Chita: A Memory of Last Island | Page 8

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-shells the long, bellowing signal
of approach.
Then the wind began to blow, with the passing 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 shore: 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 passed. 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
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 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 Washington 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 shores 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