body in the boat. He had
discovered a number of life-belts and was throwing them from various
points out on the water, where persons swept overboard might be
struggling desperately for their lives.

The boat did not wait for him. Under the third mate's command, the
sailors began to row. The sea favoured them, and soon they were more than
thirty yards from the _Roland's_ side.

Now they could see the spot where another vessel, or a drifting derelict,
had bored the flank of the _Roland_, making a great gash near the
engine-room. Since the whole of the breach was not yet under water, they
could see the foaming sea streaming into the hold. Frederick thought he
could hear its greedy gulping. At the sight, for all the horror about
him, he felt a desire to burst into mourning for the brave warrior
_Roland_, and with difficulty restrained an outcry. The fog closed in
and hid the fatally wounded giant from view.

When, in a few moments, the mist cleared, the wreck had in some
incomprehensible way turned. The twenty persons in the boat looked down
from a dizzy height upon the after part of the deck, almost on a level
with the water. They shrieked in terror, for they thought that the next
instant they would be hurled down upon the mass of human beings wedged in
there, swarming like ants.

Not until that moment did Frederick grasp to its full extent the
catastrophe that was occurring, a catastrophe beyond human conception.
All those dark little crowding ants, helplessly running up and down, were
tearing at one another, hitting about, beating, wrestling, forcing their
way. Groups of men and women were united in struggling knots. Some of the
life-boats that had not yet been lowered seemed to have turned into dark,
swaying bunches of grapes, from which every now and then a single grape
dropped off and fell into the sea.

Once more the fog and spray hid the ship from view. But a sound, which
Frederick did not immediately connect with the ghastly spectacle on the
deck, rose above the seething and roaring of the merciless sea and the
metallic clanging of the hurricane. For several seconds Frederick's
thoughts were far away in a certain place near his home, a wide, marshy
meadow-land, where great flocks of migrating birds stopped to rest in
their passage. But it was not the chirping of joyous birds that reached
his ears through the fog. It was the outcry of those human beings, who
were suffering something so horrible, beyond all conc