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A brisk walk of six miles brought me, ravenously hungry, to Dornum. Road and railway had clung together all the time, and about half-way had been joined on the left by a third companion in the shape of a puny stream which I knew from the map to be the upper portion of Neues Tief. Wriggling and doubling like an eel, choked with sedges and reeds, it had no pretensions to being navigable.
Norden had its tidal creek, but Esens and Dornum had their 'tiefs' or canals.
There was so much to do and so little time to do it in. The whole problem seemed to have been multiplied by seven, and the total again doubled and redoubled seven blue lines on land, seven dotted lines on the sea, seven islands in the offing. At any rate, I wanted breakfast badly; and the best way to get it, and at the same time to open new ground, was to walk to Dornum.
At length it looped away into the fens out of sight, only to reappear again close to Dornum in a much more dignified guise. There was no siding where the railway crossed it, but at the town itself, which it skirted on the east, a towpath began, and a piled wharf had been recently constructed.
'That's the name, said mine host, 'that's one of them some sort of foreigner, I've heard; runs a salvage concern, too, Juist way. 'Well, he won't get any of my savings! I laughed, and soon after took my leave, and inquired from a passer-by the road to Dornum. 'Follow the railway, I was told.
A boy brought me a tankard of tawny Munich beer, and, sipping it, I watched. People passed in and out, but nobody spoke to the sailor in mufti. When a quarter of an hour elapsed, a platform door opened, and a raucous voice shouted: 'Hage, Dornum, Esens, Wittmund! A knot of passengers jostled out to the platform, showing their tickets.
Norden was still the objective, but mainly as a railway junction, only remotely as a seaport. Though the possible rendezvous were eight, the possible stations were reduced to five Norden, Hage, Dornum, Esens, Wittmund all on one single line.
With a warm wind in my face from the south-west, fleecy clouds and a half-moon overhead, I set out, not for Bensersiel but for Benser Tief, which I knew must cross the road to Dornum somewhere. A mile or so of cobbled causeway flanked with ditches and willows, and running cheek by jowl with the railway track; then a bridge, and below me the 'Tief'; which was, in fact, a small canal.
It was between Dornum and Esens that these ideas came, and I was still absorbed in them when the train drew up, just upon nine o'clock, at my destination, and after ten minutes' walk, along with a handful of other passengers, I found myself in the quiet cobbled streets of Esens, with the great church steeple, that we had so often seen from the sea, soaring above me in the moonlight.
I would gladly draw a veil over our scandalous progress through peaceable Dornum, of the terrors I experienced when he introduced me as his friend, and as his English friend, and of the abasement I felt, too, as, linked arm in arm, we trod the three miles of road coastwards.
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