Part 3

--"Waltzing!" cried the captain. "God help them!--God help us all now! ... The Wind waltzes to-night, with the Sea for his partner!" ...

O the stupendous Valse-Tourbillon! O the mighty Dancer! One--two--three! From northeast to east, from east to southeast, from southeast to south: then from the south he came, whirling the Sea in his arms ...

... Some one shrieked in the midst of the revels;--some girl who found her pretty slippers wet. What could it be? Thin streams of water were spreading over the level planking,--curling about the feet of the dancers ... What could it be? All the land had begun to quake, even as, but a moment before, the polished floor was trembling to the pressure of circling steps;--all the building shook now; every beam uttered its groan. What could it be? ...

There was a clamor, a panic, a rush to the windy night. Infinite darkness above and beyond; but the lantern-beams danced far out over an unbroken circle of heaving and swirling black water. Stealthily, swiftly, the measureless sea-flood was rising.

--"Messieurs--mesdames, ce n'est rien. Nothing serious, ladies, I assure you ... Mais nous en avons vu bien souvent, les inondations comme celle-ci; ca passe vite! The water will go down in a few hours, ladies;--it never rises higher than this; il n'y a pas le moindre danger, je vous dis! Allons! il n'y a--My God! what is that?" ...

For a moment there was a ghastly hush of voices. And through that hush there burst upon the ears of all a fearful and unfamiliar sound, as of a colossal cannonade rolling up from the south, with volleying lightnings. Vastly and swiftly, nearer and nearer it came,--a ponderous and unbroken thunder-roll, terrible as the long muttering of an earthquake.

The nearest mainland,--across mad Caillou Bay to the sea-marshes,--lay twelve miles north; west, by the Gulf, the nearest solid ground was twenty miles distant. There were boats, yes!--but the stoutest swimmer might never reach them now!

Then rose a frightful cry,--the hoarse, hideous, indescribable cry of hopeless fear,--the despairing animal-cry man utters when suddenly brought face to face with Nothingness, without preparation, without consolation, without possibility of respite ... Sauve qui peut! Some wrenched down the doors; some clung to the heavy banquet-tables, to the sofas, to the billiard-tables:--during one terrible instant,--against fruitless heroisms, against futile generosities,--raged all the frenzy of selfishness, all the brutalities of panic. And then--then came, thundering through the blackness, the giant swells, boom on boom! ... One crash!--the huge frame building rocks like a cradle, seesaws, crackles. What are human shrieks now?--the tornado is shrieking! Another!--chandeliers splinter; lights are dashed out; a sweeping cataract hurls in: the immense hall rises,--oscillates,--twirls as upon a pivot,--crepitates,--crumbles into ruin. Crash again!--the swirling wreck dissolves into the wallowing of another monster billow; and a hundred cottages overturn, spin in sudden eddies, quiver, disjoint, and melt into the seething.

... So the hurricane passed,--tearing off the heads of the prodigious waves, to hurl them a hundred feet in air,--heaping up the ocean against the land,--upturning the woods. Bays and passes were swollen to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea-marshes were changed to raging wastes of water. Before New Orleans the flood of the mile-broad Mississippi rose six feet above highest water-mark. One hundred and ten miles away, Donaldsonville trembled at the towering tide of the Lafourche. Lakes strove to burst their boundaries. Far-off river steamers tugged wildly at their cables,--shivering like tethered creatures that hear by night the approaching howl of destroyers. Smoke-stacks were hurled overboard, pilot-houses torn away, cabins blown to fragments.

And over roaring Kaimbuck Pass,--over the agony of Caillou Bay,--the billowing tide rushed unresisted from the Gulf,--tearing and swallowing the land in its course,--ploughing out deep-sea channels where sleek herds had been grazing but a few hours before,--rending islands in twain,--and ever bearing with it, through the night, enormous vortex of wreck and vast wan drift of corpses ...

But the Star remained. And Captain Abraham Smith, with a long, good rope about his waist, dashed again and again into that awful surging to snatch victims from death,--clutching at passing hands, heads, garments, in the cataract-sweep of the seas,--saving, aiding, cheering, though blinded by spray and battered by drifting wreck, until his strength failed in the unequal struggle at last, and his men drew him aboard senseless, with some beautiful half-drowned girl safe in his arms. But well-nigh twoscore souls had been rescued by him; and the Star stayed on through it all.

Long years after, the weed-grown ribs of her graceful skeleton could still be seen, curving up from the sand-dunes of Last Island, in valiant witness of how well she stayed.

VII.

Day breaks through the flying wrack, over the infinite heaving of the sea, over the low land made vast with desolation. It is a spectral dawn: a wan light, like the light of a dying sun.

The wind has waned and veered; the flood sinks slowly back to its abysses--abandoning its plunder,--scattering its piteous waifs over bar and dune, over shoal and marsh, among the silences of the mango-swamps, over the long low reaches of sand-grasses and drowned weeds, for more than a hundred miles. From the shell-reefs of Pointe-au-Fer to the shallows of Pelto Bay the dead lie mingled with the high-heaped drift;--from their cypress groves the vultures rise to dispute a share of the feast with the shrieking frigate-birds and squeaking gulls. And as the tremendous tide withdraws its plunging waters, all the pirates of air follow the great white-gleaming retreat: a storm of billowing wings and screaming throats.

And swift in the wake of gull and frigate-bird the Wreckers come, the Spoilers of the dead,--savage skimmers of the sea,--hurricane-riders wont to spread their canvas-pinions in the face of storms; Sicilian and Corsican outlaws, Manila-men from the marshes, deserters from many navies, Lascars, marooners, refugees of a hundred nationalities,--fishers and shrimpers by name, smugglers by opportunity,--wild channel-finders from obscure bayous and unfamiliar chenieres, all skilled in the mysteries of these mysterious waters beyond the comprehension of the oldest licensed pilot ...

There is plunder for all--birds and men. There are drowned sheep in multitude, heaped carcasses of kine. There are casks of claret and kegs of brandy and legions of bottles bobbing in the surf. There are billiard-tables overturned upon the sand;--there are sofas, pianos, footstools and music-stools, luxurious chairs, lounges of bamboo. There are chests of cedar, and toilet-tables of rosewood, and trunks of fine stamped leather stored with precious apparel. There are objets de luxe innumerable. There are children's playthings: French dolls in marvellous toilets, and toy carts, and wooden horses, and wooden spades, and brave little wooden ships that rode out the gale in which the great Nautilus went down. There is money in notes and in coin--in purses, in pocketbooks, and in pockets: plenty of it! There are silks, satins, laces, and fine linen to be stripped from the bodies of the drowned,--and necklaces, bracelets, watches, finger-rings and fine chains, brooches and trinkets ... "Chi bidizza!--Oh! chi bedda mughieri! Eccu, la bidizza!" That ball-dress was made in Paris by--But you never heard of him, Sicilian Vicenzu ... "Che bella sposina!" Her betrothal ring will not come off, Giuseppe; but the delicate bone snaps easily: your oyster-knife can sever the tendon ... "Guardate! chi bedda picciota!" Over her heart you will find it, Valentino--the locket held by that fine Swiss chain of woven hair--"Caya manan!"

And it is not your quadroon bondsmaid, sweet lady, who now disrobes you so roughly; those Malay hands are less deft than hers,--but she slumbers very far away from you, and may not be aroused from her sleep. "Na quita mo! dalaga!--na quita maganda!" ... Juan, the fastenings of those diamond ear-drops are much too complicated for your peon fingers: tear them out!--"Dispense, chulita!" ...

... Suddenly a long, mighty silver trilling fills the ears of all: there is a wild hurrying and scurrying; swiftly, one after another, the overburdened luggers spread wings and flutter away.

Thrice the great cry rings rippling through the gray air, and over the green sea, and over the far-flooded shell-reefs, where the huge white flashes are,--sheet-lightning of breakers,--and over the weird wash of corpses coming in.

It is the steam-call of the relief-boat, hastening to rescue the living, to gather in the dead.

The tremendous tragedy is over!

Out of the Sea's Strength

There are regions of Louisiana coast whose aspect seems not of the present, but of the immemorial past--of that epoch when low flat reaches of primordial continent first rose into form above a Silurian Sea. To indulge this geologic dream, any fervid and breezeless day there, it is only necessary to ignore the evolutional protests of a few blue asters or a few composite flowers of the coryopsis sort, which contrive to display their rare flashes of color through the general waving of cat-heads, blood-weeds, wild cane, and marsh grasses. For, at a hasty glance, the general appearance of this marsh verdure is vague enough, as it ranges away towards the sand, to convey the idea of amphibious vegetation,--a primitive flora as yet undecided whether to retain marine habits and forms, or to assume terrestrial ones;--and the occasional inspection of surprising shapes might strengthen this fancy. Queer flat-lying and many-branching things, which resemble sea-weeds in juiciness and color and consistency, crackle under your feet from time to time; the moist and weighty air seems heated rather from below than from above,--less by the sun than by the radiation of a cooling world; and the mists of morning or evening appear to simulate the vapory exhalation of volcanic forces,--latent, but only dozing, and uncomfortably close to the surface. And indeed geologists have actually averred that those rare elevations of the soil,--which, with their heavy coronets of evergreen foliage, not only look like islands, but are so called in the French nomenclature of the coast,--have been prominences created by ancient mud volcanoes.

The family of a Spanish fisherman, Feliu Viosca, once occupied and gave its name to such an islet, quite close to the Gulf-shore,--the loftiest bit of land along fourteen miles of just such marshy coast as I have spoken of. Landward, it dominated a desolation that wearied the eye to look at, a wilderness of reedy sloughs, patched at intervals with ranges of bitter-weed, tufts of elbow-bushes, and broad reaches of saw-grass, stretching away to a bluish-green line of woods that closed the horizon, and imperfectly drained in the driest season by a slimy little bayou that continually vomited foul water into the sea. The point had been much discussed by geologists; it proved a godsend to United States surveyors weary of attempting to take observations among quagmires, moccasins, and arborescent weeds from fifteen to twenty feet high. Savage fishermen, at some unrecorded time, had heaped upon the eminence a hill of clam-shells,--refuse of a million feasts; earth again had been formed over these, perhaps by the blind agency of worms working through centuries unnumbered; and the new soil had given birth to a luxuriant vegetation. Millennial oaks interknotted their roots below its surface, and vouchsafed protection to many a frailer growth of shrub or tree,--wild orange, water-willow, palmetto, locust, pomegranate, and many trailing tendrilled things, both green and gray. Then,--perhaps about half a century ago,--a few white fishermen cleared a place for themselves in this grove, and built a few palmetto cottages, with boat-houses and a wharf, facing the bayou. Later on this temporary fishing station became a permanent settlement: homes constructed of heavy timber and plaster mixed with the trailing moss of the oaks and cypresses took the places of the frail and fragrant huts of palmetto. Still the population itself retained a floating character: it ebbed and came, according to season and circumstances, according to luck or loss in the tilling of the sea. Viosca, the founder of the settlement, always remained; he always managed to do well.

He owned several luggers and sloops, which were hired out upon excellent terms; he could make large and profitable contracts with New Orleans fish-dealers; and he was vaguely suspected of possessing more occult resources. There were some confused stories current about his having once been a daring smuggler, and having only been reformed by the pleadings of his wife Carmen,--a little brown woman who had followed him from Barcelona to share his fortunes in the western world.

On hot days, when the shade was full of thin sweet scents, the place had a tropical charm, a drowsy peace. Nothing except the peculiar appearance of the line of oaks facing the Gulf could have conveyed to the visitor any suggestion of days in which the trilling of crickets and the fluting of birds had ceased, of nights when the voices of the marsh had been hushed for fear. In one enormous rank the veteran trees stood shoulder to shoulder, but in the attitude of giants over mastered,--forced backward towards the marsh,--made to recoil by the might of the ghostly enemy with whom they had striven a thousand years,--the Shrieker, the Sky-Sweeper, the awful Sea-Wind!

Never had he given them so terrible a wrestle as on the night of the tenth of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six. All the waves of the excited Gulf thronged in as if to see, and lifted up their voices, and pushed, and roared, until the cheniere was islanded by such a billowing as no white man's eyes had ever looked upon before. Grandly the oaks bore themselves, but every fibre of their knotted thews was strained in the unequal contest, and two of the giants were overthrown, upturning, as they fell, roots coiled and huge as the serpent-limbs of Titans. Moved to its entrails, all the islet trembled, while the sea magnified its menace, and reached out whitely to the prostrate trees; but the rest of the oaks stood on, and strove in line, and saved the habitations defended by them ...