Chita: a Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn
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page 2 of 102 (01%)
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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 |
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