Frederick, holding on to his hat with one hand and clinging to the railing with the other, descended from the windy heights of the captain's cabin to the promenade deck. When he passed the cabin of the first mate, the door opened, and Von Halm appeared in conversation with Achleitner. Achleitner was pale, and there was an anxious look in his face. "I have rented the lieutenant's cabin for Miss Hahlstroem. I could not bear to see her suffering so in her own cabin," he called to Frederick. The gale had increased. Not a passenger was to be seen on deck. Sailors were inspecting the life-boats. Huge masses of water seethed against the ship's side, cutting into its course obliquely. The waves made a mad leap into the air, hung there for an instant in the form of white corals, and fell like a thousand lashes on the deck, which was all awash. The breath of the gale tore the smoke backward from the mouths of the smoke-stacks and scattered it in the wild chaos in which heaven and sea were mingled. Frederick glanced down at the fore-deck. In his burning brain arose a thought of the Jewess and then of the scoundrel, Wilke. But the fore-deck was so swept by the seas that nobody could keep his footing there, except the lookout men, who were holding watch at the beak of the vessel, not far from the cat-head. Between the door leading to the main companionway and the companionway itself was a square level space, about which a railing ran and in which a few people could stay and enjoy the fresh air without being drenched. When Frederick, on his way below deck, passed through the open door, he found a quiet assemblage of pale-faced passengers. One chair was still unoccupied. He seated himself in it, with the fanciful notion that he was joining a gathering of condemned men. "That poor sinner there must be Professor Toussaint, the famous sculptor in need," Frederick thought, judging so from the man's slouched hat and great cape. Now and then the man exchanged a few words with a person sitting next to him, who might be Geheimrat Lars. Frederick had once met the Geheimrat at a dinner at the mayor's house, but he had only a faded recollection of his appearance. The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse. Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other tall and thin. The tall one was showing the other a section of a submarine cable and letting the hard piece, intricately braided of hemp, metal and gutta-percha, pass from hand to hand. From his choppy, whispered sentences, the company learned that in 1877 he had worked as electrical engineer on a steamer laying a cable between Europe and the United States. The work on the high seas had lasted without interruption for many months. He had spent several months supervising the construction of the steamer itself in the yards, especially the riveting of its metal plates. He spoke of what is called the cable plateau at the bottom of the ocean, stretching from Ireland to Newfoundland, a strip of grey sand so named because it supports the main transatlantic cable. The copper wires in the centre of the cable, he said, were called its soul, the rest of the mass, almost as thick as a man's fist and resembling a great hawser, served merely as a sheath to protect the soul. Frederick had a mental vision of the fearful solitudes of the ocean depths, with the monstrous metal serpent, apparently without beginning and without end, creeping over the sandy bottom peopled by the enigmatic creatures of the deep. It seemed to him as if such profound isolation must be gruesome even for the dead mass of cable. Then he wondered why it was that mankind at each end of the cable had burst into jubilation upon the transmission of the first messages. Perhaps there was some mystic cause for rejoicing. The real cause could not possibly be that one was now able to telegraph "Good morning, Mr. Smith," or "Good morning, Mr. Brown," twenty times a minute around the earth's circumference, or that one could adulterate humanity's mind with newspaper gossip from the four quarters of the globe. In the midst of these meditations, his chair slipped, and Frederick, in company with the electrical engineer, the dozing manufacturer, a lady physician, and a lady artist, was hurled against the banister, while the opposite row of passengers, including the Geheimrat and the professor, was hurled on top of them. It was a ridiculous incident, but Frederick observed that no one seemed to find it so. They tried to arrange themselves in order again. One of the ever-industrious stewards appeared, and, as if to comfort them for their overthrow, passed about Malaga grapes from the ship's inexhaustible store. "When shall we reach New York?" somebody asked. The eyes of all the others instantly turned upon the questioner in amazement and alarm. The steward, usually so polite merely smiled an embarrassed smile and gave no reply. In his opinion an answer, one way or the other, would have been to challenge fate. The passengers felt much the same. Indeed, the idea that their feet would actually ever tread solid land again seemed in their present condition almost like an extravagant fairy tale. The short, stout man, to whom the electrical engineer was chiefly directing his discourse, was conducting himself peculiarly. At short intervals he would look out anxiously into the uproar, turning his small, watchful eyes searchingly up to the tops of the masts, which never ceased to describe great arcs in the air (starboard to port, port to starboard!), and out into the monotonous rolling of the waves, swelling into ever higher and larger masses. His face was full of concern. Frederick was on the point of inwardly ridiculing the pitiful landlubber's cowardice, when he heard him say that scarcely three weeks before he had brought his schooner safely to New York from a three years' trip around the world, and intended to start out from New York on the same trip to last the same length of time. The little gentleman was the experienced captain of a sailing vessel. In the course of his fifty years, he had spent more than thirty on all the waters of the globe.