The view of a crevasse in an inland levee, miles away from the channel, is strikingly grand; but for those in its path the grandeur is lost in a feeling of despair and danger. The ocean presents a different spectacle, for the ocean has no swift current, and its waves are greater. The foaming mountain torrent can not compare with it, for the mountain torrent is at best but a few yards in breadth. But in the swollen river is found an apparently illimitable expanse of water, heaving restlessly under the swift foot of the wind, or foaming and dashing at the roar of the storm, hurling itself in billows upon the toilers on the levee, and striking them into the ditch beyond, yet, with all the fury expended laterally, rushing seaward almost with the speed of a train. For miles between the levee and the main channel the stream pours through a great forest, or canebrake, or cypress swamp.
The fearful noise of a crevasse may be heard for a long distance. No need to tell the planters far inland the meaning of that distant hoarse murmur. Approaching the break, the murmur swells to a deep sullen roar. The water comes tearing through the dense forest at race-horse speed, not in a broad belt, but closing in from every direction, pouring into that break as into an immense funnel. As far as the eye can penetrate into that dense, gloomy forest, it is raggedly carpeted with a heavy, tossing sheet of snow-white foam. It breaks over stumps, snags and the up-turned roots of fallen trees, flinging white clouds of spray up among the branches of trees overhead, mounts in snowy billows over piles of driftwood, it snarls, hisses and roars like some mad monster at everything in its path, and then plows in one solid foaming mass into that raging maelstrom between the ragged, frothy jaws of the crevasse.
BREAKING OF THE LEVEE.
“Nearest the break, just as it sweeps into the crevasse, it curls on either side, and huge breakers mark the line where it chafes the crumbling ends of the levee. Once beyond the broken barriers, it plunges into a wild, lonesome-looking swamp, that still shows the tracks of the former disaster. Here, for the first time, the real power of this tremendous flood begins to assert itself. Supple young trees, eight or ten inches in diameter, are bent and stripped of every leaf, their naked branches and twigs whipping the foaming surface of the rustling cataract.
“It sweeps into the standing timber with a hoarse roar, foaming around sturdy trunks, and here and there one sees a tall tree swaying to and fro like a drunken man: then caught in some fierce eddy, it is twisted from its roots, and reeling around and around it falls into that tremendous current and is swept away to swell the tangled dams of drift beyond.”