In less than a minute the storm was upon us -- in less than two the sky was entirely overcast -- and what with this and the driving spray, it became suddenly so dark that we could not see each other in the smack. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. And yet all the morning, and indeed until late in the afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze from the south-west, while the sun shone brightly, so that the oldest seaman among us could not have foreseen what was to follow. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene -- or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. "You must get over these fancies," said the guide, "for I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned -- and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye." The story Poe weaves out of this natural phenomenon is highly suggestive, leaving itself open to numerous interpretations. 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. "In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and we were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction. How my elder brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I never had an opportunity of ascertaining. 'To be sure,' I thought, 'we shall get there just about the slack -- there is some little hope in that' -- but in the next moment I cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. The choice spots over here among the rocks, however, not only yield the finest variety, but in far greater abundance; so that we often got in a single day, what the more timid of the craft could not scrape together in a week. poetry | Everything was in its place but my own mind as it tried hard to wander the streets of Boston in its desperate attempt to figure out a way to celebrate this man's literary genius. -- These are the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Confession time, science fiction is not my thing, instead the unpredictability of real life continues to fascinate in both fiction and non. Format: CD. Powerful story that makes the whirlpool feel cosmic in its elemental terror. I made, also, three important observations. I attracted my brother's attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. They trace their line We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Strm was in full fury! On a fishing trip with his brothers a storm arose fuelled by the most powerful and wicked hurricane that ever erupted from heaven caused their ship to be swept into an almighty vortex. Site Built by. I shook from head to foot as if I had had the most violent fit of the ague. Do you hear any thing? The narrator, seeing the power of the whirlpool in the ocean visible from the mountain top, is then told of the man's fishing trip with his two brothers a few years ago in which they encountered the whirlpool. I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother but, in some manner which I could not understand, the din had so increased that I could not make him hear a single word, although I screamed at the top of my voice in his ear. A Descent into the Maelstrom Whirlpool October 18, 1845 London Journal (vol. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting giddy ?" * See Archimedes, "De Incidentibus in Fluido." I glanced at its face by the moonlight, and then burst into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean. It was not going. It stood like a huge writhing wall between us and the horizon. Exterior scenes were filmed at Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, and in Scotland. How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say. summaries | The story of how he was caught during a storm in a maelstrom three years earlier with his brothers and how he survived. My hair which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. credits | It had run down at seven oclock! Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm, Suarven, and Buckholm. The Maelstrom is a vortex of water off the coast of Norway that whirls and drags objects to the rocky bottom of the sea. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time ;but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks. descent n (slope) descente nf : pente nf : Harry ran down the descent to the lake. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. Overall, I thought this was one of Poe's best stories. It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the distance. Yonder are Islesen, Hotholm, Keildhelm, Suarven, and Buckholm. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. 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. "There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station. All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. He will survive, but only just and with his hair showing how his narrow escape has prematurely aged him. This certainly is the best depiction of a natural phenomenon I read. Here, the simultaneous attraction and repulsion that is a central dynamic of the maelstrom the brothers are drawn towards it but must try to resist its pull stands for mans often conflicted attitude to God and the divine. The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Very descriptive but the story within a story doesnt quite work. If I had not known where we were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognised the place at all. A Descent into the Maelstrm is one of his least known and most underrated tales, and I probably wouldn't have read it if I weren't such a big fan of his works. But A Descent into the Maelstrom is different, because the trouble which descends upon the white-haired man is outside of his control: he is a victim of natures forces at their wildest and most uncontrollable, with his brush with death being the result of natural phenomena rather than some retributive power punishing him for some past crime. It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after myquitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. Britannica Dictionary definition of DESCENT formal 1 [count] : the act or process of descending: such as a : the act or process of going from a higher to a lower place or level usually singular The climbers were faced with a dangerous descent in bad weather. Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same I knew very well that we were doomed, had we been ten times a ninety-gun ship. The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest ship of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once. 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. When I recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell instinctively downward. You really see and hear the fellows drawn into the eye of the storm and you feel the rage of the elements. 6. a sudden raid or hostile attack. 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. February 2nd 2004 "At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately. 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. We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strm, from the island of Moskoe in the midway.. I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographers account of theMare Tenebrarum. The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not asourways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works,which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. The mans fob watch a testament to mans ability to measure and regulate time mysteriously stops during his encounter with this unstoppable force of nature. Descent is a first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Parallax Software and released by Interplay Productions in 1995 for MS-DOS, and later for Macintosh, PlayStation, and RISC OS. 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 weresomeof them which were not disfigured at all. scent di-sent 1 : the act or process of descending from a higher to a lower location descent of the testes into the scrotum 2 a : derivation from an ancestor b : the fact or process of originating by generation from an ancestral stock (as a species or genus) 3 Perhaps it is significant, in this connection, that the man who tells the narrator his story had his black hair turned white by the shock of his experiences.