A Walk with Love and Death. Hans Koning

      It was late afternoon when I came to St. Valéry at the mouth of the Somme River but I rode through the village and on. A path led gradually to the top of a dune; the soil here was sandy, shining through the sparse redtop leaves. The hard wind carried a smell of brine and swept deep patterns in the grass. There was a new, an unheard sound in the air.

      I came to the top, I hardly dared look; there it was. The sea—very much not a canting glossy plain of water as I’d imagined it, but a wide huge gray swell, waves coming in endlessly, line after line from far out and breaking in foam, gulls crying painfully and a wind which brought tears to my eyes. Opposite me the sun was just visible through a thin cloud layer. Dark clouds, much lower, raced across the sky.

      I stood there and stared, and the thought that there was nothing before me but water until the end of the earth made me dizzy and almost sick to my stomach.