Evening brought with it a sinister apparition, looming through a cloud-rent in the west--a scarlet sun in a green sky. His sanguine disk, enormously magnified, seemed barred like the body of a belted planet. A moment, and the crimson spectre vanished; and the moonless night came.
Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world,--hooting,--uttering nightmare sounds,--Whoo!--whoo!--whoo!--and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness. From the northwest the breakers of the bay began to roll high over the sandy slope, into the salines;--the village bayou broadened to a bellowing flood ... So the tumult swelled and the turmoil heightened until morning,--a morning of gray gloom and whistling rain. Rain of bursting clouds and rain of wind-blown brine from the great spuming agony of the sea.
The steamer Star was due from St. Mary's that fearful morning.
Could she come? No one really believed it,--no one. And nevertheless men struggled to the roaring beach to look for her, because hope is stronger than reason ...
Even today, in these Creole islands, the advent of the steamer is the great event of the week. There are no telegraph lines, no telephones: the mail-packet is the only trustworthy medium of communication with the outer world, bringing friends, news, letters. The magic of steam has placed New Orleans nearer to New York than to the Timbaliers, nearer to Washington than to Wine Island, nearer to Chicago than to Barataria Bay. And even during the deepest sleep of waves and winds there will come betimes to sojourners in this unfamiliar archipelago a feeling of lonesomeness that is a fear, a feeling of isolation from the world of men,--totally unlike that sense of solitude which haunts one in the silence of mountain-heights, or amid the eternal tumult of lofty granitic coasts: a sense of helpless insecurity.
The land seems but an undulation of the sea-bed: its highest ridges do not rise more than the height of a man above the salines on either side;--the salines themselves lie almost level with the level of the flood-tides;--the tides are variable, treacherous, mysterious. But when all around and above these ever-changing shores the twin vastnesses of heaven and sea begin to utter the tremendous revelation of themselves as infinite forces in contention, then indeed this sense of separation from humanity appalls ... Perhaps it was such a feeling which forced men, on the tenth day of August, eighteen hundred and fifty-six, to hope against hope for the coming of the Star, and to strain their eyes towards far-off Terrebonne. "It was a wind you could lie down on," said my friend the pilot.
