CHITA _ A Memory of Last Island(奇塔)

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CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

The Legend of L'Ile Derniere

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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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-

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

-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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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....

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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--

CHITA : A Memory of Last Island

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 ...

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,

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CHITA:AMemoryofLastIsland1CHITA:AMemoryofLastIslandbyLafcadioHearn"ButNaturewhistledwithallherwinds,Didasshepleased,andwentherway."---EmersonTomyfriendDr.RodolfoMatasofNewOrleansCHITA:AMemoryofLastIsland2TheLegendofL'IleDerniereI.TravellingsouthfromNewOrleanstotheIslands,youpassthroughastrangelandin...

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