I never
      felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act—although I
      knew he was a madman when he did it—a raving maniac through sheer
      fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I
      knew it could make no difference whether either of us held on at
      all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew
      round steadily enough, and upon an even keel—only swaying to and
      fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl. Scarcely
      had I secured myself in my new position, when we gave a wild
      lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the abyss. I
      muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over. “As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had
      instinctively tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my
      eyes. For some seconds I dared not open them—while I expected
      instant destruction, and wondered that I was not already in my
      death-struggles with the water. But moment after moment elapsed. I still lived. The sense of falling had ceased; and the motion of
      the vessel seemed much as it had been before, while in the belt
      of foam, with the exception that she now lay more along. I took
      courage, and looked once again upon the scene. “Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and
      admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be
      hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface
      of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose
      perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but
      for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for
      the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of
      the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I
      have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along
      the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of
      the abyss. “At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately. The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld. When I recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell
      instinctively downward. In this direction I was able to obtain an
      unobstructed view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the
      inclined surface of the pool. She was quite upon an even
      keel—that is to say, her deck lay in a plane parallel with that
      of the water—but this latter sloped at an angle of more than
      forty-five degrees, so that we seemed to be lying upon our
      beam-ends. I could not help observing, nevertheless, that I had
      scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my hold and footing in
      this situation, than if we had been upon a dead level; and this,
      I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we revolved. “The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the
      profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on
      account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped,
      and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow
      and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway
      between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt
      occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as
      they all met together at the bottom—but the yell that went up to
      the Heavens from out of that mist, I dare not attempt to
      describe. “Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam
      above, had carried us a great distance down the slope; but our
      farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we
      swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and
      jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards—sometimes
      nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. Our progress downward,
      at each revolution, was slow, but very perceptible. “Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we
      were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only
      object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were
      visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and
      trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of
      house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already
      described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my
      original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer
      and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a
      strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our
      company. I _must_ have been delirious, for I even sought
      _amusement_ in speculating upon the relative velocities of their
      several descents toward the foam below. ‘This fir tree,’ I found
      myself at one time saying, ‘will certainly be the next thing that
      takes the awful plunge and disappears,’—and then I was
      disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship
      overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several
      guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all—this fact—the
      fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of
      reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat
      heavily once more. “It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a
      more exciting _hope_. This hope arose partly from memory, and
      partly from present observation. I called to mind the great
      variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden,
      having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-ström. By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the
      most extraordinary way—so chafed and roughened as to have the
      appearance of being stuck full of splinters—but then I distinctly
      recollected that there were _some_ of them which were not
      disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference
      except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only
      ones which had been _completely absorbed_—that the others had
      entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some
      reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not
      reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the
      ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either
      instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level
      of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been
      drawn in more early, or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also,
      three important observations.