self 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 gossi