Lost In The Tule E-Book

Yadessac

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This article, "Lost in the Tule," from the March 1852 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine, describes an incident of boat travel in Northern California. 

Leseprobe

Lost In The Tule

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Originally published in March 1852 issue of “The Knickerbocker” magazine

KNICKERBOCKER

Lost In The Tule

An Incident in California.

We were gliding rapidly up the San Joaquin. The night was murky, for the moon had not yet risen, except that now before us, and now remote upon our right, the quarter seeming to shift as we wound our way along the tortuous stream, a glare of light, girdled with dense volumes of smoke, relieved the general gloom, and proclaimed a distant conflagration in the tule.

Fire raging in uncontrollable majesty in these juncous marshes, covering them for miles in extent with a sea of flame, is no unusual spectacle to the Californian. Yet familiarity cannot divest it of its grandeur. The ocean waves, tempest-lashed, surge in maddened battalia but to break upon the rocky promontory, or to be thrown back in contemptuous discomfiture from the unyielding ledge. But the march of the fiery billows is resistlessly onward: progress is their life. The affrighted beast, roused in his lair at their terrible approach, summons all his swiftness for the flight; the drapery of nature melts away before their consuming breath; it is as gossamer in a furnace, leaving the charred earth to attest, by its sterile nakedness throughout entire districts, the immensity of their might. These periodical fires furnish displays of sublimity and power which no frequency of occurrence can render commonplace or uninteresting.