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CHITA A MEMORY OF LAST ISLAND
CHITA A MEMORY OF LAST ISLAND LAFCADIO HEARN "But Nature whistled with all her winds
Did as she pleased and went her way."
---Emerson
To my friend
Dr. Rodolfo Matas of New Orleans
The Legend of L'Ile Derniere
I.
Travelling south from New Orleans to the Islands you pass
through a strange land into a strange sea by various winding
waterways. You can journey to the Gulf by lugger if you please;
but the trip may be made much more rapidly and agreeably on some
one of those light narrow steamers built especially for
bayou-travel which usually receive passengers at a point not far
from the foot of old Saint-Louis Street hard by the
sugar-landing where there is ever a pushing and flocking of
steam craft--all striving for place to rest their white breasts
against the levee side by side--like great weary swans. But
the miniature steamboat on which you engage passage to the Gulf
never lingers long in the Mississippi: she crosses the river
slips into some canal-mouth labors along the artificial channel
awhile and then leaves it with a scream of joy to puff her free
way down many a league of heavily shadowed bayou. Perhaps
thereafter she may bear you through the immense silence of
drenched rice-fields where the yellow-green level is broken at
long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating
machine;--but whichever of the five different routes be pursued
you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre
mazes of swamp-forest--past assemblages of cypresses all hoary
with the parasitic tillandsia and grotesque as gatherings of
fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides
again into canal or bayou--from bayou or canal once more into
lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins away
from these shores into wastes of reedy morass where even of
breathless nights the quaggy soil trembles to a sound like
thunder of breakers on a coast: the storm-roar of billions of
reptile voices chanting in cadence--rhythmically surging in
stupendous crescendo and diminuendo--a monstrous and appalling
chorus of frogs! ....
Panting screaming scraping her bottom over the sand-bars--all
day the little steamer strives to reach the grand blaze of blue
open water below the marsh-lands; and perhaps she may be
fortunate enough to enter the Gulf about the time of sunset. For
the sake of passengers she travels by day only; but there are
other vessels which make the journey also by night--threading the
bayou-labyrinths winter and summer: sometimes steering by the
North Star--sometimes feeling the way with poles in the white
season of fogs--sometimes again steering by that Star of
Evening which in our sky glows like another moon and drops over
the silent lakes as she passes a quivering trail of silver fire.
Shadows lengthen; and at last the woods dwindle away behind you
into thin bluish lines;--land and water alike take more luminous
color;--bayous open into broad passes;--lakes link themselves
with sea-bays;--and the ocean-wind bursts upon you--keen cool
and full of light. For the first time the vessel begins to
swing--rocking to the great living pulse of the tides. And
gazing from the deck around you with no forest walls to break
the view it will seem to you that the low land must have once
been rent asunder by the sea and strewn about the Gulf in
fantastic tatters....
Sometimes above a waste of wind-blown prairie-cane you see an
oasis emerging--a ridge or hillock heavily umbraged with the
rounded foliage of evergreen oaks:--a cheniere. And from the
shining flood also kindred green knolls arise--pretty islets
each with its beach-girdle of dazzling sand and shells
yellow-white--and all radiant with semi-tropical foliage myrtle
and palmetto orange and magnolia. Under their emerald shadows
curious little villages of palmetto huts are drowsing where
dwell a swarthy population of Orientals--Malay fishermen who
speak the Spanish-Creole of the Philippines as well as their own
Tagal and perpetuate in Louisiana the Catholic traditions of the
Indies. There are girls in those unfamiliar villages worthy to
inspire any statuary--beautiful with the beauty of ruddy
bronze--gracile as the palmettoes that sway above them....
Further seaward you may also pass a Chinese settlement: some
queer camp of wooden dwellings clustering around a vast platform
that stands above the water upon a thousand piles;--over the
miniature wharf you can scarcely fail to observe a white
sign-board painted with crimson ideographs. The great platform
is used for drying fish in the sun; and the fantastic characters
of the sign literally translated mean: "Heap--Shrimp--Plenty."
... And finally all the land melts down into desolations of
sea-marsh whose stillness is seldom broken except by the
melancholy cry of long-legged birds and in wild seasons by that
sound which shakes all shores when the weird Musician of the Sea
touches the bass keys of his mighty organ....
II.
Beyond the sea-marshes a curious archipelago lies. If you travel
by steamer to the sea-islands to-day you are tolerably certain
to enter the Gulf by Grande Pass--skirting Grande Terre the most
familiar island of all not so much because of its proximity as
because of its great crumbling fort and its graceful pharos: the
stationary White-Light of Barataria. Otherwise the place is
bleakly uninteresting: a wilderness of wind-swept grasses and
sinewy weeds waving away from a thin beach ever speckled with
drift and decaying things--worm-riddled timbers dead porpoises.
Eastward the russet level is broken by the columnar silhouette of
the light house and again beyond it by some puny scrub timber
above which rises the angular ruddy mass of the old brick fort
whose ditches swarm with crabs and whose sluiceways are half
choked by obsolete cannon-shot now thickly covered with
incrustation of oyster shells.... Around all the gray circling of
a shark-haunted sea...
Sometimes of autumn evenings there when the hollow of heaven
flames like the interior of a chalice and waves and clouds are
flying in one wild rout of broken gold--you may see the tawny
grasses all covered with something like husks--wheat-colored
husks--large flat and disposed evenly along the lee-side of
each swaying stalk so as to present only their edges to the
wind. But if you approach those pale husks all break open to
display strange splendors of scarlet and seal-brown with
arabesque mottlings in white and black: they change into
wondrous living blossoms which detach themselves before your
eyes and rise in air and flutter away by thousands to settle
down farther off and turn into wheat-colored husks once more ...
a whirling flower-drift of sleepy butterflies!
Southwest across the pass gleams beautiful Grande Isle:
primitively a wilderness of palmetto (latanier);--then drained
diked and cultivated by Spanish sugar-planters; and now familiar
chiefly as a bathing-resort. Since the war the ocean reclaimed
its own;--the cane-fields have degenerated into sandy plains
over which tramways wind to the smooth beach;--the
plantation-residences have been converted into rustic hotels and
the negro-quarters remodelled into villages of cozy cottages for
the reception of guests. But with its imposing groves of oak
its golden wealth of orange-trees its odorous lanes of oleander.
its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile
Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its
loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is
reiterated by most of the other islands--Caillou Cassetete
Calumet Wine Island the twin Timbaliers Gull Island and the
many islets haunted by the gray pelican--all of which are little
more than sand-bars covered with wiry grasses prairie-cane and
scrub-timber. Last Island (L'Ile Derniere)--well worthy a long
visit in other years in spite of its remoteness is now a
ghastly desolation twenty-five miles long. Lying nearly forty
miles west of Grande Isle it was nevertheless far more populated
a generation ago: it was not only the most celebrated island of
the group but also the most fashionable watering-place of the
aristocratic South;--to-day it is visited by fishermen only at
long intervals. Its admirable beach in many respects resembled
that of Grande Isle to-day; the accommodations also were much
similar although finer: a charming village of cottages facing
the Gulf near the western end. The hotel itself was a massive
two-story construction of timber containing many apartments
together with a large dining-room and dancing-hall. In rear of
the hotel was a bayou where passengers landed--"Village Bayou"
it is still called by seamen;--but the deep channel which now
cuts the island in two a little eastwardly did not exist while
the village remained. The sea tore it out in one night--the same
night when trees fields dwellings all vanished into the Gulf
leaving no vestige of former human habitation except a few of
those strong brick props and foundations upon which the frame
houses and cisterns had been raised. One living creature was
found there after the cataclysm--a cow! But how that solitary
cow survived the fury of a storm-flood that actually rent the
island in twain has ever remained a mystery ...
III.
On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the
trees--when there are any trees--all bend away from the sea; and
even of bright hot days when the wind sleeps there is something
grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group
of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five
stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon like fleeing
women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair--bowing
grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to
save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued
indeed;--for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile
of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's
cavalry: far out you can see through a good glass the
porpoises at play where of old the sugar-cane shook out its
million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a
site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the
besieging tides bring up their battering-rams--whole forests of
drift--huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the
yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to
destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands and the
promontories change shape more slowly but not less
fantastically than the clouds of heaven.
And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods
made their last brave stand against the irresistible
invasion--usually at some long point of sea-marsh widely
fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond
such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened snaggy
shapes protruding above the water--some high enough to resemble
ruined chimneys others bearing a startling likeness to enormous
skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands--with crustaceous white growths
clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument.
These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks--so long drowned that
the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in
upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like
vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded and
seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their
deepening graves;--and beside these are others which have kept
their feet with astounding obstinacy although the barbarian
tides have been charging them for twenty years and gradually
torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand
around--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface--is
everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and
semi-diaphanous crab with hairy legs big staring eyes and
milk-white claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a
perpetual rustling as of some strong wind beating among reeds:
a marvellous creeping of "fiddlers" which the inexperienced
visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles as
they run about sideways each with his huge single claw folded
upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip
of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks
shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last
standing corpses of the oaks ever clinging with naked dead feet
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Unpublished Work 
