The terrible frenzy in which Frederick had been the night before was apparent from the way in which things had been thrown about.  The glass of his seaman’s clock on the wall was broken, and dishes were shivered to bits.  Peter Schmidt’s diagnosis was typhoid fever.  The first two days and nights he did not leave Frederick’s side, except when his wife took his place.  The paroxysms repeated themselves.  Memories of the shipwreck still tormented him, and at certain hours he would tell his attendants, whom he did not recognise, to look in a corner of the room, where, he said, a black spider, the size of a bowling ball, was lying in wait for him.  Peter and his wife with extreme caution applied all the means at a physician’s disposal to reduce his temperature; but the third day passed, and still it did not fall below 105.8 deg..  Peter grew graver and graver.  Finally, however, the fever curve showed declinations, and by the end of a week its downward course remained pretty constant.

Frederick looked like a pale, empty, incombustible husk, inside of which a great auto-da-fe had taken place.  What a wild orgy salamander-like creatures must have been holding behind his sweaty forehead.  Countless times, by the most different methods, Angele murdered Ingigerd and Ingigerd Angele.  His father, the general, fought a pistol duel with Mr. Garry, Captain von Kessel acting as second and measuring the distance.  Doctor Wilhelm kept rising again and again from beneath the raging chaos in his soul.  Ten or twenty times he brought him a human embryo wrapped in paper, and said: 

“To live is good.  Not to live is better.”

Hans Fuellenberg had to leave his hiding-place and join in the gruesome, grotesque dance to death.  Sometimes it seemed as if a puff of burning air swept all these figures into an oven to destroy them forever.

Something like the dizzy movement of the sea kept tossing up and down.  He was carried aloft—­his consciousness left him.  He sank deep down—­again his consciousness left him.  He flew—­he lost his sense of ponderosity.  High on the crest of this cosmic, immaterial swell, he suffered constantly from nausea.  In his lucid moments he said to himself: 

“The ocean does not wish me to be saved.  It kept me alive just to display the full extent of its powers and draw me down from my security.”

He had dreams of tremendous cosmic proportions, showing he had images of a might and power far exceeding the sane, normal strength of conception, with no precedent for them in experience.  Even when the life-boat with its small load of castaways, shrieking, praying, or unconscious, was dancing on the great broad swells of the heavy, mineral ocean, Frederick had had no such feeling of the microscopic minuteness of his personality.

At the end of the first week he recognised Miss Burns and began to understand what she had done for him.  He smiled with difficulty and made signs with his hand lying limply on the bedspread.