inland at the mouths of the Seine and Loire; and he has to get it
explained somehow, before he can go forward with a clear conscience.
One of the navels seems to be the Mahlstrom in Norway. Of the place
of the other there is no doubt. It is close to Evodia insula,
seemingly Alderney. For a high noble of the French told him so; he
was sucked into it, ships and all, and only escaped by clinging to a
rock. And after awhile the margins of that abyss were all left bare,
leaving the Frenchman high and dry, 'palpitating so with fear,' says
Paul, 'that he could hardly keep his seat.' But when all the water
had been sucked in, out and up it came pouring again, in huge
mountains, and upon them the Frenchman's ships, to his intense
astonishment, reappeared out of the bottomless pit; into one of which
he jumped; being, like a true Frenchman, thoroughly master of the
situation; and got safe home to tell Paul the deacon. It is not
quite the explanation of the tides which one would have wished for:
but if a French nobleman of high rank will swear that he saw it with
his own eyes, what can Paul do, in common courtesy, but believe him?

Paul has observed, too, which is a fact, that there is a small tide
in his own Adriatic; and suggests modestly that there may be a
similar hole in the bottom of that sea, only a little one, the tide
being very little. After which, 'his praelibatis,' he will return,
he says, to his story. And so he goes back to the famous Langbard
Saga, the old story, which he has turned out of living Teutonic verse
into dead Latin prose, and calls De Woden et Frea quaedam ridicula
fabula; but can't help for the life of him telling it, apologizing
all the time. How the Winils (his own folk) went out to fight the
Wendels, many more than them in number; and how Gambara, the Alruna-
wife, cried to Freia the goddess, and Freia told her that whichsoever
of the two armies first greeted Woden at the sunrise should win. But