Frederick attempted in vain to battle against a still-life picture, which the Roland, valiantly struggling onward, with its siren almost stifled in the storm, showed him at the bottom of the sea.  He saw the majestic vessel in a coffin of glass.  Across its decks swarms of fish swam hither and thither.  Its cabins were all filled with water.  The large dining-room, with its panels of walnut, its tables, and leather-upholstered revolving chairs, was filled with water.  A big polyp, jelly-fish, and red, mushroom-like sea-anemones had penetrated into the very gangways along which the passengers were now walking.  And to Frederick’s horror, the liveried corpses of Pfundner, the head-steward, and his assistant stewards were slowly floating about in a circle.  The picture would have been almost ridiculous, had it not been so gruesome and had it not so certainly lain in the realm of the possible.  Think of all the things divers report!  All the things they have seen in the cabins and gangways of submerged steamers; inextricably knotted masses of human beings, passengers or sailors coming toward them with outstretched arms, upright, as if alive and as if awaiting them.  A closer examination of the clothes of those guardians and administrators of a lost estate at the bottom of the sea, those strange ship-owners, business men, captains, pursers, those fortune-seekers, money-seekers, embezzlers, adventurers, or whatever they might be, showed that they were filled with polyps, crustaceans, and all sorts of ocean worms, enjoying their stay there as long as something remained beneath their shredded garments except gnawed-off bones.

Frederick beheld himself down there, too, one of those decaying phantoms, months old, wandering about in the ghastly abode of the sunken Roland, in that horrible Vineta, where each man passed his neighbour mutely with a frightened gesture, each seeming to carry in his breast a congealed cry of anguish, which he expressed with bowed head and outstretched arms, or head thrown back and open mouth.  Or else he was hideously crawling on his hands, or wringing his hands, or folding them, or spreading out his fingers.  The engineers in the boiler-room seemed still slowly, slowly to be controlling the cylinder and driving-wheel; yet differently than before, since the law of gravity seemed no longer to be in force.  One of the engineers was doing his work in a peculiarly twisted way, like a man asleep caught between the rim of the wheel and the piston-rod covered with verdigris.  Frederick descended on his ghastly tour down to the stokers, whom the catastrophe had surprised in the midst of their occupation.  Some were still holding their shovels in their hands, though unable to lift them.  They themselves were floating, while the shovels to which they clung did not stir from the bottom.  All was over.  They could not kindle the fire into a white glow, and so could not keep the mighty steamer in its course.  In the steerage the sight