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.