Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [117]
There was another passenger—friend of H.’s—who backed up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizeable, merely pretty sizeable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable “Wait—knock off twenty-five percent of that; now go on”; or, “Wait—you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down—you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster”; or, “Pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it’s drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to the facts—just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth—ain’t that so, gentlemen?” He explained privately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H. “knew to his sorrow.” Said he, “I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up and spread it so that I was actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.”
CHAPTER XXXV
Vicksburg During the Trouble
We used to plow past the lofty hill city, Vicksburg, downstream; but we cannot do that now. A cutoff has made a country town of it, like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water—also a big island—in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can’t come up, but must land some distance below it.
Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg’s tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave-refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service during the six weeks’ bombardment of the city—May 18 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the noncombatants—mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps—but wait, here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:
Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand noncombatants; the city utterly cut off from the world—walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God-speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings—a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town—for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen—all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of noncombatants of exhausted means; at three o’clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bombshells, and