文档介绍：CHITA : A Memory of Last Island
CHITA : A Memory of
Last Island
by 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
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CHITA : A Memory of Last Island
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 li