As the sea like a washerwoman of both sexes cannot keep things to him or herself, but throws everything back, these runs were never without a certain charm. Even though I am by nature a prosaic person, I can nevertheless feel sadness when I turn a dead seal lying on its back over onto its belly and have thoughts about my own mortality as I do so.
Good—or rather on this occasion: even better! I had been on this long, stretched out from south to north and vice versa, island for three weeks approximately when I had the encounter already mentioned at the start of my narrative.
It was getting on towards evening. The sun had gone down and today I was coming back from the Red Cliff, and no less tired for all that since low tide had made the way to the beach accessible for all those patients on Sylt suffering from abdominal problems to the best of its ability. After walking ten steps over quite tight-packed sand, people sank that much deeper into the sand over the next two hundred steps, and the wife, daughter, cousin or sweetheart of my readers who would have graciously picked their way over this path so uncommonly beneficial to health, I should not have hesitated in fact to commend to the attention of a lyric or epic poet if I could have numbered such a one then, with the later exception of Circuit Judge Löhnefinke, among my colleagues and other friends and enemies.
I said that the sun had gone down and I can put it even more succinctly. It was going down just as I reached the dunes south of Wenningstedt, opposite the great chasm. A fishing boat from Hamburg or Cuxhaven followed the sun in disappearing into the sea mist on the horizon and the pleasing and easy on the eye green colour of the water turned to gloomy grey. Even the orange colouring of the sandhill on the left of the sound but tiring path disappeared, and the colour grey got the upper hand to both left and right. The dune grass started to lisp as the wind got cooler—twilight had fallen and there were cogent reasons for supposing that it would soon be night.
Stumbling and, despite the evening cool, bathed in sweat, I was quickening my gait in the direction of my evening pipe when the unexpected happened and I got to know my colleague Löhnefinke.
Everyone who knows the beach on the west coast of Sylt also knows how steeply the dunes opposite the sandy sanatorium path fall down to the sea, and at one of the places where they were at their steepest my colleague fell out of the sky on top of my head and my journey through life was never the same again so may the estimable reader allow me to continue with my statement of events with my accustomed calm and without exciting myself.
I found myself, as previously stated, opposite the great chasm and the sun had said goodbye five minutes beforehand when, suddenly, at the top of the dune on the left, at approximately seventy feet above my head, a man appeared, running towards the edge of the precipice in a tearing hurry, threw his arms up to heaven, then crouched down and in one fell swoop, to my horror, all the way down the steep, almost vertical sandhill slipped—slid—shot!
Before the cry of total amazement, half of shock, that I then came out with had died away, the man was already sitting at the bottom of the dune in soft sand between a half stove-in barrel that had been washed ashore there and a broken ship's lantern and looking at me, the scurrying passer-by, with his mouth wide open, pale-faced with shock and yet managing to twist his lips into a broad grin. He called out, shouted or perhaps it was more of a howl:
"It's—it's—behind me! I'm very sorry, sir, I'm sure—but it puts me on edge…"
"Who? What? Who is behind you?" I shouted, staring up at the grey mass of the sandhill without spying anything in the least bit threatening. Nothing showed itself to me that could justify the boundless consternation and the daring flight of the individual still sitting up in the sand in front of me, a rather portly individual extremely well-dressed.