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. "Who is behind you? No-one as far as I can see! So tell me! Who's after you? What prompted you to jump like that? I really can't see anything at all up there!" "There is! There is! There's the moon--Luna--Selene! No, not Luna and Selene, but that moon, that damnable German moon! It's going up behind the mud flats as we speak and will, in a few minutes time, be up there over the dune behind me! And there's no cover here, no shelter--not even an umbrella--and quarter of an hour to wait for the next omnibus before we can seek refuge. It'll be the death of me!" I usually carry an umbrella with me and this day was no exception. But the stranger in his distraught state had not noticed it and before I offered it to the aforementioned fool, I naturally gave the matter some consideration.