e waters, seamed and
scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into
frenzied convulsion--heaving, boiling, hissing--gyrating in gigantic 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 wind an appalling voice, half-shriek,
half-roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up
in its agony to Heaven.

The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw
myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of
nervous agitation.

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

"So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-strom, 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 of either
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 this description,
nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their
effect is exceed