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In the water. Monday, April 15, 1912 at 2:25 a.m.
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Archibald Gracie, First Class Passenger:
"What impressed me at the time that my eyes beheld the horrible scene was a
thin light-gray smoky vapor that hung like a pall a few feet above the broad
expanse of sea that was covered with a mass of tangled wreckage. That it was
a tangible vapor, and not a product of my imagination, I feel well assured.
It may have been caused by smoke or steam rising to the surface around the
area where the ship had sunk. At any rate it produced a supernatural effect,
and the pictures I had seen by Dante and the description I had read in my
Virgil of the infernal regions of Charon, and the River Leth, were then
uppermost in my thoughts. Add to this, within the area described, which was
as far as my eyes could reach, there arose to the sky the most horrible sounds
ever heard by mortal man except by those of us who survived this terrible
tragedy. The agonizing cries of death from over a thousand throats, the wails
and groans of the suffering, the shrieks of the terror-stricken and the
awful gaspings for breath of those in the last throes of drowning, none of us
will ever forget to our dying day."
