Train Racing the Shadow of a Zeppelin

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It is said that on a nameless afternoon in the early years of the century, a train traveling across the northern plains of Europe found itself pursued by a shadow that did not belong to any earthly thing. The passengers—merchants, soldiers returning from permissions, a widow clutching a letter that had survived two censors—felt it first as a tremor in the sunlight, as if the air had momentarily forgotten its own transparency.

Only when they leaned toward the windows did they see it: a vast, elongated darkness sliding silently beside them, keeping perfect pace with the engine’s furious labor. Some believed it a storm. Others, an omen. A boy who had read too much Verne whispered that it was the shadow of a vessel not yet invented.

The truth was simpler and more impossible. High above, hidden in its own altitude, a zeppelin passed over the fields, its presence announced only by the moving eclipse on the earth. The train’s engineer, seeing the darkness advance upon the rails like a colossal serpent, increased the throttle. He would later deny doing so, but several witnesses testified that the old machine roared as if it had entered a contest known only to itself.

Thus began, without any agreement from history, a race between the sky and the land.

For several kilometers, shadow and train ran side by side. Scholars of the event—there are a few—note that the contest was asymmetrical: one racer was pure absence, the other a triumphant assembly of steel and steam. And yet, in the minds of the passengers, the struggle took on metaphysical dimensions. They imagined ancient duels: the chariot against the sun, the ship against the horizon, the man against his own reflection.

Eventually the zeppelin drifted onward, indifferent to the drama beneath it. The shadow elongated, thinned, and dissolved across the patchwork of fields. The train, robbed of its rival, slowed to its ordinary pace. Nothing had changed, and yet each traveler felt marked, as though they had participated in an event that belonged less to geography than to myth.

Years later, a librarian in Bremen found a photograph of the incident—this one, perhaps—and wrote on the back: “Every race is against a shadow. Only the losers learn that the shadow was never the enemy.“