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and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into
phrensied 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.
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