"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 particularising 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 vapour 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 out-stretched,
like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly 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 mid-way is Moskoe. That a mile to the
northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm,
Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off--between Moskoe and Vurrgh--are
Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Stockholm. 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 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 in 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
Faroe 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."