V.

Thirty years ago, Last Island lay steeped in the enormous light of even

such magical days. July was dying;--for weeks no fleck of cloud had

broken the heaven's blue dream of eternity; winds held their breath;

slow waveless caressed the bland brown beach with a sound as of kisses

and whispers. To one who found himself alone, beyond the limits of the

village and beyond the hearing of its voices,--the vast silence, the

vast light, seemed full of weirdness. And these hushes, these

transparencies, do not always inspire a causeless apprehension: they

are omens sometimes--omens of coming tempest.

Nature,--incomprehensible Sphinx!--before her mightiest bursts of rage,

ever puts forth her divinest witchery, makes more manifest her awful

beauty ...

But in that forgotten summer the witchery lasted many long days,--days

born in rose-light, buried in gold. It was the height of the season.

The long myrtle-shadowed village was thronged with its summer

population;--the big hotel could hardly accommodate all its

guests;--the bathing-houses were too few for the crowds who flocked to

the water morning and evening. There were diversions for all,--hunting

and fishing parties, yachting excursions, rides, music, games,

promenades. Carriage wheels whirled flickering along the beach,

seaming its smoothness noiselessly, as if muffled. Love wrote its

dreams upon the sand...

... Then one great noon, when the blue abyss of day seemed to yawn over

the world more deeply than ever before, a sudden change touched the

quicksilver smoothness of the waters--the swaying shadow of a vast

motion. First the whole sea-circle appeared to rise up bodily at the

sky; the horizon-curve lifted to a straight line; the line darkened and

approached,--a monstrous wrinkle, an immeasurable fold of green water,

moving swift as a cloud-shadow pursued by sunlight. But it had looked

formidable only by startling contrast with the previous placidity of

the open: it was scarcely two feet high;--it curled slowly as it

neared the beach, and combed itself out in sheets of woolly foam with a

low, rich roll of whispered thunder. Swift in pursuit another

followed--a third--a feebler fourth; then the sea only swayed a little,

and stilled again. Minutes passed, and the immeasurable heaving

recommenced--one, two, three, four ... seven long swells this

time;--and the Gulf smoothed itself once more. Irregularly the

phenomenon continued to repeat itself, each time with heavier billowing

and briefer intervals of quiet--until at last the whole sea grew

restless and shifted color and flickered green;--the swells became

shorter and changed form. Then from horizon to shore ran one

uninterrupted heaving--one vast green swarming of snaky shapes, rolling

in to hiss and flatten upon the sand. Yet no single cirrus-speck

revealed itself through all the violet heights: there was no

wind!--you might have fancied the sea had been upheaved from beneath ...

And indeed the fancy of a seismic origin for a windless surge would not

appear in these latitudes to be utterly without foundation. On the

fairest days a southeast breeze may bear you an odor singular enough to

startle you from sleep,--a strong, sharp smell as of fish-oil; and

gazing at the sea you might be still more startled at the sudden

apparition of great oleaginous patches spreading over the water,

sheeting over the swells. That is, if you had never heard of the

mysterious submarine oil-wells, the volcanic fountains, unexplored,

that well up with the eternal pulsing of the Gulf-Stream ...

But the pleasure-seekers of Last Island knew there must have been a

"great blow" somewhere that day. Still the sea swelled; and a splendid

surf made the evening bath delightful. Then, just at sundown, a

beautiful cloud-bridge grew 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 and

fifty-six, to hope against hope for the coming of the Star, and to

strain their eyes towards far-off Terrebonne. "It was a wind you could

lie down on," said my friend the pilot.

... "Great God!" shrieked a voice above the shouting of the

storm,--"she is coming!" ... It was true. Down the Atchafalaya, and

thence through strange mazes of bayou, lakelet, and pass, by a rear

route familiar only to the best of pilots, the frail river-craft had

toiled into Caillou Bay, running close to the main shore;--and now she

was heading right for the island, with the wind aft, over the monstrous

sea. On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,--with a great whiteness

wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,--a

tempest-whirl of spray;--ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her

smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke--the wind devoured it! The

excitement on shore became wild;--men shouted themselves hoarse; women

laughed and cried. Every telescope and opera-glass was directed upon

the coming apparition; all wondered how the pilot kept his feet; all

marvelled at the madness of the captain.

But Captain Abraham Smith was not mad. A veteran American sailor, he

had learned to know the great Gulf as scholars know deep books by

heart: he knew the birthplace of its tempests, the mystery of its

tides, the omens of its hurricanes. While lying at Brashear City he

felt the storm had not yet reached its highest, vaguely foresaw a

mighty peril, and resolved to wait no longer for a lull. "Boys," he

said, "we've got to take her out in spite of Hell!" And they "took her

out." Through all the peril, his men stayed by him and obeyed him. By

midmorning the wind had deepened to a roar,--lowering sometimes to a

rumble, sometimes bursting upon the ears like a measureless and

deafening crash. Then the captain knew the Star was running a race

with Death. "She'll win it," he muttered;--"she'll stand it ...

Perhaps they'll have need of me to-night."

She won! With a sonorous steam-chant of triumph the brave little

vessel rode at last into the bayou, and anchored hard by her accustomed

resting-place, in full view of the hotel, though not near enough to

shore to lower her gang-plank.... But she had sung her swan-song.

Gathering in from the northeast, the waters of the bay were already

marbling over the salines and half across the island; and still the

wind increased its paroxysmal power.

Cottages began to rock. Some slid away from the solid props upon which

they rested. A chimney fumbled. Shutters were wrenched off; verandas

demolished. Light roofs lifted, dropped again, and flapped into ruin.

Trees bent their heads to the earth. And still the storm grew louder

and blacker with every passing hour.

The Star rose with the rising of the waters, dragging her anchor.

Two more anchors were put out, and still she dragged--dragged in with

the flood,--twisting, shuddering, careening in her agony. Evening fell;

the sand began to move with the wind, stinging faces like a continuous

fire of fine shot; and frenzied blasts came to buffet the steamer

forward, sideward. Then one of her hog-chains parted with a clang like

the boom of a big bell. Then another! ... Then the captain bade his

men to cut away all her upper works, clean to the deck. Overboard into

the seething went her stacks, her pilot-house, her cabins,--and whirled

away. And the naked hull of the Star, still dragging her three

anchors, labored on through the darkness, nearer and nearer to the

immense silhouette of the hotel, whose hundred windows were now all

aflame. The vast timber building seemed to defy the storm. The wind,

roaring round its broad verandas,--hissing through every crevice with

the sound and force of steam,--appeared to waste its rage. And in the

half-lull between two terrible gusts there came to the captain's ears a

sound that seemed strange in that night of multitudinous terrors ... a

sound of music!