Chita A Memory of Last Island
L >>
Lafcadio Hearn >> Chita A Memory of Last Island
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 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
The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
I.
Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands, you pass
through a strange land into a strange sea, by various winding
waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please;
but the trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some
one of those light, narrow steamers, built especially for
bayou-travel, which usually receive passengers 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 flocking of
steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts
against the levee, side by side,--like great weary swans. But
the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf
never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river,
slips into some canal-mouth, labors along the artificial channel
awhile, and then leaves it with a scream of joy, to puff her free
way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps
thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of
drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at
long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating
machine;--but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued,
you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre
mazes of swamp-forest,--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary
with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of
fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides
again into canal or bayou,--from bayou or canal once more into
lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away
from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where, even of
breathless nights, the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like
thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of
reptile voices chanting in cadence,--rhythmically surging in
stupendous crescendo and diminuendo,--a monstrous and appalling
chorus of frogs! ....
Panting, screaming, scraping her bottom over the sand-bars,--all
day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue
open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be
fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For
the sake of passengers, she travels by day only; but there are
other vessels which make the journey also by night--threading the
bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering by the
North Star,--sometimes feeling the way with poles in the white
season of fogs,--sometimes, again, steering by that Star of
Evening which in our sky glows like another moon, and drops over
the silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire.
Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you
into thin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminous
color;--bayous open into broad passes;--lakes link themselves
with sea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you,--keen, cool,
and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins to
swing,--rocking to the great 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 the low land must have once
been rent asunder by the sea, and strewn about the Gulf in
fantastic tatters....
Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an
oasis emerging,--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the
rounded foliage of evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the
shining flood also kindred green knolls arise,--pretty islets,
each with its beach-girdle of dazzling sand and shells,
yellow-white,--and all radiant with semi-tropical foliage, myrtle
and palmetto, orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows
curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing, where
dwell a swarthy population of Orientals,--Malay fishermen, who
speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own
Tagal, and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the
Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to
inspire any statuary,--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy
bronze,--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them....
Further seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some
queer camp of wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform
that stands above the water upon a thousand piles;--over the
miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white
sign-board painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform
is used for drying fish in the sun; and the fantastic characters
of the sign, literally translated, mean: "Heap--Shrimp--Plenty."
... And finally all the land melts down into desolations of
sea-marsh, whose stillness is seldom broken, except by the
melancholy cry of long-legged birds, and in wild seasons by that
sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea
touches the bass keys of his mighty organ....
II.
Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel
by steamer to the sea-islands to-day, you are tolerably certain
to enter the Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre, the most
familiar island of all, not so much because of its proximity as
because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the
stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is
bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and
sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with
drift and decaying things,--worm-riddled timbers, dead porpoises.
Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of
the light house, and again, beyond it, by some puny scrub timber,
above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort,
whose ditches swarm with crabs, and whose sluiceways are half
choked by obsolete cannon-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
flames like the interior of a chalice, and waves and clouds are
flying in one wild rout of broken gold,--you may see the tawny
grasses all covered with something like husks,--wheat-colored
husks,--large, flat, and disposed evenly along the lee-side of
each swaying stalk, so as to present only their edges to the
wind. But, if you approach, those pale husks all break open to
display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown, with
arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into
wondrous living blossoms, which detach themselves before your
eyes and rise in air, and flutter away by thousands to settle
down farther off, and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ...
a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies!
Southwest, across the pass, gleams beautiful Grande Isle:
primitively a wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained,
diked, and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar
chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed
its own;--the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains,
over which tramways wind to the smooth beach;--the
plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels, and
the negro-quarters remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for
the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak,
its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander.
its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile,
Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its
loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is
reiterated by most of the other islands,--Caillou, Cassetete,
Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the
many islets haunted by the gray pelican,--all of which are little
more than sand-bars covered with wiry grasses, prairie-cane, and
scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Ile Derniere),--well worthy a long
visit in other years, in spite of its remoteness, is now a
ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying nearly forty
miles west of Grande Isle, it was nevertheless far more populated
a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated island of
the group, but also the most fashionable watering-place of the
aristocratic South;--to-day it is visited by fishermen only, at
long intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled
that of Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much
similar, although finer: a charming village of cottages facing
the Gulf near the western end. The hotel itself was a massive
two-story construction of timber, containing many apartments,
together with a large dining-room and dancing-hall. In rear of
the hotel was a bayou, where passengers landed--"Village Bayou"
it is still called by seamen;--but the deep channel which now
cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not exist while
the village remained. The sea tore it out in one night--the same
night when trees, fields, dwellings, all vanished into the Gulf,
leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of
those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame
houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was
found there after the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary
cow survived the fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the
island in twain has ever remained a mystery ...
III.
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....
IV.
The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is
something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely,
in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity:
those will best understand me who have seen the splendor of a
West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress
of color, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,--a
spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been
to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when
he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;--it was indeed under such a
sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern
havens Espiritu Santo,--the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a
something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels
awe,--something vital, something holy, something pantheistic:
and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is
not the Pneuma indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the
great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the
calm,--save the low land under your feet, which you almost
forget, since it seems only as a tiny green 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 into delicious
oblivion of facts,--to forget the past, the present, the
substantial,--to comprehend nothing but the existence of that
infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to
melt utterly away forever....
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 it be the silhouette of some passing gull, whirling
his sickle-wings against the crimsoning. Ever, as the sun floats
higher, the flood shifts its color. Sometimes smooth and gray,
yet flickering with the morning gold, it is the vision of
John,--the apocalyptic Sea of Glass mixed with fire;--again, with
the growing breeze, it takes that incredible purple tint familiar
mostly to painters of West Indian scenery;--once more, under the
blaze of noon, it changes to a waste of broken emerald. With
evening, the horizon assumes tints of inexpressible
sweetness,--pearl-lights, opaline colors of milk and fire; and in
the west are topaz-glowings and wondrous flushings as of nacre.
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
approach of equinoctial days, mark the coming of the winds. Over
the rim of the sea a bright cloud gently pushes up its head. It
rises; and others rise 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 and wreathing into an
arch that expands and advances,--bending from horizon to horizon.
A clear, cold breath accompanies its coming. Reaching the
zenith, it seems there to hang poised awhile,--a ghostly bridge
arching the empyrean,--upreaching its measureless span from
either underside of the world. Then the colossal phantom begins
to turn, as on a pivot of air,--always preserving its curvilinear
symmetry, but moving its unseen ends beyond and below the
sky-circle. And at last it floats away unbroken beyond the blue
sweep of the world, with a wind following after. 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
sloping beaches and bars of smooth tawny sand. Sand and sea teem
with vitality;--over all the dunes there is a constant
susurration, a blattering and swarming of crustacea;--through all
the sea there is a ceaseless 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 also when countless medusae drift
in--beautiful veined creatures that throb like hearts, with
perpetual systole and diastole of their diaphanous envelops:
some, of translucent azure or rose, seem in the flood the shadows
or ghosts of huge campanulate flowers;--others have the semblance
of strange living vegetables,--great milky tubers, just beginning
to sprout. But woe to the human skin grazed by those shadowy
sproutings and spectral stamens!--the touch of glowing iron is
not more painful... Within an hour or two after their appearance
all these tremulous 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 you feel those ascending wave-currents of
coldness arising which bespeak profundity, you will also begin to
feel innumerable touches, as of groping fingers--touches of the
bodies of fish, innumerable fish, fleeing towards shore. The
farther you advance, the more thickly you will 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, like intercrossing
fountain-jets of fluid silver. The gulls fly lower about you,
circling with sinister squeaking cries;--perhaps for an instant
your feet touch in the deep something heavy, swift, lithe, that
rushes past with a swirling shock. Then the fear of the Abyss,
the vast and voiceless Nightmare of the Sea, will come upon you;
the silent panic of all those opaline millions that flee
glimmering by will enter into you also...
From what do they flee thus perpetually? Is it from the giant
sawfish or the ravening shark?--from the herds of the porpoises,
or from the grande-ecaille,--that splendid monster whom no net
may hold,--all helmed and armored in argent plate-mail?--or from
the hideous devilfish of the Gulf,--gigantic, flat-bodied, black,
with immense side-fins ever outspread like the pinions of a
bat,--the terror of luggermen, the uprooter of anchors? From all
these, perhaps, and from other monsters likewise--goblin shapes
evolved by Nature as destroyers, as equilibrists, as
counterchecks to that prodigious fecundity, which, unhindered,
would thicken the deep into one measureless and waveless ferment
of being... But when there are many bathers these perils are
forgotten,--numbers give courage,--one can abandon one's self,
without fear of the invisible, to the long, quivering, electrical
caresses of the sea ...
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.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7