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 gossip from the four quarters of the globe.

In the midst of these meditations, his chair slipped, and Frederick, in company with the electrical engineer, the dozing manufacturer, a lady physician, and a lady artist, was hurled against the banister, while the opposite row of passengers, including the Geheimrat and the professor, was hurled on top of them.  It was a ridiculous incident, but Frederick observed that no one seemed to find it so.

They tried to arrange themselves in order again.  One of the ever-industrious stewards appeared, and, as if to comfort them for their overthrow, passed about Malaga grapes from the ship’s inexhaustible store.

“When shall we reach New York?” somebody asked.  The eyes of all the others instantly turned upon the questioner in amazement and alarm.  The steward, usually so polite merely smiled an embarrassed smile and gave no reply.  In his opinion an answer, one way or the other, would have been to challenge fate.  The passengers felt much the same.  Indeed, the idea that their feet would actually ever tread solid land again seemed in their present condition almost like an extravagant fairy tale.

The short, stout man, to whom the electrical engineer was chiefly directing his discourse, was conducting himself peculiarly.  At short intervals he would look out anxiously into the uproar, turning his small, watchful eyes searchingly up to the tops of the masts, which never ceased to describe great arcs in the air (starboard to port, port to starboard!), and out into the monotonous rolling of the waves, swelling into ever higher and larger masses.  His face was full of concern.  Frederick was on the point of inwardly ridiculing the pitiful landlubber’s cowardice, when he heard him say that scarcely three weeks before he had brought his schooner safely to New York from a three years’ trip around the world, and intended to start out from New York on the same trip to last the same length of time.  The little gentleman was the experienced captain of a sailing vessel.  In the course of his fifty years, he had spent more than thirty on all the waters of the globe.