WORK OF THE STORM.
“So the hurricane passed, tearing off the heads of prodigious waves to hurl them a hundred feet in air—heaping up the ocean against the land—upturning the woods. Bays and passes were swollen to abysses; rivers regorged; the sea marshes changed to roaring wastes of water. Before New Orleans the flood of the mile-broad Mississippi rose six feet above highest water mark. One hundred and ten miles away Donaldsonville trembled at the towering tide of the Lafourche. Lakes strove to burst their boundaries. Far-off river steamers tugged wildly at their cables—shivering like tethered creatures that hear by night the approaching howl of destroyers. * * *
“And swift in the wake of gull and frigate bird the wreckers come, the spoilers of the dead—savage skimmers of the sea—hurricane-riders wont to spread their canvas pinions in the face of storms. * * * There is plunder for all—birds and men. * * * Her betrothal ring will not come off, Guiseppe; but the delicate bone snaps easily; your oyster-knife can sever the tendon. * * * Over her heart you will find it, Valentio—the locket held by that fine, Swiss chain of woven hair * * * Juan, the fastenings of those diamond eardrops are much too complicated for your peon fingers; tear them out. * * *
“Suddenly a long, mighty silver trilling fills the ears of all; there is a wild hurrying and scurrying; swiftly, one after another, the overburdened luggers spread wings and flutter away. Thrice the great cry rings through the gray air and over the green sea, and over the far-flooded shell reefs where the huge white flashes are—sheet lightning of breakers—and over the weird wash of corpses coming in.
“It is the steam-call of the relief boat, hastening to rescue the living, to gather in the dead.
“The tremendous tragedy is over.”
GALVESTON BUILT UPON THE SAND.
Galveston is built upon the sand. According to Professor Willis L. Moore, Chief of the United States Weather Bureau at Washington, not only Galveston was insecurely built upon the flat sands of the island, but other cities on the gulf and Atlantic coasts, lying at tide, are subject to the same dangers. The West Indian hurricane may strike almost anywhere from the southern line of North Carolina, on down the coast, around the peninsula of Florida, and anywhere within the great arc described by the western shores of the Gulf of Mexico. These storms, perhaps 600 miles wide, have a vortex of twenty to thirty miles in diameter. It is in this vortex that the land is laid waste.
It is this fact that will lead more strongly than any other to the rebuilding of Galveston. With an export business of $100,000,000 annually, the great West will bring pressure to bear upon the maintenance of the port. There is an island type of man in its population that will not be driven from that little ridge of sand three miles out in the gulf. There are 1,500 miles of gulf coast on which the vortex of such a storm may waste itself without touching Galveston, and both conservatism and commercialism will take the risk that a score of other cities at the tide level are taking.
At the same time there are those who see for Galveston only a commercial existence. It never can grow as it has grown; it never can be the home of people whose fortunes are not tied up in the island.