For days the sullen overflow lay in the
valley of the Sacramento, enormous, silent, currentless--except where
the surplus waters rolled through Carquinez Straits, San Francisco Bay,
and the Golden Gate, and reappeared as the vanished Sacramento River, in
an outflowing stream of fresh and turbid water fifty miles at sea.
Across the vast inland expanse, brooded over by a leaden sky, leaden
rain fell, dimpling like shot the sluggish pools of the flood; a
cloudy chaos of fallen trees, drifting barns and outhouses, wagons and
agricultural implements moved over the surface of the waters, or circled
slowly around the outskirts of forests that stood ankle deep in ooze and
the current, which in serried phalanx they resisted still. As night fell
these forms became still more vague and chaotic, and were interspersed
with the scattered lanterns and flaming torches of relief-boats, or
occasionally the high terraced gleaming windows of the great steamboats,
feeling their way along the lost channel. At times the opening of a
furnace-door shot broad bars of light across the sluggish stream and
into the branches of dripping and drift-encumbered trees; at times
the looming smoke-stacks sent out a pent-up breath of sparks that
illuminated the inky chaos for a moment, and then fell as black and
dripping rain. Or perhaps a hoarse shout from some faintly outlined hulk
on either side brought a quick response from the relief-boats, and the
detaching of a canoe with a blazing pine-knot in its bow into the outer
darkness.
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