... Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the pest-smitten
city of New Orleans.
Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from
the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm river ran yellow and
noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. Even sounds seemed blunted by the
heaviness of the air;--the rumbling of wheels, the reverberation of
footsteps, fell half-toned upon the ear, like sounds that visit a
dozing brain.
Daily, almost at the same hour, the continuous sense of atmospheric
oppression became thickened;--a packed herd of low-bellying clouds
lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered,
thundered, and burst in torrential rain--tepid, perpendicular--and
vanished utterly away. Then, more furiously than before, the sun
flamed down;--roofs and pavements steamed; the streets seemed to smoke;
the air grew suffocating with vapor; and the luminous city filled with
a faint, sickly odor,--a stale smell, as of dead leaves suddenly
disinterred from wet mould,--as of grasses decomposing after a flood.
Something saffron speckled the slimy water of the gutters; sulphur some
called it; others feared even to give it a name! Was it only the
wind-blown pollen of some innocuous plant?
I do not know; but to many it seemed as if the Invisible Destruction
were scattering visible seed! ... Such were the days; and each day the
terror-stricken city offered up its hecatomb to death; and the faces of
all the dead were yellow as flame!
"DECEDE--"; "DECEDEE--"; "FALLECIO;"--"DIED." ... On the door-posts,
the telegraph-poles, the pillars of verandas, the lamps,--over the
government letter-boxes,--everywhere glimmered the white annunciations
of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured
into the gutters; and huge purifying fires were kindled after sunset.
The nights began with a black heat;--there were hours when the acrid
air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial
tubing;--then, toward morning, it would grow chill with venomous
vapors, with morbific dews,--till the sun came up to lift the torpid
moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-glow. And the
interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again
began to circulate between the centres of life and of death;--and long
trains and steamships rushed from the port, with heavy burden of
fugitives.
Wealth might flee; yet even in flight there was peril. Men, who might
have been saved by the craft of experienced nurses at home, hurriedly
departed in apparent health, unconsciously carrying in their blood the
toxic principle of a malady unfamiliar to physicians of the West and
North;--and they died upon their way, by the road-side, by the
river-banks, in woods, in deserted stations, on the cots of quarantine
hospitals. Wiser those who sought refuge in the purity of the pine
forests, or in those near Gulf Islands, whence the bright sea-breath
kept ever sweeping back the expanding poison into the funereal swamps,
into the misty lowlands. The watering-resorts became
overcrowded;--then the fishing villages were thronged,--at least all
which were easy to reach by steamboat or by lugger. And at last, even
Viosca's Point,--remote and unfamiliar as it was,--had a stranger to
shelter: a good old gentleman named Edwards, rather broken down in
health--who came as much for quiet as for sea-air, and who had been
warmly recommended to Feliu by Captain Harris. For some years he had
been troubled by a disease of the heart.
Certainly the old invalid could not have found a more suitable place so
far as rest and quiet were concerned. The season had early given such
little promise that several men of the Point betook themselves
elsewhere; and the aged visitor had two or three vacant cabins from
among which to select a dwelling-place. He chose to occupy the most
remote of all, which Carmen furnished for him with a cool moss bed and
some necessary furniture,--including a big wooden rocking-chair. It
seemed to him very comfortable thus. He took his meals with the
family, spent most of the day in his own quarters, spoke very little,
and lived so unobtrusively and inconspicuously that his presence in the
settlement was felt scarcely more than that of some dumb
creature,--some domestic animal,--some humble pet whose relation to the
family is only fully comprehended after it has failed to appear for
several days in its accustomed place of patient waiting,--and we know
that it is dead.