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For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town, because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet, and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.
The Basin where the river widened and ran currentless a mile or two from bank to bank, in Caleb's father's time for weeks and weeks on end often had showed no more signs of activity than a dawdling fisherman or two who angled now and then and smoked incessantly.
Sky empty, earth empty too the emptiness below hard and barren, that overhead arched and ethereal one could hardly find elsewhere such a picture of stark desolation. But on turning to the West, there is water, the currentless bend of the river, fringed with its high bank, up to which spread the village groves with cottages peeping through all like an enchanting dream in the evening light.
It isn't a part of the church now, if ever it has been. No one comes to service in it, and the only voiced worshipper who sends up little winding eddies through its else currentless air is I. And he preaches every Sunday out of the little square pulpit, overhung by a great, tremulous sounding-board, to the congregation, sitting silently listening below, within the church.
Its thick masses of drifting vegetation reassured them, for the silly legend that it could surround and embed a ship had not then found believers. Many years after it was discovered that several undercurrents met there and died down, leaving all their seaweed to linger on the calm, currentless surface. But back in 1492 the thicker the seaweed, the surer were those sailors that it indicated land.
A cut-off 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.
Log rafts, huge barges, miles of railroad-ties, laid-up steamers, peddling-boats, with their highly-colored storehouses, fishermen's scows, floating homely cabins alive with bare-legged children and idlers of the water-side, push-boats loaded to the edge of the narrow gunwales with merchandise for delivery to stores and dwellers far up the river, boats loaded with hoop-poles, grist, chickens, and the "home-plunder" of some mover to civilization, coming down the river from the mountain-clearing, and samples of every conceivable kind of the river's outpour, were tied to the banks or lazily floating on the currentless back-water from the Kanawha.
In those almost currentless waters a steersman in any craft is usually self-sufficient, but among turbulent rapids, where rocks and shoals lie in all directions, and the deep-water track is tortuous, with, it may be, abrupt turnings here and there, a bowman is absolutely essential, and sometimes, indeed, may become the more important steersman of the two.
There was something pronounced yet hard to define which gave him the outstanding prominence of a master among minions. He was a large man and inclined to stoutness. His hair and moustache were sandy and his florid face was marked with a purplish tracery of veins in which the blood appeared to bank and stand currentless.
A cut-off 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.
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