It was a strange lake indeed on which the travelers found themselves. Most of the lake, about ten miles long and two miles wide, was covered with water-lilies, lotus, and many other kinds of water plants. Along the margin and on half a dozen low islands grew the sombre cypress, its odd, fantastic, knee-like roots projecting above the water. On the higher lands also, many trees not growing on the upper river had appeared. Sycamores, or buttonwood, mulberry, gum-trees, and catalpas.
The campers met an old man, who had lived near Reelfoot all his life and who told many stories of the great earthquake.
“I was born the year of the earthquake,” the old man related, “and my father told me many stories about it.
“The first shock came a little after midnight on December 16th. My father and two other men were on the river at the time. They were going to New Madrid and were going to start very early, so they could return the same day. Their boat was tied near a very big sycamore. All at once they heard a great thundering underground. The big tree began to sway like the tow-head willows in the storm. Then the whole bank broke loose and crashed into the river. First the water in the river seemed to rise like a big wall, the next moment it rushed down stream with a roaring current.
“My father was thrown out of the boat and would have drowned if he had not gotten hold of the branches of the big sycamore. How he did it, he did not remember. He yelled for help, and after a long time the men came back with the boat and took him off.
“They were all so scared they couldn’t talk; they thought the world was coming to an end.
“They hurried to the highest land they could find to spend the night, but none of them expected to see the sun rise. Again and again the earth rolled and shook as if it were a blanket. Big trees crashed and snapped like bean-poles, and whole acres of forest crashed into the river. The air smelled of burning sulphur, or some such gases as come out of a sulphur spring.
“Father and the two men crept into a thicket of small brush because they were afraid to stay in the big timber, and father always claimed that in a few minutes it grew as dark as if they had been sitting in a cellar at night.
“Every little while, a dozen times or more, they felt the earth shaking and heard the deep rambling underground and the roaring and rushing of the river.
“When daylight came they hurried home and when they found that father’s family had not been injured they decided to go on to New Madrid, thinking that they might be of some help to sufferers or to shipwrecked boatmen.