THE POST-OFFICE[37]
I
The little steamer will bear you thither in one summer day—starting at early morning, arriving just as the sun begins to rest his red chin upon the edge of the west. It is a somewhat wearisome and a wonderfully tortuous journey, through that same marshy labyrinth by which the slavers in other days used to smuggle their African freight up to the old Creole city from the Gulf.... Leaving the Mississippi by a lock-guarded opening in its western levee, the miniature packet first enters a long and narrow canal—cutting straight across plantations considerably below the level of its raised banks—and through this artificial waterway she struggles on, panting desperately under the scorching heat, until after long hours she almost leaps, with a great steam-sigh of relief, into the deeper and broader bayou that serpentines through the swamp-forest. Then there is at least ample shadow; the moss-hung trees fling their silhouettes right across the water and into the woods on the other side, morning and evening. Grotesque roots—black, geniculated, gnarly—project from the crumbling banks like bones from an ancient grave;—dead, shrunken limbs and fallen trunks lie macerating in the slime. Grim shapes of cypress stoop above us, and seem to point the way with anchylosed knobby finger—their squalid tatters of moss grazing our smoke-stack. The banks swarm with crustaceans, gnawing, burrowing, undermining; gray saurians slumber among the gray floating logs at the edge; gorged carrion-birds doze upon the paralytic shoulders of cypresses, about whose roots are coiled more serpents than ever gnawed Yggdrasil. The silence is only broken by the loud breathing of the little steamer;—odors of vegetable death—smells of drowned grasses and decomposing trunks and of eternal mould-formation—make the air weighty to breathe; and the green obscurities on either hand deepen behind the crests of the water-oaks and the bright masses of willow frondescense. The parasitic life of the swamp, pendent and enormous, gives the scene a drenched, half-drowned look, as of a land long-immersed, and pushed up again from profundities of stagnant water—and still dripping with moisture and monstrous algæ....
The ranks of the water-oaks become less serried—the semi-tropical vegetation less puissant—the willows and palmettoes and cypresses no longer bar out the horizon-light; and the bayou broadens into a shining, green-rimmed sheet of water, over which our little boat puffs a zigzag course—feeling her way cautiously—to enter a long chain of lakelets and lakes, all bayou-linked together. Sparser and lower becomes the foliage-line, lower also the banks; the water-tints brighten bluely; the heavy and almost acrid odors of the swamp pass away. So thin the land is that from the little steamer's deck, as from a great altitude, the eye can range over immense distances. These are the skirts of the continent, trending in multitudinous tatters southward to the sea;—and the practiced gaze of the geologist can discern the history of prodigious alluvial formation, the slow creation of future prairie lands, in those long grassy tongues—those desolate islands, shaped like the letters of an Oriental alphabet—those reaches of flesh-colored sand, that shift their shape with the years, but never cease to grow.
Miles of sluggish, laboring travel—sometimes over shallows of less than half a fathom—through archipelagoes whose islets become more and more widely separated as we proceed. Then the water deepens steadily—and the sky also seems to deepen—and there is something in the bright air that makes electrical commotion in the blood and fills the lungs with richer life. Gulls with white breasts and dark, broad wings sweep past with sharp, plaintive cries; brown clouds of pelicans hover above tiny islands within rifle-shot—alternately rising and descending all together. Through luminous distances the eye can just distinguish masses of foliage, madder-colored by remoteness, that seem to float in suspension between the brightness of the horizon and the brightness of water, like shapes of the Fata Morgana. And in those far, dim, island groves prevails, perhaps, the strange belief that the Universe itself is but a mirage; for the gods of the most eastern East have been transported thither, and the incense of Oriental prayer mounts thence into the azure of a Christian heaven. Those are Chinese fishing-stations—miniature villages of palmetto huts, whose yellow populations still cling to the creed of Fo—unless, indeed, they follow the more practical teachings of the Ancient Infant, born with snow-white hair—the doctrine of the good Thai-chang-lao-kinn, the sublime Loo-tseu...
II
Glassy-smooth the water sleeps along the northern coast of our island summer resort, as the boat slowly skirts the low beach, passing bright shallows where seines of stupendous extent are hung upon rows of high stakes to dry;—but already the ear is filled with a ponderous and powerful sound, rolling up from the south through groves of orange and lemon—the sound of that "great voice that shakes the world." For less than half a mile away—across the narrow island—immense surges are whitening all the long slant of sand.... Divinely caressing the first far-off tones of that eternal voice to one revisiting ocean after absence of many weary and dusty summers—tones filling the mind with even such vague blending of tenderness and of awe as the pious traveler might feel when, returning after long sojourn in a land of strange, grim gods, whose temple pavements may never be trodden by Occidental feet, he hears again the pacific harmonies of some cathedral organ, breaking all about him in waves of golden thunder.
...Then with a joyous shock we bump the ancient wooden wharf—where groups of the brown island people are already waiting to scrutinize each new face with kindliest curiosity; for the advent of the mail-packet is ever a great and gladsome event. Even the dogs bark merry welcome, and run to be caressed. A tramway car receives the visitors—baggage is piled on—the driver clacks his tongue—the mule starts—the dogs rush on in advance to announce our coming.