The second of these phenomena was the Wirbel, more truly described, it would seem, as an eddy than as a whirlpool. About a thousand yards below the Strudel there used to rise from the channel towards the right bank a rocky islet known as the Hausstein, the stream rushing against this part of it going to the right through a narrow channel known as the Lüng, and the rest forming the Wirbel on the left. “This has the appearance of a series of foaming circles, each deepening as it approaches the centre, and caused by the two opposite streams rushing violently against each other. [The Hössgang branch comes in again to the main stream almost at right angles.] ... The circle, within which the eddies perform their circumvolutions with amazing velocity, deepens as it approaches the centre, so as to form a basin nearly five feet in depth, and filling the neighbouring echoes with the increasing roar of its waters.” It certainly must have been a hazardous business getting rafts and boats past the Wirbel, especially at times when the Lüng was not navigable owing to the lowness of the water, and it is not matter for surprise that there are many records of wrecks. The destruction of the Hausstein removed the cause of the disturbance, and the terrors of the Wirbel have become traditional. A German writer in 1780 went so far, indeed, as to declare that then those terrors were much exaggerated: “A great variety of circumstances concur to excite an idea of danger in both these parts of the Danube. Low mechanics are fond of speaking of them, and magnifying the danger, that they may increase their own importance in having gone through it. Others, more simple, who come to the place with strong conceits of what they are to meet with there, are so struck with the wildness of the prospect, and the roaring of the water that they begin to quake and tremble before they have seen anything. But the masters of the vessels are those who most effectually keep up the imposition. They make the passage a pretence for raising the price of the freight, and when you are past them the steersman goes round with his hat in his hand to collect money from the passengers as a reward for having conducted them safely through such perilous spots. When our master (who yet knew how very much it was for his interest to keep up the credit of his monsters) saw how little attention I paid to them, he assured me in confidence that during the twenty years he had sailed the Danube, he had not heard of a single accident.” That the “master” was going to the other extreme of exaggeration is shown by the fact that--besides fatalities in the Wirbel--two vessels had been wrecked on the sunken rocks of the Strudel only three years before that was written.