I
The little steamer will bear you thither in one summer day--starting
at early morning, arriving just as the sun begins to rest his red chin
upon the edge of the west. It is a somewhat wearisome and a wonderfully
tortuous journey, through that same marshy labyrinth by which the
slavers in other days used to smuggle their African freight up to
the old Creole city from the Gulf.... Leaving the Mississippi by a
lock-guarded opening in its western levee, the miniature packet first
enters a long and narrow canal--cutting straight across plantations
considerably below the level of its raised banks--and through this
artificial waterway she struggles on, panting desperately under the
scorching heat, until after long hours she almost leaps, with a
great steam-sigh of relief, into the deeper and broader bayou that
serpentines through the swamp-forest. Then there is at least ample
shadow; the moss-hung trees fling their silhouettes right across the
water and into the woods on the other side, morning and evening.
Grotesque roots--black, geniculated, gnarly--project from the crumbling
banks like bones from an ancient grave;--dead, shrunken limbs and
fallen trunks lie macerating in the slime. Grim shapes of cypress
stoop above us, and seem to point the way with anchylosed knobby
finger--their squalid tatters of moss grazing our smoke-stack. The
banks swarm with crustaceans, gnawing, burrowing, undermining; gray
saurians slumber among the gray floating logs at the edge; gorged
carrion-birds doze upon the paralytic shoulders of cypresses, about
whose roots are coiled more serpents than ever gnawed Yggdrasil.
The silence is only broken by the loud breathing of the little
steamer;--odors of vegetable death--smells of drowned grasses and
decomposing trunks and of eternal mould-formation--make the air weighty
to breathe; and the green obscurities on either hand deepen behind the
crests of the water-oaks and the bright masses of willow frondescense.
The parasitic life of the swamp, pendent and enormous, gives the scene
a drenched, half-drowned look, as of a land long-immersed, and pushed
up again from profundities of stagnant water--and still dripping with
moisture and monstrous algæ....
The ranks of the water-oaks become less serried--the semi-tropical
vegetation less puissant--the willows and palmettoes and cypresses
no longer bar out the horizon-light; and the bayou broadens into a
shining, green-rimmed sheet of water, over which our little boat puffs
a zigzag course--feeling her way cautiously--to enter a long chain
of lakelets and lakes, all bayou-linked together. Sparser and lower
becomes the foliage-line, lower also the banks; the water-tints
brighten bluely; the heavy and almost acrid odors of the swamp pass
away. So thin the land is that from the little steamer's deck, as from
a great altitude, the eye can range over immense distances. These
are the skirts of the continent, trending in multitudinous tatters
southward to the sea;--and the practiced gaze of the geologist can
discern the history of prodigious alluvial formation, the slow creation
of future prairie lands, in those long grassy tongues--those desolate
islands, shaped like the letters of an Oriental alphabet--those reaches
of flesh-colored sand, that shift their shape with the years, but never
cease to grow.
Miles of sluggish, laboring travel--sometimes over shallows of less
than half a fathom--through archipelagoes whose islets become more
and more widely separated as we proceed. Then the water deepens
steadily--and the sky also seems to deepen--and there is something in
the bright air that makes electrical commotion in the blood and fills
the lungs with richer life. Gulls with white breasts and dark, broad
wings sweep past with sharp, plaintive cries; brown clouds of pelicans
hover above tiny islands within rifle-shot--alternately rising and
descending all together. Through luminous distances the eye can just
distinguish masses of foliage, madder-colored by remoteness, that seem
to float in suspension between the brightness of the horizon and the
brightness of water, like shapes of the Fata Morgana. And in those
far, dim, island groves prevails, perhaps, the strange belief that
the Universe itself is but a mirage; for the gods of the most eastern
East have been transported thither, and the incense of Oriental prayer
mounts thence into the azure of a Christian heaven. Those are Chinese
fishing-stations--miniature villages of palmetto huts, whose yellow
populations still cling to the creed of Fo--unless, indeed, they
follow the more practical teachings of the Ancient Infant, born with
snow-white hair--the doctrine of the good Thai-chang-lao-kinn, the
sublime Loo-tseu...