Though Ingigerd as well as Frederick could not still the fluttering of their shaken souls, they were fascinated by the changing pictures of the entrance to the harbour.  It was an amazing spectacle.  Surprise followed surprise.  Each second brought a new sensation.

A gigantic White Star liner came gliding toward them slowly, to the accompaniment of its brass band.  It was starting out on the passage that the Hamburg was just concluding.  Passengers swarmed like ants on the majestic vessel’s decks, giving an impression of gaiety and festivity.  What knew they of the thing awaiting them, perhaps, out there on the ocean?  When they looked down upon the little Hamburg, with its few passengers on deck, they had not the least inkling of the greatness, the fearfulness of the event of which those few puny persons were the sole surviving witnesses.

The emotion that filled the Roland’s passengers with restlessness and excited them as with fire and tears when the Hamburg entered New York Harbour and steamed up through the Lower Bay toward the Narrows, was both a farewell to home and to the dangers of the sea and a greeting to solid land, to a stable human civilisation.  This was the known, the usual, the mother’s lap from which they had sprung and in which they had grown until the time came for them to start out upon their spiritual life’s journey.  It was also that without which the individual even to-day is helpless against the powers of nature.

Thus, they experienced a sort of home-coming, mingled with a peculiar dream-like feeling, that they were arriving on a strange planet, after having been ferried across Stygian currents on a Charon’s raft.  Out there, on the ocean and over the ocean, hovered a gruesomeness of solitudes, in which the human being, himself seeing everything, remains unseen, unknown, forgotten by God and the world.  To be happy in his heated, clustered ant nests, man can and must forget the murderous in those watery transitional realms—­man, that insect-like being whose sense organs and intellect are capacitated for the knowledge of his vast isolation in the world, but for nothing beyond that knowledge.

Sailing vessels passed one another, steamers blew their whistles, flocks of gulls swooped down on the water for fish, or darted hither and thither in the fresh breeze.  Another great ocean greyhound, of the Hamburg-American line, neared them at Norton Point.  The huge structure was propelled forward quietly and surely, as by some mysterious force.  The gong summoning the passengers from the promenade deck to the dining-room could be distinctly heard.

“At this moment,” said Frederick, drawing his watch from his pocket, “it is quarter of six in Europe, and still dark.”

Captain Butor exchanged flag signals with the quarantine station.  The Hamburg came to a standstill to receive health officers on board.  After prolonged negotiations, in the course of which the physicians were called upon to give detailed information, the sick woman from the steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling’s consent, Siegfried’s corpse were taken from the Hamburg.  Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in her cabin and was spared the too painful scene.  Within half an hour, the gallant Hamburg was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the magnificent Upper Bay.