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This chapter describes how travelers in the 1700s reported hearing beautiful, ghostly singing emanating from this beach. A legend grew up that this was the place where mermaids would gather under a full moon. They had swum up the river till it was cleansed of salt and clarified of the tea-stain of tannin leaching from the cypress swamps in the lower river, to this beach where the mountain-cold water ran purified by fifty miles of fall and drip and seep through a watershed spider-webbing out north, east, and west. Here they would lounge, washing and combing one another's long hair, all the...

This chapter describes how travelers in the 1700s reported hearing beautiful, ghostly singing emanating from this beach. A legend grew up that this was the place where mermaids would gather under a full moon. They had swum up the river till it was cleansed of salt and clarified of the tea-stain of tannin leaching from the cypress swamps in the lower river, to this beach where the mountain-cold water ran purified by fifty miles of fall and drip and seep through a watershed spider-webbing out north, east, and west. Here they would lounge, washing and combing one another's long hair, all the while keening their siren song in a lovely, mesmerizing language no human ear could comprehend.