Grey gloom was closing down on him. After all, he felt that he yearned for life and was far from being as ready to die as he had occasionally supposed. Something akin to regret came over him. "Why am I here? Why did I not stop to consider and summon all my rational will power to keep me from this senseless trip? For all I care, let me die; but not here, not in a desert of water far from mother earth, immeasurably far from the great community of men. This seems to me a particularly awful curse. Men on solid land, in their own homes, men among men, have not the least notion of it." What was Ingigerd to him now? A matter of indifference. Shaking his head, he admitted that he now had only the narrowest concern for himself. What a beautiful hope to escape that brutal fate and land on some shore! Any fragment of land, any island, any city, any snow-clad village was a garden of Eden, an improbable dream of happiness. How extravagantly grateful he would be in the future merely to tread dry land, merely to draw breath, merely to see a lively street! He gnashed his teeth. Of what avail a cry for help here? How could a man find God's ear here? If the extreme thing were to happen, and the _Roland_ with its mass of human beings were to founder, one would see things that would prevent the man that had seen them, even if he escaped, from ever being happy again. "I would not witness it," thought Frederick. "I would jump overboard to avoid the sight of it. And while that would be happening, none of my friends and relatives would be thinking of me at all. 'The steamship _Roland_ sunk' appears as a head-line in the newspapers. 'Oh!' says the reader in Berlin, the reader in Hamburg, and Amsterdam. He takes a sip of coffee, puffs at his cigar, and comfortably settles back to a taste of more details of the catastrophe, whether observed or fabricated. What a hurrah for the newspaper publishers! A sensation! More readers! That is the Medusa into whose eyes we look, and who tells us what the genuine value of a cargo of human lives is in the world."