Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Stockholm. These are the true
names of the places - but why it has been thought necessary to name
them at all, is more than either you or I can understand. Do you hear
anything? Do you see any change in the water?"

We had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to
which we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had
caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the
summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually
increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon
an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what
seamen term the _chopping_ character of the ocean beneath us, was
rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while
I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment
added to its speed - to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the
whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but
it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its
sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed 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