It was late in the afternoon when Lawrence Grant, from the deck of one
of the larger tugs, sighted what had been once the estuary of Sidon
Creek. The leader of a party of scientific observation and relief, he
had kept a tireless watch of eighteen hours, keenly noticing the work of
devastation, the changes in the channel, the prospects of abatement, and
the danger that still threatened. He had passed down the length of the
submerged Sacramento valley, through the Straits of Carquinez, and was
now steaming along the shores of the upper reaches of San Francisco Bay.
Everywhere the same scene of desolation,--vast stretches of tule land,
once broken up by cultivation and dotted with dwellings, now clearly
erased on that watery chart; long lines of symmetrical perspective,
breaking the monotonous level, showing orchards buried in the flood;
Indian mounds and natural eminences covered with cattle or hastily
erected camps; half submerged houses, whose solitary chimneys, however,
still gave signs of an undaunted life within; isolated groups of trees,
with their lower branches heavy with the unwholesome fruit of the
flood, in wisps of hay and straw, rakes and pitchforks, or pathetically
sheltering some shivering and forgotten household pet. But everywhere
the same dull, expressionless, placid tranquillity of destruction,--a
horrible leveling of all things in one bland smiling equality of
surface, beneath which agony, despair, and ruin were deeply buried and
forgotten; a catastrophe without convulsion,--a devastation voiceless,
passionless, and supine.
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