Ranking among the strange items of the Known World, one would also list the « the tricorne without a top » and the Big Eastern Swirl. « The tricorne without a top » est un ensemble is a ensemble of three giant swirls: the Great Chaos, Charybdis and Scylla, whichever of them can actually be compared to a small sea defined by a rotating stream and a turbulent perimeter.

Those seas are created, maintained and perturbated by the powerful, but changing, flows of the Ey Sea and the Great Southern Stream which are trapped in the vasts gulfs all around the Navel of the World, Nip'On and the neighbouring archipelagos. Their waters, however, mix relatively few with those of the main streams (For some certainly very scientific reasons, which are fully out of the reach of our intellect as well as of the theories of most scientists of the Known World…). Hence for instance, the ensemble of Charybdis and Scylla, close to the Equator, has extremely warm waters, full of incredible masses of fish…

An inferno trio: Charybdis, Scylla and the Great Chaos

Let us start with the proverbial Charybdis and Scylla, maybe the least strange of these great swirls – Though we could put a physicist here to the test as to their dynamics! They whirl in opposite directions and exchange their waters. On thus says « to fall from Charybdis into Scylla », refering to the unfortunate boats (often fisher boats from Mattink or Guinea) which found themselves taken in the main stream and then follow a road in the sea shaped like an « eight », out of which it is practically impossible to get out alone. That road is thus marked by an almost continuous string of wrecks still afloat, their Crew being - usually - long dead! Hence its names: the Road of Wrecks, the Road of Thirst, the Road of the Infinite, etc. However, skilled Navigators manage to enter in the influence zone of the two swirls and come out back, as long as they manage to not enter too deep in the stream nor to stay to long on the edge of it for they could then be taken in turbulent areas where they would lose control. The danger Le danger tient lies in that, that the streams have an oscillating regime, either Charybdis or Scylla becoming the bigger through an unbalanced exchange of waters. In addition to the trap of the oscillating flow strengths, the most extreme caution is required for some sea monsters may well lurk around to make prey in those waters, dwelled by so many a juicy fish… Well, after all, just in the same way as the skilled fishermen who come to launch their lines or nets there…

The somewhat irregular oscillations of Charybdis and Scylla, as well as variations in the Ey Sea - the Great Inward Stream - are sources of the chaotic behaviour of the Great Chaos, a swirl of null navigability: hence, the rotation can change, reverse or even disappear within a mere few hours. Even the best Navigators have no chance in such a strange sea. Storms appear in the same way, are totally impredictable, with or without wind, with or without clouds, and in the most violent events the wave depth is here probably the biggest in the whole Known World. In the course of History however, some Crews, having lost their way at sea and having crossed the Great Chaos in a way or another, could reach a safe land but the Ships were all, without a single exception, dislocated and wrecked.

The Great Chaos as well as Charybdis and Scylla are even more famous under the name of « the tricorne without a top » for that, which ever stroke the mind of the Mariners, is the perspective to find oneself taken, not in one of those two seas, but in the turbulent channel forming between them. To those who enter here remain only prayer and their teeth to to let chatter… but not for long!

The Big Eastern Swirl

The Big Eastern Swirl is the strangest. Being isolated, it creates few turbulences on its edge and to enter it is (almost) a child's play up to the middle of the way to its center. To come out of it as well. However, close to the center, the stream becomes stronger until it becomes impossible to counter and the natural trap closes onto its navigating preys…

There are, however – especially on Nip'On – stories, rumours and even a legend, according to which the unfortunate Navigators would not only be trapped in the swirl but sucked up to the center, then down to the bottom. Most of the time, it would swallow everything down like a giant sink; but, at certain points in time, carefully recorded by astronomers, geographs and priests of that country, the rotation of the Big Eastern Swirl suddenly inverts and that phenomenon is associated to two enormous successive tidal waves. Then, several further abnormal tides are recorded during some weeks after the main event, while the Big Eastern Swirl recovers its usual regime.

A (silly?!) theory to explain the phenomenon, which does not happen more than once or twice per century, hypothetises a big hole below the sea bottom, which would get progressively filled with water and where water would be heated in the depths of the World. At one point in time would the hole be full and the water at the bottom would start to boil, violently pushing the rest of water through the hole opening at the top. If that theory be true, at the time of the rotation inversion and of the first tidal wave, a huge (and possibly quite warm) column of water would rise up to over several thousands of meters in the skies before falling back. The first tidal wave would be caused by the burst of water from the hole, the second one from the fall back of that whole unthinkable mass of water. Some, rather mystic-minded, think it could be the blowhole of some titanic creature of which the Known World would be the scallied back and, by the way, they predict that the world would apocalyptically end the day it would decide to go back to the abyss where it comes from… Anyway, nobody had, up to now, the temerity to go and verify those hypotheses… Or he or she is still writing the report! The forecast of the event is also quite complex, which does not make the task easier…

But who would be crasy enough to attempt to approach the phenomenon? Nobody of course! Well, so it would be if… there wouldn't be yet another legend about the there – some prefer to say an arcanum of well-kept secrets in meditation rooms of the Nip'In temples – a thing, according to which would be up there in the skies… islands!! Believe it or not, these islands would form an archipelago to which a name was even given: the Islands of the Great Peagulls, the Great Peagulls themselves being a kind of legendary bird, which the Mariners of that region pretend to have witnessed in the sky on evenings when a storm is rising from the South, even if the descriptions significantly differ from one account to the other… Let us say that, here too, the mystery remains thick.

Back