When a drama has finished, the curtain falls, and as the orchestra plays some popular air the audience makes its way to the street, talking for a few moments of the characters and the scenes, but shutting out from mind, with the falling of the curtain, the happiness and the pain which was depicted by moving characters who but represented a story of man’s imaginative mind. Not so with this.
No curtain can be drawn and the stage remains ever before them. They have it now as a desolate picture to gaze upon, and they will have it forever, wander where they will upon this earth’s surface. No curtain can force it from the mind, and no effort can efface it from the tablets of memory. Many of the actors in this great drama are not here. Some of them yet remain, and their stories are stranger than fiction which Jules Verne or Dumas have written.
Amid the smoke of battle, when men meet men in armed conflict, and thousands fall beneath the leaden hail, there is time taken to make a trench and consign to a resting place the bodies of the fallen thousands, and the chaplain has his moment to ask a merciful God to receive His own. Not so with this. No trench can be made for those people who have been found where the angry waters threw them up, where the falling timbers caught them, or where they are floating on the waters of a waved lashed shore.
QUICK WORK NEEDED.
They are disposed of, not as humanity would direct, or as sentiment dictates, but as necessity demands, and it is not with the accompaniment of a clergyman’s prayer, or the simple words of the man of the cloth, that “God has given and God has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord; earth to earth, dust to dust and ashes to ashes.” Bodies have been consigned to that element which destroyed the vitality of the material—the water and the waves which came from the storm tossed Gulf of Mexico to invade the portion of land which nature set aside for the habitation of man.
This could not be continued for long. The conception of man’s mind, which first suggested this disposition, proved to be wise judgment in the first emergency, but nature’s laws prevented a continuance of the plan, and it became necessary to turn to a quicker and more convenient method, as the decomposition which fast began a destruction of the mortal, rendered handling impossible. Cremation was then resorted to, and without the facilities of science to assist, the destruction of the remains was affected by using burning debris, upon the places where the corpses were found.
Humanity may think this is terrible and sentiment may revolt at this story, but that humanity and that sentiment is not to be found in Galveston. Here the people have thrown aside custom and formalities, all men are equal and that equality extends throughout the whole city. No custom of dress, no formality of appearance and no false modesty enters into one’s mind. Men and women cover their nakedness with what they can procure from neighbors, from friends or from the relief committee or what perchance was saved from the wreckage of their own homes, and they proceed with the work of looking after their own, their friends and their neighbors, as necessity demands. All people are neighbors here and all have a common interest.
NEW CHART OF BAY NEEDED.
A phenomenal thing has occurred in the bay. There are now bars there which have never before been seen. They are across from the Twenty-fifth street wharf and from the Twentieth street wharf. There may be others, but these two long ridges of sand have been noticed by the observing men who know the bay front as well as they know anything, and it is possible that when the water is sounded quite a number of these will be found in various places. It may require a new chart of the bay to determine the damage, and until this is done the greatest care must be exercised in moving about the harbor.
Those who live away from here will have an idea of the wreckage when it is stated that within an area bounded by Thirteenth street on the west, the end of the island on the east, the Gulf on the south and Broadway on the north, there is not a standing house. Between Broadway and Postoffice street and between Thirteenth street and the end of the island there is not a house standing. In the territory south of avenue K and east Tremont street all the way to the Denver resurvey there is not a house standing. There are other portions of the city which are in a similar condition, but it is impossible to tell them now.