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pleasure for a long, long time, his ghosts had simply evaporated, vanished, which he regretted no end, and felt the poorer and emptier for it; in fact, he'd almost forgotten about their existence and eerie ways, but to see if there was any resemblance between his past experiences and my present ones, he asked me to describe, as accurately as possible, the outward appearance of my ghost.
    That day we took a longer walk than usual, so the appearance of the ghost aside, it was itself out of the ordinary, because on our afternoon walks we never ventured beyond the immediate vicinity of the spa, and this area was no larger than the park itself, beyond which lay untouched landscape, the black-pebbled seashore, the craggy, precipitous rocks, and, in the opposite direction, the marsh, with a murky, opaque pond in the middle of it called the Snail Garden, and even farther, on dry land, the fabulously scarifying beechwood grove called the Great Wilderness.
    True, the park, girded by slender whitewashed cottages facing the sea, was quite large and had wide driveways broadening into little plazas and radiating in every direction, with whimsical little footpaths crisscrossing the green lawns, but the solitary pines had more than enough space to display their solitude, just as the white birches with their meticulous nonchalance had room to arrange themselves in tidy clusters; the seafront promenade was also part of the park, protected by a tall stone wall adorned with elongated marble urns and running straight as an arrow, separating land from sea; in a sense, even the short first section of the embankment belonged to the park, too, being a direct extension of the promenade and different from the rest of the embankment because they had used fine gravel instead of crushed stones to make a rough surface suitable for walking —I could actually sink my feet ankle-deep into this gravel—but despite these efforts to turn this short section into a walkway by using soft, pleasantly crunching gravel, it remained bare as it rose between the sea and the marsh, a reminder of its convulsive origins, when in the course of a single night many centuries ago it had been flung here by a terrible tidal wave, thus cutting off water from water and letting a once lovely bay deteriorate into a marsh; properly speaking, then, only the tree-lined lane could be said to belong to the park, but that, too, if only in a mundane sense, led away from here, since it went from the rear entrance of the spa to the railroad station, where it ended for good; from the station there was nowhere to go, one had to turn back, for it was one thing to take a walk and quite another to go on an excursion.
    It is also true that my parents never decided in advance which way we would walk, this was always determined by chance or simply by the dearth of choices; it seemed quite unnecessary to ponder which of the two routes to take —whether, coming from the spa, we should turn onto the seaside promenade or proceed farther on the embankment and on the way back, sweeping around the main building, walk as far as the station— or decide whether we should while away the time in the lobby's wicker chairs until so little time was left for the actual walk that on our return, instead of taking the sensible short route, we'd choose the impractical long one; but none of this really mattered; all these afternoon walks did was make us repeat the same diverting game of choices and possibilities, though only until the pearly hue of the sky began to deepen and we, back in our rooms or on the terrace, watched it turn completely dark.
    On that day, however, nightfall caught us out-of-doors, for we had begun our afternoon walk, as usual, first going down to the shore for our fresh-air cure, which we took by leaning against the stone wall, no more than fifteen minutes, and simply relaxing our muscles as much as possible and silently inhaling and exhaling through our nostrils, taking advantage of the early