NOTES AND QUESTIONS Biography. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859--) is an English author. He was educated in Stonyhurst College and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1885 he was graduated as a doctor of medicine and soon afterwards began practice. It was about this time that his first book, A Study in Scarlet, was published. His greatest success came with the publication of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a collection of detective stories that introduced a character who has become as famous as if he had actually lived. Other books that have added to his fame are The Lost World, The New Revelation, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. He has written many interesting articles on the World War, particularly descriptions of the western campaigns. In 1902 he was knighted. Discussion. 1. Who is supposed to be telling the story? 2. Why were the soldiers of the Twenty-first so disheartened? 3. What effect upon them had the arrival of the Guards? 4. Do you think that you would have felt like cheering if you had been a soldier of the Twenty-first? 5. What effect upon you has the line "Dressing as straight as a hem"? 6. What picture does the last stanza give you? 7. Does the poet make you see the Guards as they came through? 8. What do the last three lines suggest? 9. What does "Blighty" mean to you? 10. Why does the one who is telling the story say that we could not understand? shell-swept slope, 188, 19 waiting and wincing, 188, 24 Phrases swank and dash, 189, 19 MY FIRST VIEW OF THE MAELSTROM We had now, reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak. "Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided 5 you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man-or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of-and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up, body and soul. You suppose 10 me a very old man-but I am not. It took less than a single day 15 to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting giddy?" The "little cliff," upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body bung over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of bis elbow on its extreme and slippery edge-this "little cliff" arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of 5 its brink. In truth, so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky-while I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger from 10 the fury of the winds. It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the distance. "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 15 story with the spot just under your eye. "We are now," he continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him-"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude-in the great province of Nordland-and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The 20 mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher-hold on to the grass if you feel giddy-so-and look out, beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea." I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose 25 waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly 30 black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it, its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. 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 35 a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was envel oped. 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. The appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more 5 distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, 10 angry cross-dashing of water in every direction-as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks. "The island in the distance," resumed the old man, "is called by the Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That 1s a mile to the northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm, Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off-between Moskoe and Vurrgh-are Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Skarholm. These are the true names of the places—but why it had been thought necessary to name them at all is more than 20 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 225 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 30 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 38 the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied 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. 5 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 w distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly-very suddenly— this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented 15 by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and 20 sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven. The mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in 25 an excess of nervous agitation. "This," said I at length, to the old man-"this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom." "So it is sometimes termed," said he. "We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway." The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. 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 sceneor of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the 35 beholder. 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. There |