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....