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 Ferroe 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 Encyclopdia Britannica. Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrm 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.
