[Illustration]
(_Fragments from a Narrative somewhat in the style of E. A. Poe._)
Even while one gazed, the current acquired a monstrous velocity.
Each moment added to its speed--to its headlong impetuosity.
The vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting
channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsion--heaving, boiling,
hissing,--gryrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling
and plunging on with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except
in precipitous descents.
* * * * *
Precipitous descents! Niagara's abrupt and headlong plunge is but as an
eddy in a rocky trout-stream compared with what was soon to be seen _here_.
In brief space 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 a colossal and seemingly all-embracing diameter.
The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming, turbid
slime--cumbered spray, foul, festering, furiously troubled, slipping, as it
seemed, particle by particle, viscid gout by gout, 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.
* * * * *
Then, said I, this _can_ be nothing else than the "great, all-whelming
whirlpool of the Maelström!"
* * * * *
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 Ström!
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!
* * * * *
Looking about upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which that helpless,
past-struggling, beautiful, and apparently doomed figure was borne, I
perceived that she, in the midst of the mighty, all-mastering misery, was
not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below were
visible fragments of wreckage--significant wreckage--plumed hats,
sword-sheaths, portfolios, epaulettes, decorations, insignia of honour, as
if here a national Argosy, laden with Opulence, Rank Intelligence, and
Honour, had gone, dismally and desperately, down to--_what_? Let those
Phlegethon walls, that Tophet-like mist, make answer!
* * * * *
And that bound, helpless, seemingly doomed, but beautiful and piteously
appealing figure on which my eyes were fixed in terror, and amaze, and
profound compassion? Alas! Yet are there some objects which enter the whirl
at a late period of the tide, which for some happy reason descend slowly
after entering, which do not reach the bottom before the turn of the tide,
which are _not completely absorbed_ ere the desperate ordeal of danger is
ended by utter submergence and entire wreck! These, conceivably, may be
whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of
those which had been drawn in more early, or absorbed more rapidly!
* * * * *
Here indeed the phantom of Hope seems to gleam forth rainbow-like even
amidst the foul mists of the Maelström! That beautiful agonised figure
seems yet but as it were at the edge of the whirl. Into its profound and
pestilential depths, indeed, she _can see_. And she shudders at the sight,
as must all who are interested in her fate. But the Ström will not whirl
for ever, the hour of slack cannot be far off, and when the slope of the
sides of the vast funnel become momentarily less and less steep, when the
gyrations of the whirl grow gradually less and less violent, when the froth
and the fume disappear, and the bottom of the gulf seems slowly to uprise;
when the sky clears, and the winds go down, and the full moon rises
radiantly o'er the swaying but no longer tormented floods, shall she, that
beautiful, bound creature be found floating upon the quieting waves, sorely
buffeted, may be much scarred, bearing in her beauty ineffaceable traces of
the hideous ordeal she has undergone, but living, and _Safe_?
* * * * *
So may it be!
* * * * *
[Illustration: FASHIONABLE.
"HOW DO YOU LIKE ME IN THIS, VERA? TELL ME THE TRUTH."
"WELL, DEAR, IT LOOKS AS IF YOUR PET POODLE HAD DIED, AND YOU'D HAD HIM
MADE UP AS A CLOAK!"]
* * * * *