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Updated: May 17, 2025
On the following morning, the 30th, a joyous shout of 'Nor'-west wind' sent me shivering on deck, in the small hours, to handle rain-stiff canvas and cutting chain. It was a cloudy, unsettled day, but still enough after yesterday's boisterous ordeal. We retraced our way past Sonderburg, and thence sailed for a faint line of pale green on the far south-western horizon.
An hour later the narrow vista of Als Sound was visible, with quiet old Sonderburg sunning itself on the island shore, amid the Dybbol heights towering above the Dybbol of bloody memory; scene of the last desperate stand of the Danes in '64, ere the Prussians wrested the two fair provinces from them.
We seemed to be in the middle of the fiord, whose shores looked distant and steep in the gathering darkness. Close ahead they faded away suddenly, and the sight lost itself in a grey void. The stillness was absolute. 'We can't get to Sonderburg to-night, said Davies. 'What's to be done then? I asked, collecting my senses.
That's about fifteen miles south of Sonderburg, on the way to Kiel. They said there was a pilot chap living at the mouth who would tell us all about it. They weren't very encouraging though. We should want a north wind for that. 'I don't care where we go, I said, to my own surprise. 'Don't you really? he rejoined, with sudden warmth. Then, with a slight change of voice.
And here I had fascinating Sonderburg, with its broad-eaved houses of carved woodwork, each fresh with cleansing, yet reverend with age; its fair-haired Viking-like men, and rosy, plain-faced women, with their bullet foreheads and large mouths; Sonderburg still Danish to the core under its Teuton veneer.
We were just lighting our cigars when we heard voices and the splash of oars, followed by a bump against the hull which made Davies wince, as violations of his paint always did. 'Guten Abend; wo fahren Sie bin? greeted us as we climbed on deck. It turned out to be some jovial fishermen returning to their smack from a visit to Sonderburg.
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