The captain asked the two physicians to come to the chart-room where they and the sailors of the Roland, who were already awaiting him, were to give him the vouchers he needed for his brief report to be submitted to his company’s agent in New York in regard to the picking up of the castaways.  A sort of audience was held, during which nothing new concerning the tremendous disaster was revealed.

Pander showed the scrap of paper with the pencilled message that Captain von Kessel had asked him to take to his sisters.  All were greatly moved on reading the few hastily scrawled words.  The incident revealed what a wrench the hearts and nerves of even the seamen had undergone.  At the mention of this or that person or incident, Pander and the three sailors burst into hysterical tears.  When asked whether they thought the Roland would remain above water over the day, all said “No.”  One of the sailors, who from the first warning of danger to the boarding of the Hamburg, had gone about his heavy duty with the same grit, the same matter-of-course manner, scarcely uttering a word, concluded each of his statements with:  “Captain, it was like on Judgment Day.”

At the conclusion of the audience, Frederick felt a great need to be alone for a while.  “It was like on Judgment Day,” followed him.  Yes, it was like on Judgment Day!  The horrors of the cruellest judgment could not exceed those amid which the victims of the shipwreck had perished.  Strange, the evening before, Frederick had still been able to laugh; to-day he felt as if the gravity of his being were turned to brass and had laid itself about him, not like an iron mask, not like a leaden cloak, but rather like a heavy metal sarcophagus.

He knew a man, an architect verging on middle age, who had been on the island of Ischia during the last great earthquake there.  The architect and some very dear friends were sitting together over a bottle of wine when the calamity was ushered in by the roll of subterranean thunder.  A moment later the ceiling and floors burst, and an abyss swallowed up five or six persons, men and women, full of hope and joy in life.  He himself remained on the brink of the abyss unscathed.  Though years intervened, there was still not a clod of earth, not a rock, no matter how adamantine, on which he could set foot with his old confidence; there was no wall or ceiling that he did not seem to see falling on his head and crushing him.  Groping along the walls of houses on the street, terror would seize him.  Open places made him dizzy, and not infrequently a passerby seeing his helplessness would lead him like a blind man across the city square.

Frederick felt that the sinking of the Roland had left him with a gloomy heritage, a black compact cloud-mass brooding menacingly in the spaces of his soul.  With all his will, he had to overcome a shudder when something like a flash of lightning darted from the cloud and illuminated the horror he had witnessed, as if it were still present to his eye.