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 Maelstroem!" * * * * * 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 Stroem! 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! * * * * *