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that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty
mountain-top in a dream. But while we were up I had thrown a quick
glance around--and that one glance was all sufficient. I saw our exact
position in an instant. The Moskoe-Ström whirlpool was about a quarter
of a mile dead ahead--but no more like the every-day Moskoe-Ström, than
the whirl as you now see it is like a mill-race. If I had not known
where we were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognised
the place at all. As it was, I involuntarily closed my eyes in horror.
The lids clenched themselves together as if in a spasm.
"It could not have been more than two minutes afterward until we
suddenly felt the waves subside, and were enveloped in foam. The
boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new
direction like a thunderbolt. At the same moment the roaring noise of
the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek--such a
sound as you might imagine given out by the waste-pipes of many thousand
steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together. We were now in the
belt of surf that always surrounds the whirl; and I thought, of course,
that another moment would plunge us into the abyss--down which we could
only see indistinctly on account of the amazing velocity with which we
wore borne along. The boat did not seem to sink into the water at
all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the surge. Her
starboard side was next the whirl, and on the larboard arose the world
of ocean we had left. It stood like a huge writhing wall between us and
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