The Magic Mountain — Chapter 1

Chapter 2 of 8 · Review of The Magic Mountain

Arrival

A simple young man travelled in high summer from Hamburg, his native city, to Davos-Platz in the Grisons. He was going on a visit for three weeks.

From Hamburg to that place up there is, however, a long journey; too long, properly speaking, in proportion to so brief a stay. It goes through the lands of several rulers, up hill and down, from the South German uplands down to the shores of the Swabian Sea and by boat across its leaping waves, over depths once thought unfathomable.

From that point onward the journey frays out, after proceeding so generously and in direct lines for so long. There are halts and complications. At the place called Rorschach, on Swiss soil, one entrusts oneself once more to the railway, but for the present gets only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station where one is obliged to change trains. It is a narrow-gauge line which one boards after a good deal of standing about in a windy and not very inviting place, and at the moment when the little engine, evidently possessed of extraordinary pulling power, sets itself in motion, there begins the truly adventurous part of the journey, a sudden and stubborn ascent that seems to have no wish to end. For the station of Landquart lies, comparatively speaking, at no great height; but now one goes in earnest into the high mountains, on a wild and urgent road through the rocks.

Hans Castorp, for that was the young man’s name, found himself alone with his crocodile-leather hand-bag, a gift from his uncle and foster-father, Consul Tienappel, to name that name here at once as well, his winter coat, which swung from a hook, and his rolled plaid, in a small compartment upholstered in grey; he sat with the window lowered, and as the afternoon grew cooler and cooler, he, darling and pet of the family, had turned up the collar of his fashionably ample summer overcoat with its silk facings. Beside him on the seat lay a paper-covered book entitled “Ocean steamships,” in which at the beginning of the journey he had studied from time to time; but now it lay neglected there, while the breath of the heavily panting locomotive, drifting in, soiled its cover with particles of coal.

Two days of travel remove a man, and especially a young man who as yet has not taken very firm root in life, from his everyday world, from all that he called his duties, interests, cares, prospects, much more than he could possibly have dreamed on the cab-drive to the station. The space that rolls itself out, turning and fleeing, between him and the soil that nurtured him proves itself possessed of powers which one ordinarily believes reserved for time; from hour to hour it brings about inner changes very similar to those effected by time, yet in a certain sense surpassing them. Like time, it produces forgetfulness; but it does so by loosening the person from his relationships and setting him in a free and primal state, indeed making even of the pedant and stay-at-home burgher, in the twinkling of an eye, something like a vagabond. Time, people say, is Lethe; but the air of far places is such a draught as well, and if it should work less thoroughly, it does so all the more quickly.

Hans Castorp underwent something of the kind as well. He had not intended to take this journey very seriously, to commit himself inwardly to it. His idea, rather, had been to get it over quickly, because it had to be got over, to return exactly the same man as the one who had departed, and to resume his life precisely where he had been obliged to lay it aside for a moment. Only yesterday he had still been wholly confined within his customary circle of thought, occupied with what had most recently lain behind him, his examination, and what immediately lay before him, his entry into practical work at Tunder & Wilms (shipyard, engineering works, and boilermakers), and had looked ahead over the next three weeks with as much impatience as his temperament ever allowed. But now it seemed to him, after all, as though the circumstances demanded his full attention and as though it would not do to shrug them off lightly. This being lifted up into regions where he had never yet breathed and where, as he knew, wholly unfamiliar, peculiarly thin and scant conditions of life prevailed, it was beginning to excite him, to fill him with a certain anxiety. Home and order lay not only far behind, they lay chiefly fathoms deep beneath him, and still he was rising above them. Suspended between them and the unknown, he asked himself how it would go with him up there. Perhaps it was unwise and unwholesome that he, born and accustomed to breathe only a few metres above sea-level, should allow himself to be transported all at once into these extreme regions without having lingered at least a few days in a place of middling elevation? He wished himself at his destination; for once one was up there, he thought, one would live as everywhere else and not, as now in the very climb, be reminded at every moment in what inappropriate spheres one found oneself. He looked out: the train wound in curves along a narrow pass; one could see the carriages in front, could see the engine, which in its labour threw out brown, green, and black masses of smoke that streamed away. Waters roared in the depths to the right; to the left dark firs strove upward between boulders toward a stone-grey sky. Pitch-dark tunnels came, and when day returned, spacious abysses with villages in their depths opened out. They closed again, new narrows followed, with remnants of snow in their gullies and crevices. There were halts at miserable little station huts, terminal stations from which the train departed in the opposite direction, which had a bewildering effect, since one no longer knew how one was travelling and no longer remembered the points of the compass. Magnificent distant vistas into the holy, phantasmagorical world of peaks piled up in the high mountains, toward and into which one was striving upward, opened themselves and were lost again to the reverent eye at bends of the track. Hans Castorp reflected that he had left the zone of deciduous trees beneath him, and probably that of the songbirds as well, if he was not mistaken, and this thought of cessation and impoverishment had the effect that, visited by a slight dizziness and malaise, he covered his eyes with his hand for two seconds. That passed. He saw that the ascent had come to an end, the summit of the pass had been surmounted. On a level valley floor the train now rolled onward more comfortably.

It was toward eight o’clock, and day still lingered. A lake appeared in the distant landscape, its waters were grey, and black fir forests rose beside its shores up the surrounding heights, grew thin farther up, were lost, and left behind misty, bare rock. They stopped at a little station; it was Davos-Dorf, as Hans Castorp heard called out outside, and he would now be at his destination within a very short time. And suddenly he heard beside him the voice of Joachim Ziemßen, his cousin’s deliberate Hamburg voice, saying: “Good day, there, now just get out”; and when he looked out, Joachim himself was standing beneath his window on the platform, in a brown ulster, with absolutely no hat on and looking healthier than ever in his life. He laughed and said again:

“Come out, then; don’t stand on ceremony!”

“But I’m not there yet,” said Hans Castorp, bewildered and still sitting where he was.

“Yes, you are there. This is the village. It is nearer to the sanatorium from here. I’ve brought a carriage. Hand out your things.”

And laughing, bewildered, in the excitement of arrival and reunion, Hans Castorp handed him his hand-bag and winter coat, the rolled plaid with stick and umbrella, and finally “Ocean steamships” as well. Then he ran through the narrow corridor and sprang onto the platform for the proper and, so to speak, only now personal greeting with his cousin, which took place without effusion, as between people of cool and somewhat stiff habits. It is strange to say, but they had always avoided calling one another by their Christian names, solely out of shyness of too much warmth of heart. Since, however, they could hardly address one another by their surnames, they confined themselves to the familiar pronoun. That was an ingrained habit between the cousins.

A man in livery, with a braided cap, looked on as they, young Ziemßen in military bearing, shook hands quickly and a little awkwardly, and then came up to ask Hans Castorp for his luggage check; for he was the concierge of the International Sanatorium “Berghof” and showed himself willing to fetch the guest’s large trunk from the station “Platz,” while the gentlemen drove straight on to supper. The man limped conspicuously, and so the first thing Hans Castorp asked Joachim Ziemßen was:

“Is that a war veteran? Why does he limp like that?”

“Yes, thank you!” Joachim answered, somewhat bitterly. “A war veteran! It’s his knee, or rather it was, for then he had his kneecap taken out.”

Hans Castorp collected himself as quickly as he could. “I see!” he said, lifting his head as he walked and glancing about him. “But you’re surely not going to make me believe that you still have anything of the sort? You look as if you had your sword-knot already and had just come back from manoeuvres.” And he looked sideways at his cousin.

Joachim was taller and broader than he, the very image of youthful strength and as though made for uniform. He belonged to that very brown type which his fair homeland not infrequently produces, and the already dark skin of his face had through burning become almost bronze in colour. With his large black eyes and the dark little moustache above the full, well-shaped mouth, he would have been positively handsome if he had not had ears that stuck out. They had been his only sorrow and pain in life up to a certain point. Now he had other cares. Hans Castorp went on:

“But you are coming down with me at once, aren’t you? I really can see no obstacle.”

“At once with you?” asked the cousin, and turned toward him his large eyes, which had always been gentle, but in these five months had taken on a somewhat weary, indeed sorrowful expression. “At once when?”

“Why, in three weeks.”

“Oh, I see, you’re going home again already in your thoughts,” Joachim answered. “Well, just wait; you are only just arriving. Three weeks are of course next to nothing for us up here, but for you, who are here on a visit and in any case are only meant to stay three weeks, for you it is still a great deal of time. First acclimatize yourself a little; that is not at all so easy, you’ll see. And then the climate is not the only curious thing with us. You will see all sorts of new things here, just wait. And as for what you say about me, it doesn’t go quite so briskly with me, you know; ‘home in three weeks,’ those are notions from down below. I may well be brown, but that is chiefly snow-burn and does not mean much, as Behrens always says too, and at the last general examination he said it would in all likelihood still take another half-year.”

“Half a year? Are you mad?” cried Hans Castorp. They had just seated themselves in the yellow cabriolet, which stood there ready on the stony space before the station building, which was little more than a shed, and while the two bays started off, Hans Castorp threw himself about indignantly on the hard cushion. “Half a year? Why, you’ve already been here almost half a year! One hasn’t so much time—!”

“Yes, time,” said Joachim, nodding several times straight ahead without troubling himself over his cousin’s honest indignation. “They bandy human time about here, you wouldn’t believe it. Three weeks are like a day to them. You’ll see. You’ll learn all that soon enough,” he said, and added: “One changes one’s notions here.”

Hans Castorp kept looking at him from the side.

“But you have recovered splendidly all the same,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yes, do you think so?” Joachim answered. “As a matter of fact, I think so too!” he said, settling himself higher back into the cushion; yet at once he resumed a more oblique position. “I am better,” he explained; “but I am still not well. Up top on the left, where one used to hear rales, it now sounds only rough, that is not so bad, but lower down it is still _very_ rough, and then there are sounds in the second intercostal space as well.”

“How learned you have become,” said Hans Castorp.

“Yes, by God, that is a fine kind of learning. I should gladly have sweated it off again in the service already,” Joachim replied. “But I still have sputum,” he said, with a shrug that was at once careless and violent, and did not become his face, and he showed his cousin something which he drew halfway out of the side pocket of his ulster turned toward him and at once put away again: a flat, curved bottle of blue glass with a metal stopper. “Most of us up here have one of those,” he said. “It even has a name among us, a sort of nickname, quite jolly. Are you looking at the scenery?”

Hans Castorp was doing so, and he remarked: “Magnificent!”

“Do you think so?” Joachim asked.

They had followed for some distance the irregularly built-up street running parallel with the railway, in the direction of the valley’s axis; then they had crossed the narrow track to the left, gone over a watercourse, and were now trotting along a gently ascending carriage-road toward wooded slopes, toward the place where, on a low projecting plateau of meadowland, its front turned southwest, a long-stretched building with a domed tower, which from afar looked riddled and porous from all its balcony loggias like a sponge, was just now putting out its first lights. Twilight fell rapidly. A faint evening red that for a while had enlivened the evenly overcast sky had already faded, and that colourless, disensouled, melancholy state of transition prevailed in nature which immediately precedes the full onset of night. The inhabited valley, drawn out long and somewhat winding, was now lighting itself everywhere, on the floor as well as here and there on the slopes to either side, on the right especially, which opened outward and where buildings rose terracewise. To the left, paths ran up the meadow slopes and were lost in the dull blackness of the conifer forests. The more distant mountain backdrops, at the far end, toward the outlet where the valley narrowed, showed a sober slate-blue. As a wind had sprung up, the evening cool became keenly perceptible.

“No, to be frank I do not find it so overwhelming,” said Hans Castorp. “Where are the glaciers and snowfields and the mighty mountain giants? These things are not very high, it seems to me.”

“On the contrary, they are high,” Joachim answered. “You can see the tree line almost everywhere; it marks itself out strikingly sharply, the firs come to an end, and with that everything comes to an end, that is all there is, rocks, as you observe. Over there, to the right of the Schwarzhorn, that point there, you even have a glacier, do you still see the blue? It is not large, but it is a glacier as a glacier ought to be, the Scaletta Glacier. Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn in the gap, you cannot see them from here, also lie in snow all the year round.”

“In eternal snow,” said Hans Castorp.

“Yes, eternal, if you like. Still, it is all high enough. But we ourselves are frightfully high up, you must remember. Sixteen hundred metres above sea level. The elevations do not stand out so much from here.”

“Yes, what a climb that was! I grew quite alarmed, I can tell you. Sixteen hundred metres! That is nearly five thousand feet, if I reckon it up. Never in my life have I been so high up.” And Hans Castorp curiously drew a deep, tentative breath of the strange air. It was fresh, and nothing more. It lacked scent, substance, moisture; it entered lightly and said nothing to the soul.

“Excellent!” he remarked politely.

“Yes, it is celebrated air, after all. Besides, the country is not showing itself to advantage this evening. Sometimes it looks better, especially in the snow. But one gets thoroughly sick of looking at it. All of us up here, you may believe me, are unspeakably sick of it,” said Joachim, and his mouth twisted into an expression of disgust that seemed exaggerated and uncontrolled and again did not become him.

“You speak so oddly,” said Hans Castorp.

“Do I speak oddly?” Joachim asked with a certain concern, turning to his cousin...

“No, no, forgive me, it only seemed so to me for a moment!” Hans Castorp hastened to say. Yet what he had meant was the phrase “We up here,” which Joachim had already used for the third or fourth time, and which in some way struck him as oppressive and strange.

“Our sanatorium lies even higher than the village, as you see,” Joachim went on. “Fifty metres. The prospectus says ‘a hundred,’ but it is only fifty. Highest of all lies the Schatzalp sanatorium over there; you cannot see it. In winter they have to bring their corpses down by bobsleigh, because the roads are not passable then.”

“Their corpses? Oh, I see! Well, listen to that!” cried Hans Castorp. And suddenly he burst out laughing, in a violent, irresistible laughter that shook his chest and drew his face, somewhat stiffened by the cool wind, into a faintly painful grimace. “On a bobsleigh! And you tell me that in perfect composure? You have grown positively cynical in these five months!”

“Not cynical at all,” Joachim answered with a shrug. “Why should it be? It is all the same to the corpses... Besides, perhaps one does grow cynical here among us. Behrens himself is an old cynic too, by the way; a famous bird, an old Corps student and a brilliant operator, it seems, you will like him. Then there is Krokowski, the assistant, quite a clever something. The prospectus lays particular stress on his activity. He practises dissection of souls on the patients.”

“What does he practise? Dissection of souls? That is disgusting!” cried Hans Castorp, and now his mirth got the upper hand. He was no longer master of it at all; after everything else, the dissection of souls finished him completely, and he laughed so much that tears ran out beneath the hand with which, bending forward, he covered his eyes. Joachim laughed heartily as well; it seemed to do him good; and so it came about that the young men got out of their carriage in high good humour after it had borne them at last, at a walk, up the steep, looping approach to the portal of the International Sanatorium Berghof.

No. 34

Immediately to the right, between the front door and the vestibule, lay the concierge’s lodge, and from there a servant of French type, who had been sitting at the telephone reading newspapers, came towards them in the grey livery of the limping man at the station and led them through the brightly lit hall, on whose left were the public rooms. As he passed, Hans Castorp glanced inside and found them empty. Where the guests were, he asked, and his cousin answered:

“At the rest cure. I had leave today because I wanted to fetch you. Otherwise I too lie out on the balcony after supper.”

It lacked little for Hans Castorp to be overcome by laughter anew.

“What, you lie out on the balcony in the dead of night?” he asked in an unsteady voice...

“Yes, it is prescribed. From eight to ten. But come along now, look at your room and wash your hands.”

They took the lift, whose electric mechanism the Frenchman operated. As they glided upward, Hans Castorp dried his eyes.

“I am quite broken in two and exhausted with laughing,” he said, breathing through his mouth. “You have told me such outrageous things... That business of dissecting souls was too much, that ought not to have come in. Besides, I suppose I am a little done up from the journey too. Do you suffer so much from cold feet as well? At the same time one’s face is so hot; it is unpleasant. We shall eat at once, I hope? It seems to me I am hungry. Does one eat decently here with you up here?”

They went noiselessly along the coconut matting of the narrow corridor. Bells of frosted glass sent a pale light from the ceiling. The walls gleamed white and hard, coated with a lacquer-like oil paint. A nurse showed herself somewhere, in a white cap and with a pince-nez on her nose, the cord of which she had hooked behind her ear. She was evidently of the Protestant faith, without any genuine devotion to her calling, curious and troubled and burdened by boredom. At two points in the passage, on the floor before the white-lacquered numbered doors, there stood certain large bulging vessels with short necks, about whose meaning Hans Castorp for the present forgot to inquire.

“Here you are,” said Joachim. “Number Thirty-four. I am on the right, and on the left there is a Russian married couple, somewhat slapdash and loud, one must say, but it could not be helped. Well, what do you say?”

The door was double, with clothes-hooks in the hollow space between. Joachim had switched on the ceiling light, and in its trembling brightness the room showed itself cheerful and peaceful, with its white practical furniture, its equally white stout washable wallpaper, its clean linoleum floor-covering, and the linen curtains, simply and gaily embroidered in the modern taste. The balcony door stood open; one saw the lights of the valley and heard far-off dance music. Good Joachim had set a few flowers in a little vase on the chest of drawers, whatever happened to be found in the aftermath, some yarrow and a few bellflowers, plucked by himself on the hillside.

“Charming of you,” said Hans Castorp. “What a pleasant room! One could lodge here very comfortably for a few weeks.”

“The day before yesterday an American woman died here,” said Joachim. “Behrens said at once she would be finished by the time you came, and that then you could have the room. Her fiancé was with her, an English naval officer, but he did not exactly behave in a soldierly way. Every other moment he came out into the corridor to cry, just like a little boy. And then he rubbed his cheeks with _Cold-cream_ because he had been shaved and the tears stung him there so. The day before yesterday evening the American had two haemorrhages of the first order besides, and that was the end. But she has been gone since yesterday morning, and then of course they fumigated thoroughly in here, with formalin, you know; that is supposed to be so good for such purposes.”

Hans Castorp took in this story with an animated distraction. Standing before the spacious washbasin, sleeves drawn back, its nickel taps glittering in the electric light, he barely cast more than a fleeting glance over at the bedstead of white metal, neatly covered.

“Fumigated, that is splendid,” he said conversationally and somewhat inconsequently, as he washed and dried his hands. “Yes, methyl aldehyde, the stoutest bacterium cannot stand that, H₂CO, but it catches in the nose, does it not? The strictest cleanliness is self-evidently an indispensable condition...” He pronounced “self-evidently” with the consonants distinctly separated, whereas his cousin, since becoming a student, had adopted the commoner pronunciation, and with great fluency went on: “What I still wanted to say... The naval officer had probably shaved with a safety razor, I should suppose; one cuts oneself more easily with those things than with a well-honed blade, that at least is my experience, I use one and the other alternately... Well, and on irritated skin salt water naturally hurts; he was no doubt accustomed from the service to using _Cold-cream_; I see nothing remarkable in that...” And he went on chattering, said he had two hundred _Maria Mancini_ in his suitcase, his cigar; the customs inspection had been most comfortable; and conveyed greetings from various persons at home. “Is there no heating here, then?” he cried suddenly, and ran to the pipes to lay his hands on them...

“No, they keep us fairly cool here,” Joachim answered. “That will have to change only when the central heating is lit in August.”

“August, August!” said Hans Castorp. “But I am freezing! I am freezing abominably, that is, in my body; for in the face I am conspicuously flushed. There, feel how I burn!”

This demand that one should feel his face suited Hans Castorp’s nature not at all and embarrassed him himself. Joachim did not respond to it either, but only said:

“That is the air and means nothing. Behrens himself has blue cheeks all day long. Some never get used to it. Now, _go on_, or else we shall get nothing more to eat.”

Outside the nurse appeared again, short-sighted and peering after them with curiosity. But on the first floor Hans Castorp suddenly stopped, riveted by a perfectly dreadful sound that became audible a short distance away behind a bend in the corridor, a sound not loud, but of so decidedly abominable a sort that Hans Castorp made a grimace and looked at his cousin with widened eyes. It was coughing, evidently, a man’s coughing; but coughing unlike any Hans Castorp had ever heard, indeed in comparison with which every other cough known to him had been a splendid and healthy manifestation of life; a cough wholly without relish or love, which did not come in proper fits, but sounded only like a ghastly powerless stirring in the mush of organic dissolution.

“Yes,” said Joachim, “that looks bad. An Austrian aristocrat, you know, an elegant man and altogether born to be a gentleman rider. And now this is the condition he is in. But he still gets about.”

As they went on their way, Hans Castorp spoke with insistence about the cough of the gentleman rider. “You must consider,” he said, “that I have never heard anything of the sort, that it is wholly new to me; naturally it makes an impression on me. There are so many kinds of cough, dry and loose, and the loose is, if anything, the more favourable, as people generally say, and better than when one barks. When in my youth” (“in my youth,” he said) “I had croup, I barked like a wolf, and they were all glad when it loosened, I still remember that. But such a cough as this, there has never yet been one, at least not for me; why, it is no longer a living cough at all. It is not dry, but neither can you call it loose; that is very far indeed from being the word. It is really as if, while listening to it, one looked right into the man and saw how things are with him there inside, all one mash and slime...”

“Well,” said Joachim, “I hear it every day, you need not describe it to me.”

But Hans Castorp could not recover his composure over the cough he had heard; he repeatedly declared that one positively looked into the gentleman rider while hearing it, and when they entered the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited gleam.

In the Restaurant

In the restaurant it was bright, elegant, and cosy. It lay just to the right of the hall, opposite the conversation rooms, and was used, as Joachim explained, chiefly by newly arrived guests who dined outside the regular hours, and by such as had visitors. Birthdays and impending departures were also festively celebrated there, as well as favourable results of general examinations. At times things went gaily enough in the restaurant, said Joachim; champagne too was served. At present no one was sitting there except a single lady of about thirty, who was reading in a book, but meanwhile humming to herself and continually tapping lightly on the tablecloth with the middle finger of her left hand. When the young men had sat down, she changed places in order to turn her back on them. She was shy of human company, Joachim explained in a low voice, and always ate in the restaurant with a book. It was said that she had entered pulmonary sanatoriums when she was still a very young girl and had not lived in the world since.

“Well then, compared with her, with your five months, you are still a young beginner, and will still be one when you have a year behind you,” said Hans Castorp to his cousin; whereupon Joachim, with that shrug which had formerly not been natural to him, reached for the bill of fare.

They had taken the raised table by the window, the prettiest place. Against the cream-coloured curtain they sat facing one another, their faces glowed by the light of the red-shaded electric table-lamp. Hans Castorp folded his freshly washed hands and rubbed them together in comfortable expectancy, as was his habit when he sat down to table, perhaps because his forefathers had prayed before soup. A friendly girl, speaking with a broad palate, in a black dress with a white apron and a large face of exceedingly healthy colour waited on them, and to his great amusement Hans Castorp learned that the waitresses here were called “dining-room daughters.” They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose from her, and Hans Castorp sent her away once more to have it brought to a better temperature. The meal was excellent. There was asparagus soup, stuffed tomatoes, roast with all manner of accompaniments, a particularly well-prepared sweet dish, a cheese course, and fruit. Hans Castorp ate very heartily, although his appetite did not prove so lively as he had thought. But he was accustomed to eating a great deal even when he was not hungry, and that out of self-respect.

Joachim did not do the dishes much honour. He was tired of the cooking, he said; they all were, up here, and it was the custom to abuse the food; for when one sat here for ever and a day ... On the other hand, he drank the wine with pleasure, indeed with a certain devotion, and, carefully avoiding any all too sentimental turn of phrase, repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that someone was there with whom one could exchange a reasonable word.

"Yes, it is splendid that you have come!" he said, and his deliberate voice was moved. "I may truly say it is positively an event for me. This is at least a change, I mean, it is a break, an articulation in the eternal, boundless sameness ..."

"But time ought really to pass quickly for you here," Hans Castorp observed.

"Quickly and slowly, whichever you please," answered Joachim. "It does not pass at all, I tell you, it is no time at all, and it is not life either, no, it is not," he said, shaking his head and reaching again for his glass.

Hans Castorp too drank, although by now his face was burning like fire. But in his body he was still cold, and a peculiar joyful and yet somewhat tormenting restlessness was in his limbs. His words hurried over one another, he misspoke more than once, and brushed it aside with a dismissive movement of the hand. Joachim, moreover, was in an animated mood as well, and their conversation flowed all the more freely and gaily because the humming, tapping lady had quite suddenly got up and gone away. As they ate, they gesticulated with their forks, put on important expressions with a mouthful in the cheek, laughed, nodded, shrugged their shoulders, and had not properly swallowed before they were already speaking again. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and had turned the conversation to the projected regulation of the Elbe.

"Epoch-making!" said Hans Castorp. "Epoch-making for the development of our shipping, quite beyond estimate. We are putting fifty million into the budget for it as an immediate single expenditure, and you may be assured that we know precisely what we are about."

However, for all the importance he attached to the regulation of the Elbe, he immediately broke off from that topic again and demanded that Joachim tell him more of life "up here" and of the guests, which Joachim was quite ready to do, since he was glad to unburden himself and communicate. The matter of the corpses that were sent down the bob run he had to repeat, and once more expressly assure him that it was true. Since Hans Castorp was again seized with laughter, he too laughed, which he seemed heartily to enjoy, and related other comic things to feed their high spirits. A lady sat at table with him, named Frau Stöhr, rather ill, by the way, a musician's wife from Cannstatt, and she was the most uncultivated person he had ever come across. She said "disinfectize" in the fullest seriousness. And the assistant Krokowski she called the "fomulus." One had to swallow that without pulling a face. Besides, she was fond of gossip, as most of them were up here, and of another lady, Frau Iltis, she said that she wore a "sterilet." "Sterilet she calls it, that really is beyond price!" And half reclining, thrown back against the backs of their chairs, they laughed so hard that their bodies shook and they almost simultaneously got the hiccups.

In between, Joachim grew dejected and thought of his lot.

"Yes, here we sit and laugh," he said, with a pained face, interrupted now and then by the convulsions of his diaphragm; "and yet there is no telling when I shall get away from here, for if Behrens says another half-year, that is reckoned close, one must be prepared for more. But it is hard all the same, tell me yourself whether it is not sad for me. There I was already accepted, and next month I could take my officer's examination. And now I loaf about here with the thermometer in my mouth and count the blunders of that uncultivated Frau Stöhr and let time slip by. A year plays such a part at our age, it brings so many changes and advances with it in the life down below. And I must stagnate here like a water-hole, yes, exactly like a putrid pond, it is not too violent a comparison at all ..."

Strangely enough, Hans Castorp replied to this only with the question whether one could get porter here; and when his cousin looked at him somewhat astonished, he saw that he was in the act of falling asleep, indeed he was already asleep.

"But you are asleep!" said Joachim. "Come, it is time to go to bed, for both of us."

"It is no time at all," said Hans Castorp thick-tongued. But he went with him nevertheless, somewhat stooped and stiff-legged, like a man positively being dragged to the ground by weariness, only pulling himself together by force when, in the hall now lit only dimly, he heard Joachim say:

"Krokowski is sitting there. I think I had better introduce you quickly."

Dr. Krokowski sat in the light, by the fireplace in one of the conversation rooms, close by the open sliding door, reading a newspaper. He stood up when the young men approached him and Joachim said, in military posture:

"May I present my cousin Castorp from Hamburg to you, Herr Doktor. He has only just arrived."

Dr. Krokowski greeted the new member of the household with a kind of cheerful, sturdy, encouraging heartiness, as though he meant to suggest that face to face with him any embarrassment was superfluous and that cheerful confidence alone was in place. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered, stout, considerably shorter than the two who stood before him, so that he had to tilt his head back at an angle in order to look them in the face, and extraordinarily pale, of a translucent, indeed phosphorescent pallor, heightened still further by the dark glow of his eyes, the blackness of his brows, and of his rather long full beard tapering into two points, which already showed a few white threads. He wore a black double-breasted lounge suit, already somewhat worn, black openwork half-shoes of a sandal-like kind with thick grey woollen socks, and a soft falling collar such as Hans Castorp had hitherto seen only on a photographer in Danzig, and which in fact gave Dr. Krokowski's appearance an atelier air. Smiling warmly, so that the yellowish teeth became visible in his beard, he shook the young man's hand, saying in a baritonal voice with somewhat foreign, drawling accents:

"Be welcome among us, Herr Castorp! May you soon settle in and feel at home in our midst. You are coming to us as a patient, if I may permit myself the question?"

It was touching to see how Hans Castorp laboured to show himself polite and master his sleepiness. He was annoyed at being so poorly in form and, with the mistrustful self-consciousness of youth, detected in the assistant's smile and encouraging manner signs of indulgent mockery. He replied by speaking of the three weeks, mentioning his examination as well, and adding that, thank God, he was perfectly healthy.

"Indeed?" asked Dr. Krokowski, thrusting his head forward askew as if teasingly and intensifying his smile ... "Then you are a most interesting phenomenon to study! For I have not yet encountered a completely healthy human being. What examination have you passed, if the question is permitted?"

"I am an engineer, Herr Doktor," answered Hans Castorp with modest dignity.

"Ah, an engineer!" And Dr. Krokowski's smile, as it were, drew back; for the moment it lost something of its force and cordiality. "That is worthy. And so you will not be availing yourself here of any medical treatment, neither in the physical nor in the psychical respect?"

"No, thank you a thousand times!" said Hans Castorp, and almost stepped back.

Then Dr. Krokowski's smile broke forth again in triumph, and, shaking the young man's hand once more, he cried in a loud voice:

"Well then, sleep soundly, Herr Castorp, in the full consciousness of your irreproachable health! Sleep well, and until we meet again!" With that he dismissed the young men and sat down again to his newspaper.

The lift no longer had an attendant, and so they made their way up the stairs on foot, silent and somewhat disconcerted by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim accompanied Hans Castorp to Number Thirty-Four, where the limping man had properly delivered the new arrival's luggage, and they chatted for another quarter of an hour while Hans Castorp unpacked his night things and toilet articles and smoked a thick, mild cigarette over it. He would not get to his cigar tonight now, which struck him as odd and quite extraordinary.

"He looks very distinguished," he said, spurting forth the inhaled smoke as he spoke. "Wax-pale he is. But as for his chaussure, really, that is dreadful. Grey woollen socks and then those sandals. Was he offended in the end?"

"He is a little sensitive," Joachim admitted. "You should not have rejected medical treatment so brusquely, at least not the psychical. He does not like it when one evades it. He is not especially well disposed toward me either, because I do not confide enough in him. But every now and then I do tell him a dream, so that he may have something to analyse."

"Well then, I snubbed him," said Hans Castorp peevishly; for it left him dissatisfied with himself to have hurt anyone, and so weariness came over him again with renewed force.

"Good night," he said. "I am about to drop."

"At eight I shall fetch you for breakfast," said Joachim, and went.

Hans Castorp made only a cursory toilette for the night. Sleep overpowered him scarcely had he put out the bedside lamp, but he started up once more on remembering that someone had died in this bed the day before yesterday. "It will not have been the first time," he said to himself, as though that could serve to reassure him. "It is simply a death-bed, an ordinary death-bed." And he fell asleep.

But as soon as he had fallen asleep, he began to dream, and dreamed almost without cease until the next morning. Above all, he saw Joachim Ziemßen, in a strangely contorted posture, riding down a slanting course on a bob-sleigh. He was as phosphorescently pale as Dr. Krokowski, and seated in front was the gentleman rider, who looked very indistinct, like someone one had merely heard cough, and was steering. "It is all quite the same to us, to us up here," said the contorted Joachim, and then it was he, not the gentleman rider, who coughed in so horribly thick and pulpy a way. At this Hans Castorp had to weep bitterly and realized that he must run to the chemist's to procure some _Cold-cream_. But on the way sat Frau Iltis with a pointed snout and held something in her hand which was plainly meant to be her "sterilet," but was in fact nothing more than a safety razor. That, in turn, made Hans Castorp laugh again, and so he was tossed back and forth between different states of feeling until morning dawned through his half-open balcony door and woke him.