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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
Contents
The Legend of L'Ile Derniere Out of the Sea's Strength The Shadow of the Tide
The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
I.
Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass through astrange land into a strange sea, by various winding waterways. You canjourney to the Gulf by lugger if you please; but the trip may be mademuch more rapidly and agreeably on some one of those light, narrowsteamers, built especially for bayou-travel, which usually receivepassengers 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 flockingof steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breastsagainst the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But theminiature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf neverlingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river, slips intosome canal-mouth, labors along the artificial channel awhile, and thenleaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free way down many a leagueof heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps thereafter she may bear you throughthe immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-greenlevel is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of someirrigating machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes bepursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through sombremazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary withthe parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods.Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal orbayou,--from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimesthe swamp-forest visibly thins away from these shores into wastes ofreedy morass where, even of breathless nights, the quaggy soil tremblesto a sound like thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar ofbillions of reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surgingin stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appallingchorus of frogs! ....
Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all daythe little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue open waterbelow the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be fortunate enough to enterthe Gulf about the time of sunset. For the sake of passengers, shetravels by day only; but there are other vessels which make the journeyalso by night--threading the bayou-labyrinths winter and summer:sometimes steering by the North Star,--sometimes feeling the way withpoles in the white season of fogs,--sometimes, again, steering by thatStar of Evening which in our sky glows like another moon, and dropsover the silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire.
Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you intothin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminouscolor;--bayous open into broad passes;--lakes link themselves withsea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,--keen, cool, and full oflight. For the first time the vessel begins to swing,--rocking to thegreat 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 thelow land must have once been rent asunder by the sea, and strewn aboutthe Gulf in fantastic tatters....
Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an oasisemerging,--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the rounded foliageof evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the shining flood alsokindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets, each with its beach-girdleof dazzling sand and shells, yellow-white,--and all radiant withsemi-tropical foliage, myrtle and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Undertheir emerald shadows curious little villages of palmetto huts aredrowsing, where dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malayfishermen, who speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well astheir own Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions ofthe Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy toinspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddybronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them.... Furtherseaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some queer camp ofwooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform that stands abovethe water upon a thousand piles;--over the miniature wharf you canscarcely fail to observe a white sign-board painted with crimsonideographs. The great platform is used for drying fish in the sun; andthe fantastic characters of the sign, literally translated, mean:"Heap--Shrimp--Plenty." ... And finally all the land melts down intodesolations of sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except bythe melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by thatsound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Seatouches the bass keys of his mighty organ....
II.
Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel bysteamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain to enterthe Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre, the most familiarisland of all, not so much because of its proximity as because of itsgreat crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the stationaryWhite-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is bleaklyuninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and sinewy weedswaving away from a thin beach ever speckled with drift and decayingthings,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.
Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of thelight house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber, abovewhich rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort, whose ditchesswarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half choked by obsoletecannon-shot, now thickly covered with incrustation of oyster shells....Around all the gray circling of a shark-haunted sea...
Sometimes of autumn evenings there, when the hollow of heaven flameslike the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are flying in onewild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny grasses all coveredwith something like husks,--wheat-colored husks,--large, flat, anddisposed evenly along the lee-side of each swaying stalk, so as topresent only their edges to the wind. But, if you approach, those palehusks all break open to display strange splendors of scarlet andseal-brown, with arabesque mottlings in white and black: they changeinto wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your eyesand rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle down fartheroff, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ... a whirlingflower-drift of sleepy butterflies!
Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle: primitively awilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained, diked, and cultivatedby Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar chiefly as abathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed its own;--thecane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains, over which tramwayswind to the smooth beach;--the plantation-residences have beenconverted into rustic hotels, and the negro-quarters remodelled intovillages of cozy cottages for the reception of guests. But with itsimposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorouslanes of oleander.
its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, GrandeIsle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness isexceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is reiterated by most ofthe other islands,--Caillou, Cassetete, Calumet, Wine Island, the twinTimbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the graypelican,--all of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wirygrasses, prairie-cane, and scrub-timber. Last Island (L'IleDerniere),--well worthy a long visit in other years, in spite of itsremoteness, is now a ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lyingnearly forty miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far morepopulated a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated islandof the group, but also the most fashionable watering-place of thearistocratic South;--to-day it is v
isited by fishermen only, at longintervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled that ofGrande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much similar, althoughfiner: a charming village of cottages facing the Gulf near the westernend. The hotel itself was a massive two-story construction of timber,containing many apartments, together with a large dining-room anddancing-hall. In rear of the hotel was a bayou, where passengerslanded--"Village Bayou" it is still called by seamen;--but the deepchannel which now cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did notexist while the village remained. The sea tore it out in onenight--the same night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished intothe Gulf, leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few ofthose strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame housesand cisterns had been raised. One living creature was found thereafter the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary cow survived thefury of a storm-flood that actually rent the island in twain has everremained a mystery ...
III.
On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees--whenthere are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright,hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely patheticin their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle Iremember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in lineagainst the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments andwind-blown hair,--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperatelynorthward as to save themselves from falling. And they are beingpursued indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many amile 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 whereof old the sugar-cane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-finsnow seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men builddikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--wholeforests of drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress.Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the seastruggles to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands andthe 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 madetheir last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,--usually atsome long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Justwhere the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude ofblackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,--some high enoughto resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness toenormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous whitegrowths clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument.These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,--so long drowned that theshell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon thebeach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast brokencolumns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach outmutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;--and besidethese 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. Thesand around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,--iseverywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled andsemi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-whiteclaws;--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 forso many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with hishuge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by yearthat rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads andsinks, shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the laststanding corpses of the oaks, ever clinging with naked, dead feet tothe sliding beach, lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As thesands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted masses ofsnakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,--like the reaching arms ofcephalopods....
... Grande Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will beforemany years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,--slowlybut 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 aveteran pilot, while we sat one evening together on the trunk of adrifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply into the GrandeIsle beach. The day had been tropically warm; we had sought the shorefor a breath of living air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderousheat lifted,--a sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in thedarkening horizon,--wind and water began to strive together,--and soonall the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhapsthe coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened tohim, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed backto me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of theSea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voices--voices of drownedmen,--the muttering of multitudinous dead,--the moaning of innumerableghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch callof storms....
IV.
The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is somethingimpossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the palerzones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will bestunderstand me who have seen the splendor of a West Indian sky. And yetthere is a tenderness of tint, a caress of color, in these Gulf-dayswhich is not of the Antilles,--a spirituality, as of eternal tropicalspring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted uphis eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeedunder such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest ofSouthern havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is asomething unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compelsawe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic: andreverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not thePneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the great BlueSoul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,--save the low landunder your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tinygreen flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly,caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you:out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes,--to drift intodelicious oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, thesubstantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infiniteBlue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly awayforever....
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 itbe the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling his sickle-wingsagainst the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats higher, the floodshifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray, yet flickering with themorning gold, it is the vision of John,--the apocalyptic Sea of Glassmixed with fire;--again, with the growing breeze, it takes thatincredible purple tint familiar mostly to painters of West Indianscenery;--once more, under the blaze of noon, it changes to a waste ofbroken emerald. With evening, the horizon assumes tints ofinexpressible sweetness,--pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk andfire; and in the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flushings as ofnacre. 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 approachof equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over the rim of thesea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It rises; and othersrise 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 andwreathing into an arch that expands and advances,--bending from horizonto horizon.
A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the zenith, itseems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge arching theempyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from either underside of theworld. Then the colossal phantom begins to turn,
as on a pivot ofair,--always preserving its curvilinear symmetry, but moving its unseenends beyond and below the sky-circle. And at last it floats awayunbroken beyond the blue sweep of the world, with a wind followingafter. Day after day, almost at the same hour, the white arc rises,wheels, and passes...
... Never a glimpse of rock on these low shores;--only long slopingbeaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem withvitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant susurration, ablattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all the sea there is aceaseless play of silver lightning,--flashing of myriad fish.Sometimes the shallows are thickened with minute, transparent,crab-like organisms,--all colorless as gelatine. There are days alsowhen countless medusae drift in--beautiful veined creatures that throblike hearts, with perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanousenvelops: some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood theshadows or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have thesemblance of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, justbeginning to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowysproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is not morepainful... Within an hour or two after their appearance all thesetremulous 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 youfeel those ascending wave-currents of coldness arising which bespeakprofundity, you will also begin to feel innumerable touches, as ofgroping fingers--touches of the bodies of fish, innumerable fish,fleeing towards shore. The farther you advance, the more thickly youwill 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, likeintercrossing fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower aboutyou, circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instantyour feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that
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