Seite:Marsh Hallig 1856.djvu/32

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room to exert his strength, and his landscape has its
distances which want not the interest of novelty. The
inhabitant of the hallig takes in at a single glance
his narrow boundaries. His toils and troubles are the
same from day to day, except when some rare occasion,
such as the sale of his wool, takes him over to the
mainland, and removed as he has been from intercourse
with his fellow men, he feels himself a stranger among
strangers when, pressed by necessity, he leaves his little
sea-girt sod. All his pleasures and enjoyments are like
his labors, confined within a very narrow sphere, with-
out the stimulating excitement incident to the expecta-
tion of something unusual. A wedding dance, which,
on account of the small number of the inhabitants of
the hallig, frequently does not occur for years, is one
of his greatest pleasures.
  Even the dangers to which he is exposed are without
the only attraction which nature can have — namely,
the pleasure of resistance. Though the sand of the
desert, whirled upward by the storm, in thick clouds,
as it the very vault of heaven would become a Sahara,
may bury in its stifling waves encampments and cara-
vans, yet the possibility of escape remains, and often
do men, flying on horses and camels before the sand
storm, succeed in avoiding the threatened destruction.
The islander's enemy is on every side of him ; and
if that power rise in its fearful might, he, more help-
less than the child in the way of the maddened bull,
must, trembling, resign himself to this resistless force
and wait the event, whether it will mercifully pass
over, or in wild fury crush every thing in its path ; he
must accept life or death as a passive victim, without