But it was the heartlessness of it that especially struck me.

The dead man was an episode that was past, an incident that was dropped, in a canvas covering with a sack of coal, while the ship sped along and her work went on.

Nobody had been affected.

The hunters were laughing at a fresh story of Smoke's; the men pulling and hauling, and two of them climbing aloft; Wolf Larsen was studying the clouding sky to windward; and the dead man, dying obscenely, buried sordidly, and sinking down, down-- Then it was that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me.

Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime.