ose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a
smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an
angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round, with a
swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling
voice half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of
Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

* * * * *

Then, said I, this _can_ be nothing else than the "great, all-whelming
whirlpool of the Maelstroem!"

* * * * *

In all violent eddies at sea _there is good fishing_, at proper
opportunities, if only one has the courage to attempt it. In fact, it is
made a matter of desperate speculation--risk standing instead of labour,
and courage, of a reckless, and not too scrupulous sort, answering for
capital. But there are many who would lightly adventure the pestilential
perils of a tropic stream, or fever-haunted water-way or canal, who would
yet shrink from being caught--owing to want of care, and cautious
calculation as to the exact hours of slack and safety--by the hideous,
irresistible, all-engulfing, all-wrecking whirl of the terrifying Stroem!
Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army
might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing
contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour
of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!

* * * * *

Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe,
horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once
within that whirl, gaze about him!--for he has leisure to observe. The
downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling
water-walls is comparatively slow. The victim clinging to his boat, or
bound to his spar or barrel, appears to be hanging, as if by magic, midway
down, upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in circumference,
prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might be mistaken for
ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spin around,
and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shoot forth, a foul,
phosphorescent iridescence, as of accumulated corruption, streaming in a
flood of loathsome radiance along the black walls, and far away down into
the inmost mist--veiled recesses of the abyss!

* * *