This fact as well as the peculiarity and the vividness of his dream set him to marvelling.  He could not recall ever having dreamed so coherently and logically.  Are there dreams that are more than dreams?  Was Rasmussen dead?  Had his friend, keeping his promise, chosen this way to make himself noticeable from the Beyond?  A strange shudder went through Frederick.  In his excitement it seemed to him that he had been honoured with a revelation.  He took his memorandum book from the net bag over his berth and jotted down the date and hour that the remarkable chandler had mentioned as the time of his death.  “Thirteen minutes past one,” he distinctly heard Rasmussen’s voice saying, “thirteen minutes past one, on the twenty-fourth of January.”

The Roland was tossing slightly again, and the great siren was bellowing.  Its repeated thunderous cries, which indicated fog, the lurching of the vessel, the sign, perhaps, of fresh storms and hardships to be gone through, vexed and fretted Frederick.  From the adventurous doings in his brain, he was transported to the no less adventurous doings in reality.  Awakening from his dreams, he found himself locked into a narrow cabin, plowing through the high seas, on a vessel heavily freighted with the fearful dreams of many souls, and yet not sinking from the load of that cargo.

Frederick was already on deck before half past five.  The fog had lifted, and from over the edge of a leaden sea of moderate-sized waves rose the dawn of a gloomy morning.  The deck was empty, producing the impression of dreary loneliness.  The passengers were all lying in their berths.  None of the crew even were visible.  It looked as if the mighty ship were pursuing its course wholly without human agency.

XXXV

Frederick was standing near the log-line, which dragged in the broad, churning wake.  Even in the ghostly dawn, hungry gulls were following the ship, sometimes flying near, sometimes dropping back, ever and anon swooping down into the foamy wake with a mournful cry, as of condemned souls.  This was no vision, and yet Frederick scarcely distinguished it from a dream.  With his nerves unstrung, with his being still penetrated by the marvels of his sleeping life, which remained partially present to him, the strange heaving waste of the ocean seemed no less miraculous than his dreams.  Thus the ocean had been tossing its mountains of waves beneath the blind eyes of millions of years, itself no less blind than those eons.  Thus and not otherwise had it been since the first day of creation:  “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”