s 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.

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 cata