Visit to Godenholm - Ernst Jünger

Part One

1

The sea was so calm that it barely rippled at the foot of the cliffs. Seabirds lay in flocks on the waves. It seemed that the melancholy, the decadence of the shore, took on a new depth at the sight of these dreamy squadrons – as if the emptiness was bound up in a knot with them. From time to time this welled up in the voice of a seagull.

With each of these piercing, pitiful cries a shiver ran down Moltner’s face. It was gaunt from a long fast and his skin, which had once been tanned by more southerly rays of sun, was now greenish. The grey birds with red eyes repulsed him; he saw them as embodiments of a spiritless and bloodless element that frightened him even more in its purity, for in it, after all, lay the danger, the fate of his life. And the earth, too, seemed as if it had been carved out of the grey cortex of some brain, as the electric dawn in the pale glow of midnight.

The cries of the birds ended with a knowing, discordant laughter. They seemed to herald a solemn birth – the prophetic cries of the augurs preceding the flow of images. It was like the birth pains Moltner was struggling with – visions soon to rise up from the abyss.