The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as _our_ ways;
nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the
vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, _which have
a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus_.
JOSEPH GLANVILLE
We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes
the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.
"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on
this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years
past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to
mortal man--or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of--and
the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up
body and soul. You suppose me a _very_ old man--but I am not. It took
less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to
white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I
tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Do you
know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting
giddy?"
The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown
himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over
it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on
its extreme and slippery edge--this "little cliff" arose, a sheer
unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen
hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have
tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In truth so
deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I
fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me,
and dared not even glance upward at the sky--while I struggled in vain
to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain
were in danger from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could
reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the
distance.
"You must get over these fancies," said the guide, "for I have brought
you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of
that event I mentioned--and to tell you the whole story with the spot
just under your eye.
"We are now," he continued, in that particularizing manner which
distinguished him--"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast--in the
sixty-eighth degree of latitude--in the great province of
Nordland--and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon
whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a
little higher--hold on to the grass if you feel giddy--so--and look
out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea."
I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters
wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian
geographer's account of the _Mare Tenebrarum_. A panorama more
deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right
and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like
ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff,
whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the
surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest,
howling and shrieking forever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose
apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out
at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more
properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge
in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land arose
another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed
at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.
The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant
island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although,
at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the
remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly
plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like
a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water
in every direction--as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of
foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.
"The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the
Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to the
northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm,
Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off--between Moskoe and Vurrgh--are
Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Skarholm. These are the true names
of the places--but why it has been thought necessary to name them at
all is more than either you or I can understand. Do you hear anything?
Do you see any change in the water?"
We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to which
we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no
glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the
old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing
sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American
prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the
_chopping_ character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing
into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this
current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its
speed--to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as
far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between
Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast
bed of the 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 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.
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 Maelström."
"So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the
Moskoe-ström, 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 (Vurrgh), this depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient
passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on the rocks,
which happens even in the calmest weather. When it is flood, the
stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a
boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is
scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts, the noise
being heard several leagues Off; and the vortices or pits are of such
an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is
inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to
pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes, the fragments
thereof are thrown up again. But these intervals of tranquillity are
only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last
but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. When the
stream is most boisterous, and its fury heightened by a storm, it is
dangerous to come within a Norway mile of it. Boats, yachts, and ships
have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were
within its reach. It likewise happens frequently that whales come too
near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is
impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their
fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting
to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne
down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large
stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the current,
rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon
them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among
which they are whirled to and fro. This stream is regulated by the
flux and reflux of the sea--it being constantly high and low water
every six hours. In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima
Sunday, it raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones
of the houses on the coast fell to the ground."
In regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could
have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the
vortex. The "forty fathoms" must have reference only to portions of
the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden. The
depth in the centre of the Moskoe-ström must be immeasurably greater;
and no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained
from even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be
had from the highest crag of Helseggen. Looking down from this
pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling
at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a
matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears;
for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing that the largest
ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that
deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the
hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.
The attempts to account for the phenomenon--some of which, I remember,
seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal--now wore a very
different and unsatisfactory aspect. The idea generally received is
that this, as well as three smaller vortices among the Feroe Islands,
"have no other cause than the collision of waves rising and falling,
at flux and reflux, against a ridge of rocks and shelves, which
confines the water so that it precipitates itself like a cataract; and
thus the higher the flood rises, the deeper must the fall be, and the
natural result of all is a whirlpool or vortex, the prodigious suction
of which is sufficiently known by lesser experiments."--These are the
words of the "Encyclopædia Britannica." Kircher and others imagine
that in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss
penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part--the Gulf
of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance. This
opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed, my
imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to the guide, I
was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it was the view
almost universally entertained of the subject by the Norwegians, it
nevertheless was not his own. As to the former notion he confessed his
inability to comprehend it; and here I agreed with him--for, however
conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even
absurd, amid the thunder of the abyss.
"You have had a good look at the whirl now," said the old man, "and if
you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden
the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you
I ought to know something of the Moskoe-ström."