tic and innumerable vortices, and all
whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never
elsewhere assumes, except in precipitous descents.

In a few minutes more there came over the scene another radical
alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the
whirlpools one by one disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became
apparent where none had been seen before.

These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance and entering
into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided
vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly--very
suddenly--this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of
more than a mile in diameter.

The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray;
but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel,
whose 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.

"This," said I at length to the old man--"this can be nothing else than
the great whirlpool of the Maelstroem."

"So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-stroem, from the island of Moskoe in the midway."

The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what
I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of
any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence or
of the horror of the scene, or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel
which confounds the beholder.

I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it,
nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of
Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages of his description,
nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their effect
is exceedingly feeble in conveying an impression of the spectacle.

"Between Lofoden and Moskoe," he says, "the depth of the water is between
thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward Ver, this
depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient passage for a vessel,
without the risk of splitting on th