At home I saw and split my firewood in my leisure time, whereas here I did things for fun or carefully perused some papers on the House of Brunswick inheritance that I had brought with me in my suitcase. During what would have been my business hours I went for walks along the beach.
When you stay in a place like this to take the waters everything takes that much longer. At home I walk every day and in every weather round the purpose-built walls of the town where I carry out my duties as a public servant. On Sylt I had lunch, lay down on a dune for an hour for an afternoon nap and then ran along the beach towards the north of the island, sometimes getting as far as the Red Cliff, but usually only as far as the bathing huts of Wenningstedt.
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.