinous 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 shores 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