So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied.

No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a``horrid chasm,''from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants of this fact.

The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action.

At the centre of the island there is a chasm about fifty yards in diameter, whence the astronomers descend into a large dome, which is therefore called _flandona gagnole_, or the astronomer’s cave, situated at the depth of a hundred yards beneath the upper surface of the adamant.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire.