Marathe and Steeply: the Entertainment (ii)
As the lowering light from behind came at an angle more and more acute, Goethe’s well-known ‘Bröckengespenst’ phenomenon [n.38] enlarged and distended his seated shadow far out overland, so that the spokes of his chair’s rear wheels cast over two whole counties below gigantic asterisk-shadows, whose fine black radial lines he could cause to move by playing slightly with the wheels’ rubber rims; and his head’s shadow brought to much of the suburb West Tucson a premature dusk.
Context
Marathe alone on the outcropping above Tucson at sunset, 30 April YDAU, opening the mountainside serial by amusing himself as a mountain-scale specter — the Brocken-spectre that n.38 glosses with the word wraith. A terrorist in a wheelchair casting a two-county ghost over an American city: the Entertainment plot's whole menace rendered as optics, and the book's wraith-vocabulary formally introduced before any actual haunting. (Umlauted "Bröckengespenst" is nonstandard German, preserved as written; the same page's "Tortolita"/"Totolita" is a live edition question.)