out a kind of fire, phosphoric lights chase each other along the
rigging, so close sometimes to the sailors at their work that the latter
stretch forth their hands and try to catch, as they fly, these birds of
flame. After the great earthquake of Lisbon, a blast of hot air, as from
a furnace, drove before it towards the city a wave sixty feet high. The
oscillation of the ocean is closely related to the convulsions of the
earth.

These immeasurable forces produce sometimes extraordinary inundations.
At the end of the year 1864, one of the Maldive Islands, at a hundred
leagues from the Malabar coast, actually foundered in the sea. It sunk
to the bottom like a shipwrecked vessel. The fishermen who sailed from
it in the morning, found nothing when they returned at night; scarcely
could they distinguish their villages under the sea. On this occasion
boats were the spectators of the wrecks of houses.

In Europe, where nature seems restrained by the presence of
civilisation, such events are rare and are thought impossible.
Nevertheless, Jersey and Guernsey originally formed part of Gaul, and at
the moment while we are writing these lines, an equinoctial gale has
demolished a great portion of the cliff of the Firth of Forth in
Scotland.

Nowhere do these terrific forces appear more formidably conjoined than
in the surprising strait known as the Lyse-Fiord. The Lyse-Fiord is the
most terrible of all the gut rocks of the ocean. Their terrors are there
complete. It is in the northern sea, near the inhospitable Gulf of
Stavanger, and in the 59th degree of latitude. The water is black and
heavy, and subject to intermitting storms. In this sea, and in the midst
of this solitude, rises a great sombre street--a street for no human
footsteps. None ever pass through there; no ship ever ventures in. It is
a corridor ten leagues in length, between two rocky walls of three
thousand feet in height. Such is the passage which presents an entrance
to the sea. The defile has its elbows and angles like all these streets
of the sea--never straight, having been formed by the irregular action
of the water. In the Lyse-Fiord, the sea is almost always tranquil; the
sky above is serene; the place terrible. Where is the wind? Not on high.
Where is the thunder? Not in the heavens. The wind is under the sea; the
lightnings within the rock. Now and then there is a convulsion of the
water. At certain moments, when there is perhaps not a cloud in the sky,