“The harbour where you landed in your dreams,” he told Frederick, “was the Atlantis, a submerged continent.  The Azores, the Madeira Islands, and the Canary Islands are the remnants of that continent.”

When Frederick found himself leaning over a hole such as foxes make, seriously hunting for a way to the Toilers of the Light, he came to his senses and laughed at himself.

From day to day, aye, from hour to hour, the creations of his disordered brain assumed more and more fantastic forms.  Rasmussen was always sitting on his bed, the four passengers of the Roland were always playing skat in the lower room, and the sick man went about his house conversing in whispers with all sorts of invisible men and things, unconscious for hours at a time of where he was.  Sometimes he thought he was in the house in which he lived when a practising physician, at other times, in the home of his parents.  As a rule, he was on the deck, or in the saloons of the Roland, crossing the ocean to America.

“Why,” he said to himself, shaking his head, “after all, the Roland did not sink.”

After midnight he would get up from bed and take the wrapping from a mirror hanging on the wall, which he had covered up because he was not fond of mirrors.  He would hold the candle close to the glass and frighten himself by making grimaces, which distorted his features beyond recognition.  Then he would talk to himself, asking questions and listening to answers, and hearing questions and giving answers.  Some of this was utterly irrational, some perfectly rational.  It showed that he had investigated one of the obscurest, most awful psychic problems, the sickness of men who are haunted by their doubles.  He jotted down a note: 

“The mirror has made man out of the animal.  Without the mirror, no I and no you.  Without an I and a you, no thought.  All fundamental concepts are twins, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, hard and soft, sorrow and joy, hate and love, cowardice and courage, jest and earnest, and so on.”

The image in the mirror said to Frederick: 

“You have divided yourself into you and me before you could distinguish the separate characteristics of your being, which acts only as a whole.  That is, you divided yourself before you could divide yourself.  Until you saw yourself in a mirror, you saw nothing of the world.”

“It is good to be alone with my image in the mirror,” thought Frederick.  “I don’t need all those distressing concave and convex mirrors which other people are.  This condition in which I am is the original condition, and in the original condition one escapes the distortion to which other people’s words and glances subject one.  The best thing is to be silent or to speak with oneself, that is, with oneself in the mirror.”

Frederick kept this up until one evening, when he was returning from a walk in the neighbourhood, he opened the door of his room and saw himself sitting at his desk.  He stood still and rubbed his eyes, but the man continued to sit there, though Frederick tried to drive him away with a sharp look as a ray of light dispels a cloud of fog.  He was filled with horror, and at the same time a wave of hate swept over him.