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Chapter One

Arrival

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

From Hamburg up there, however, is a long journey; too long, really, in proportion to so short a stay. It passes through several gentlemen's countries, uphill and down, from the South German plateau down to the shore of the Swabian Sea, and then by ship across its leaping waves, over abysses that in former times were thought unfathomable.

From that point on, the journey, which for so long had proceeded handsomely, in direct lines, breaks up into details. There are waits and complications. Near the town of Rorschach, on Swiss territory, one entrusts oneself again to the railway, but for the time being gets only as far as Landquart, a little Alpine station where one is obliged to change trains. It is a narrow-gauge railway, boarded after a long spell of standing about in windy and not very attractive surroundings; and at the moment when the small but evidently uncommonly powerful engine sets itself in motion, the truly adventurous part of the journey begins: an abrupt and stubborn ascent that seems unwilling ever to end. For Landquart station still lies, comparatively speaking, at a moderate elevation; but now, on a wild, pressing road of rock, the train is in earnest entering the high mountains.

Hans Castorp - that was the young man's name - found himself alone with his crocodile-leather handbag, a gift from his uncle and foster father, Consul Tienappel, to name him here at once as well, with his winter coat, which swung from a hook, and with his rug roll, in a small gray-upholstered compartment. He sat by the lowered window, and since the afternoon was growing steadily cooler, he, a child of good family and a tender sort of fellow, had turned up the collar of his fashionably loose summer overcoat, lined with silk. Beside him on the bench lay a paperback book called Ocean Steamships, in which he had studied from time to time at the beginning of the journey; but now it lay neglected, while the breath of the heavily panting locomotive, streaming in, soiled its cover with particles of coal.

Two days of travel remove a person - and especially a young person, not yet very firmly rooted in life - from his everyday world, from everything he called his duties, interests, cares, prospects, far more than he could have dreamed on the cab ride to the station. Space, rolling between him and his place of growth as it turns and flees, proves itself possessed of powers one usually thinks reserved for time; from hour to hour it produces inward changes very similar to those brought about by time, but in a certain way surpassing them. Like time, it breeds forgetfulness; but it does so by loosening the human person from his relations and setting him in a free and original condition - indeed, in the twinkling of an eye it turns even the pedant and solid citizen into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is Lethe; but distance in the air is such a draught as well, and if it should work less thoroughly, it does so all the more quickly.

Hans Castorp experienced something of this kind too. He had not intended to take this journey particularly seriously, to enter into it inwardly. His opinion, rather, had been that he would get it quickly over with, because it had to be got over with, return quite the same man he had been when he left, and take up his life again at precisely the point where he had had to lay it aside for a moment. Only yesterday he had still been wholly captive in the customary circle of his thoughts, concerned with what lay just behind him, his examination, and with what lay immediately ahead, his entry into practical work at Tunder & Wilms (shipyard, machine works, and boiler forge), and had looked past the next three weeks with as much impatience as his nature was capable of. But now it nevertheless seemed to him that circumstances required his full attention, and that it would not do to take them lightly. This being lifted up into regions where he had never yet breathed and where, as he knew, wholly unfamiliar, peculiarly thin and sparse 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 him; above all they lay fathoms deep below him, and still he rose beyond them. Suspended between them and the unknown, he asked himself how he would fare up there. Perhaps it was unwise and unwholesome that he, born and accustomed to breathe only a few meters above sea level, should have himself suddenly conveyed into these extreme regions without first spending at least a few days in a place of intermediate elevation? He wished he were at his destination, for once up there, he thought, one would live as everywhere else and would not, as now while climbing, be reminded in what unsuitable spheres one found oneself. He looked out: the train wound in a curve along a narrow pass; one saw the forward cars, saw the engine, which in its exertion thrust out brown, green, and black masses of smoke that scattered away. Waters roared in the depths to the right; to the left dark firs strove upward among blocks of rock toward a stone-gray sky. Pitch-black tunnels came, and when daylight returned, broad abysses opened with villages down below. They closed again; new defiles followed, with remnants of snow in their clefts and cracks. There were stops at wretched little station-houses, terminal stations from which the train departed in the opposite direction, which had a confusing effect, since one no longer knew which way one was traveling and no longer remembered the points of the compass. Magnificent distant views into the sacredly phantasmagoric world of peaks of the high mountains, toward and into which one was striving upward, opened and were lost again to the reverent eye through bends in the path. Hans Castorp reflected that he had left the zone of deciduous trees beneath him, and probably that of songbirds too, if he was right; and this thought of cessation and impoverishment caused him, overtaken by a slight dizziness and malaise, to cover his eyes with his hand for two seconds. It passed. He saw that the ascent had come to an end, that the pass had been overcome. On the level floor of a valley the train now rolled along more comfortably.

It was toward eight o'clock; the day still held. A lake appeared in the landscaped distance, its flood gray, and black fir forests climbed from its banks up the surrounding heights, grew thinner higher up, vanished, and left behind misty, bare rock. They stopped at a little station; it was Davos-Dorf, as Hans Castorp heard someone call outside; he would soon be at his destination. And suddenly he heard beside him the voice of Joachim Ziemßen, his cousin's leisurely Hamburg voice, saying, "Well now, get out"; and when he looked out, Joachim himself was standing below his window on the platform, in a brown ulster, without any head covering, and looking healthier than he had ever looked in his life. He laughed and said again:

"Come on out, don't be shy!"

"But I am not there yet," said Hans Castorp, bewildered and still sitting.

"Yes, you are. This is the Dorf. It is nearer to the sanatorium from here. I have a carriage with me. Hand over your things."

And laughing, confused, in the excitement of arrival and reunion, Hans Castorp handed out to him the handbag and winter coat, the rug roll with cane and umbrella, and finally Ocean Steamships as well. Then he hurried through the narrow corridor and jumped down onto the platform for the actual and, so to speak, now personal greeting with his cousin, which was performed without effusion, as between people of cool and brittle manners. It is odd to say, but they had always avoided calling each other by their first names, solely from fear of too much warmth of heart. Since, however, they could not very well address each other by their surnames, they limited themselves to the familiar "you." That was an ingrained habit between the cousins.

A man in livery, with a braided cap, watched as they - young Ziemßen in a military posture - shook hands quickly and a little awkwardly, and then came over to ask Hans Castorp for his baggage check; for he was the concierge of the International Sanatorium "Berghof" and showed himself willing to fetch the guest's large trunk from the "Platz" station, while the gentlemen drove directly to supper. The man limped noticeably, and so the first thing Hans Castorp asked Joachim Ziemßen was:

"Is he a war veteran? Why does he limp like that?"

"Oh, thank you!" Joachim replied, somewhat bitterly. "A war veteran! He has it in his knee - or had it, rather, because then he had his kneecap taken out."

Hans Castorp collected himself as quickly as he could. "Ah, I see!" he said, lifting his head as they walked and looking briefly about him. "But you are not going to try to persuade me that you still have anything like that, are you? You look as if you already had your sword-knot and had just come from maneuvers." And he looked at his cousin from the side.

Joachim was taller and broader than he, an image of youthful strength and as if made for uniform. He belonged to that very brown type which his blond homeland not infrequently produces, and his already dark facial skin had been burned almost bronze. With his large black eyes and the dark little mustache over his full, well-cut mouth he would have been downright handsome, had he not had protruding ears. They had been his only grief and life-sorrow up to a certain point. Now he had other worries. Hans Castorp went on:

"Surely you are coming down with me right away? I really see no obstacle."

"Right away with you?" asked the cousin, turning toward him his large eyes, which had always been gentle but in these five months had taken on a somewhat tired, even sad expression. "Right away when?"

"Well, in three weeks."

"Oh, so you are already on your way home in your thoughts," Joachim answered. "Well, just wait; you have only just arrived. Three weeks are almost nothing for us up here, of course, but for you, who are here on a visit and are supposed to stay only three weeks altogether, it is quite a lot of time. First get acclimatized; that is not so easy, you will see. And then the climate is not the only strange thing with us. You will see various new things here, just watch. And as for what you say about me, it cannot go quite so briskly with me after all, you know, 'home in three weeks'; those are ideas from down below. I am brown, yes, but that is mainly snowburn and does not mean much, as Behrens always says too; and at the last general examination he said it would quite certainly take another half year."

"Another half year? Are you mad?" cried Hans Castorp. They had just seated themselves before the station building, which was little more than a shed, in the yellow cabriolet waiting there on the stony square; and as the two brown horses pulled away, Hans Castorp tossed himself about indignantly on the hard cushion. "Another half year? Why, you have already been here almost half a year! One does not have so much time -!"

"Yes, time," said Joachim, nodding several times straight ahead, without troubling himself over his cousin's honest indignation. "The way they deal with human time up here, you would not believe it. Three weeks are like a day to them. You will see. You will learn all that," he said, and added: "One changes one's ideas here."

Hans Castorp looked at him continuously from the side.

"But you have recovered splendidly," he said, shaking his head.

"Yes, do you think so?" Joachim answered. "Don't you think? I think so too!" he said, and sat back higher against the cushion; yet at once he took up a more slanting position again. "I am better," he explained; "but I am simply not healthy yet. Up on the left, where rattling used to be heard, it only sounds rough now, which is not so bad, but below it is still very rough, and then there are also noises in the second intercostal space."

"How learned you have become," said Hans Castorp.

"Yes, by God, it is a fine sort of learning. I would gladly have sweated it out again in the service by now," Joachim replied. "But I still have sputum," he said, with a simultaneously casual and violent shrug that did not become him, and let his cousin see something he drew halfway out of the side pocket of his ulster facing him and then immediately put away again: a flat, curved bottle of blue glass with a metal cap. "Most of us up here have that," he said. "It has a name among us too, a sort of nickname, quite jolly. You are looking at the landscape?"

Hans Castorp was doing so, and he observed: "Magnificent!"

"You think so?" asked Joachim.

They had followed for a little way the irregularly built-up road running parallel to the railway in the direction of the valley axis; then they had crossed the narrow track to the left, passed over a watercourse, and were now trotting on a gently ascending carriage road toward wooded slopes, toward the place where, on a low projecting meadow plateau with its front turned southwest, a long building with a domed tower, looking from a distance holey and porous as a sponge because of all its balcony loggias, was just putting on its first lights. Twilight came quickly. A slight evening red, which for a while had enlivened the uniformly covered sky, had already faded, and that colorless, soulless, and melancholy transitional state prevailed in nature which immediately precedes the full onset of night. The settled valley, stretched long and somewhat winding, now lit itself everywhere, on the floor as well as here and there on both slopes - especially on the right, which spread out and on which buildings rose in terraces. To the left, paths ran up the meadow slopes and lost themselves in the dull blackness of the conifer forests. The more distant mountain wings, back at the outlet toward which the valley narrowed, showed a sober slate-blue. Since a wind had risen, the evening chill became keen.

"No, to be frank I do not find it so overwhelming," said Hans Castorp. "Where are the glaciers and firn fields and the enormous mountain giants? These things do not seem very high to me."

"Yes, they are high," Joachim answered. "You see the tree line almost everywhere; it marks itself off remarkably sharply, the firs stop, and with that everything stops, finished, rock, as you notice. 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 proper glacier, the Scaletta Glacier. Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn in the gap, which you cannot see from here, also always lie in snow, all year."

"In eternal snow," said Hans Castorp.

"Yes, eternal, if you like. Still, all this is high enough. But we ourselves are hideously high, you must remember that. Sixteen hundred meters above the sea. That keeps the elevations from showing to advantage."

"Yes, what a climb that was! I grew positively anxious and afraid, I can tell you. Sixteen hundred meters! That is nearly five thousand feet, if I calculate it. In my life I have never been so high." And Hans Castorp curiously took a deep, testing breath of the strange air. It was fresh - and nothing more. It lacked scent, content, moisture; it entered easily and said nothing to the soul.

"Excellent!" he remarked politely.

"Yes, it is famous air, of course. Besides, the region is not showing itself to advantage this evening. Sometimes it looks better, especially in snow. But one gets very tired of looking at it. All of us up here, believe me, are indescribably tired of it," said Joachim, and his mouth was twisted by an expression of disgust that seemed exaggerated and uncontrolled and again did not become him.

"You speak so strangely," said Hans Castorp.

"Do I speak strangely?" asked Joachim 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. But he had meant the phrase "we up here," which Joachim had already used for the third or fourth time and which affected him in some way as oppressive and odd.

"Our sanatorium lies still higher than the town, as you see," Joachim continued. "Fifty meters. The prospectus says 'a hundred,' but it is only fifty. Highest of all is the Schatzalp sanatorium over there; one cannot see it. In winter they have to bring their corpses down by bobsled, because then the roads are not passable."

"Their corpses? Oh, I see! Well, listen to that!" cried Hans Castorp. And suddenly he fell to laughing, into a violent, unconquerable laughter that shook his chest and twisted his face, somewhat stiff from the cool wind, into a faintly painful grimace. "On a bobsled! And you tell me that in complete calm? You have become quite cynical in these five months!"

"Not cynical at all," Joachim answered, shrugging. "Why should it be? It makes no difference to the corpses... Besides, it may well be that one becomes cynical here with us. Behrens himself is an old cynic too - a splendid fellow, incidentally, an old corps student and a brilliant surgeon, it seems; you will like him. Then there is Krokowski, the assistant - a very clever something. The prospectus gives special notice to his work. He practices dissection of the soul on the patients, you see."

"He practices what? Dissection of the soul? That is repulsive!" cried Hans Castorp, and now his merriment got the upper hand. He was no longer master of it; after everything else, the dissection of the soul had finished him off completely, and he laughed so hard that tears ran out beneath the hand with which, bending forward, he covered his eyes. Joachim also laughed heartily - it seemed to do him good - and so it happened that the young men got out of their carriage in great good spirits, after it had finally borne them at a walk up the steep, looping drive to the portal of the International Sanatorium Berghof.

No. 34

Immediately to the right, between the house 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 toward them in the gray livery of the limping man at the station and led them through the well-lit hall, on the left side of which were social rooms. As he passed, Hans Castorp looked in 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 also 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 even by night and fog?" he asked in an unsteady voice...

"Yes, that is the rule. From eight to ten. But come 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 and exhausted from laughing," he said, breathing through his mouth. "You have told me so much mad stuff... That business of the dissection of the soul was too much; that should not have come. Besides, I suppose I am also a little worn out from the journey. Do you suffer from cold feet too? At the same time one has such a hot face; it is unpleasant. We shall eat at once, I hope? It seems to me I am hungry. Does one eat decently with you up here?"

They went noiselessly along the coconut runner of the narrow corridor. Bells of milk glass sent a pale light from the ceiling. The walls shimmered white and hard, coated with a lacquer-like oil paint. A nurse appeared somewhere, in a white cap and with a pince-nez on her nose, whose cord she had looped behind her ear. She was evidently of Protestant confession, without true devotion to her calling, curious and troubled and burdened by boredom. At two points in the corridor, on the floor before the white-lacquered numbered doors, stood certain demijohns, large, potbellied vessels with short necks, whose meaning Hans Castorp for the present forgot to ask about.

"Here you are," said Joachim. "Number Thirty-four. I am on the right, and on the left is a Russian married couple - rather slipshod and loud, one has to 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 clarity the room appeared cheerful and peaceful, with its white, practical furniture, its likewise white, strong, washable wallpapers, its clean linoleum floor covering, and the linen curtains, simply and merrily embroidered in modern taste. The balcony door stood open; one perceived the lights of the valley and heard distant dance music. Good Joachim had put a few flowers in a small vase on the chest of drawers - whatever could be found in the second growth, a little yarrow and a few harebells, picked by himself on the slope.

"Charming of you," said Hans Castorp. "What a nice room! One can live here quite pleasantly for a few weeks."

"An American woman died here the day before yesterday," said Joachim. "Behrens thought at once that she would be done by the time you came, and that you could then have the room. Her fiance was with her, an English naval officer, but he did not behave exactly smartly. Every moment he came out into the corridor to weep, just like a little boy. And then he rubbed his cheeks with cold cream because he was clean-shaven and the tears burned him so there. The evening before last the American woman had two first-rate hemorrhages, and that was the end. But she has been gone since yesterday morning, and then of course they smoked the room out thoroughly, with formalin, you know; that is supposed to be so good for such purposes."

Hans Castorp received this account with animated distraction. Standing before the spacious washstand, whose nickel taps flashed in the electric light, with his sleeves drawn back, he cast only a fleeting glance toward the white metal bedstead, neatly covered.

"Smoked out, that is splendid," he said conversationally and somewhat incoherently, as he washed and dried his hands. "Yes, methylaldehyde, the strongest bacterium cannot stand up to that - H2CO, but it stings the nose, doesn't it? Naturally the strictest cleanliness is a basic condition..." He said "Naturally" with the old-fashioned separated consonant, while his cousin, since becoming a student, had adopted the more common pronunciation, and went on with great fluency: "What I was going to say... The naval officer had probably shaved with a safety razor, I would suppose; one does cut oneself more easily with those things than with a well-stropped blade, that at least is my experience, I use one and the other in alternation... Well, and on irritated skin the salt water naturally hurts; from the service he was probably used to applying cold cream, there is nothing about that which surprises me..." And he chatted on, saying that he had two hundred Maria Mancinis - his cigar - in his trunk, that the inspection had been most agreeable, and conveyed greetings from various people at home. "Isn't there any heating here?" he cried suddenly, and ran to the pipes to lay his hands on them...

"No, we are kept fairly cool here," answered Joachim. "Things have to change considerably before they light the central heating in August."

"August, August!" said Hans Castorp. "But I am freezing! I am abominably cold, that is, in my body, for in the face I am remarkably heated - here, feel how I am burning!"

This demand that someone should feel his face did not suit Hans Castorp's nature at all and embarrassed him himself. Joachim did not respond to it either, but merely said:

"That is the air and means nothing. Behrens himself has blue cheeks all day. Some people never get used to it. Well, go on, or we shall get nothing more to eat."

Outside the nurse appeared again, nearsighted and curious, peering at them. But on the first floor Hans Castorp suddenly stood still, held fast by a perfectly gruesome sound that became audible at a little distance behind a bend in the corridor; a sound not loud, but of so decidedly hideous a kind that Hans Castorp made a grimace and looked at his cousin with widened eyes. It was coughing, evidently - the cough of a man; but a cough that resembled no other Hans Castorp had ever heard, indeed, one beside which every other cough known to him had been a splendid and healthy expression of life: a cough wholly without pleasure or love, which did not come in proper bursts but sounded only like a horribly feeble stirring in the mush of organic dissolution.

"Yes," said Joachim, "things are bad there. An Austrian aristocrat, you know, an elegant man and born to be a gentleman rider. And now this is how it stands with him. But he still walks about."

As they continued on their way, Hans Castorp spoke earnestly about the gentleman rider's cough. "You must consider," he said, "that I have never heard anything of the kind, that it is completely new to me; naturally it makes an impression on me. There are so many kinds of cough, dry and loose, and the loose kind is even more advantageous, as people generally say, and better than barking like that. When I had croup in my youth ('in my youth,' he said), I barked like a wolf, and everyone was glad when it became loose; I can still remember it. But such a cough as this one has not existed before, at least not for me - why, it is no longer a living cough at all. It is not dry, but one cannot call it loose either; that is far from the word. It is precisely as if, while hearing it, one saw inside the person and what it looked like there - all a mash and mud..."

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

But Hans Castorp could not at all calm himself about the cough he had heard; he repeatedly declared that one fairly saw inside the gentleman rider while hearing it, and when they entered the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited shine.

In the Restaurant

The restaurant was bright, elegant, and comfortable. It lay just to the right of the hall, opposite the conversation rooms, and was used, as Joachim explained, chiefly by newly arrived guests taking meals outside the regular hours, and by those who had visitors. But birthdays and impending departures were also festively celebrated there, as were favorable results of general examinations. Sometimes things went high in the restaurant, Joachim said; champagne was served there too. At present no one was sitting there except a single lady of about thirty, who was reading in a book, but at the same time humming to herself and continually tapping lightly on the tablecloth with the middle finger of her left hand. When the young men had seated themselves, she changed places in order to turn her back to them. She was shy of people, Joachim explained softly, and always ate in the restaurant with a book. It was said that she had entered lung sanatoriums as quite a young girl and since then had no longer lived in the world.

"Well, then you are still a young beginner compared with her, with your five months, and will still be one when you have a year on your back," Hans Castorp said to his cousin; whereupon Joachim, with that shrug which had not formerly been peculiar to him, reached for the menu.

They had taken the raised table by the window, the prettiest place. Beside the cream-colored curtain they sat facing each other, their faces glowing in the shine of the red-shaded electric table lamp. Hans Castorp folded his freshly washed hands and rubbed them together in comfortable expectation, as he was accustomed to do when sitting down to table - perhaps because his ancestors had prayed before the soup. A friendly girl, speaking from the palate, in a black dress with a white apron and with a large face of exceedingly healthy color, served them, and to his great amusement Hans Castorp allowed himself to be instructed that waitresses here were called "daughters of the hall." They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose from her, which Hans Castorp sent away once more to have it brought to a better temperature. The food was excellent. There was asparagus soup, stuffed tomatoes, roast with all sorts of accompaniments, a particularly well-prepared sweet dish, a cheese platter, and fruit. Hans Castorp ate very heartily, although his appetite did not prove as lively as he had thought. But he was used to eating a great deal even when he was not hungry, and did so out of self-respect.

Joachim did the dishes little honor. He was tired of the cooking, he said; they all were up here, and it was customary to rail at the food, for when one sat here forever and three days... On the other hand he drank the wine with pleasure, indeed with a certain devotion, and, while carefully avoiding turns of phrase that were too sentimental, repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that someone was there with whom one could exchange a reasonable word.

"Yes, it is brilliant that you have come!" he said, and his leisurely voice was moved. "I may say it is positively an event for me. It is at least a change - I mean, it is a break, an articulation in the eternal, boundless monotony..."

"But time must actually pass quickly for you here," Hans Castorp thought.

"Quickly and slowly, however you like," Joachim answered. "It does not pass at all, I tell you; there is no time at all, and it is not life either - no, it is not," he said, shaking his head, and took up his glass again.

Hans Castorp drank too, although by now his face was burning like fire. But in his body he was still cold, and a special, joyful, yet somewhat tormenting unrest was in his limbs. His words rushed ahead of themselves; he misspoke often and passed over it with a dismissive movement of the hand. Joachim, too, was in an animated mood, and their conversation went all the more freely and cheerfully because the humming, tapping lady had quite suddenly risen and gone away. They gesticulated with their forks while eating, assumed important expressions with a bite in their cheek, laughed, nodded, lifted their shoulders, and had not properly swallowed before they were speaking on. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and had brought the conversation around to the planned regulation of the Elbe.

"Epoch-making!" said Hans Castorp. "Epoch-making for the development of our shipping - not to be overestimated. We are putting fifty million into the budget for it as an immediate one-time expenditure, and you may be convinced that we know exactly what we are doing."

Nevertheless, for all the importance he attached to the regulation of the Elbe, he immediately jumped away from this subject again and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life "up here" and about the guests, which happened readily enough, since Joachim was glad to relieve himself and communicate. The business about the corpses that were sent down the bobsled run he had to repeat, and once more expressly assure him that it was based on truth. Since Hans Castorp was again seized by laughter, he laughed too, which he seemed to enjoy heartily, and let him hear other comic things, in order to feed the exuberance. There was a lady sitting at his table, by the name of Frau Stöhr, rather ill, incidentally, the wife of a musician from Cannstatt - she was the most uneducated creature he had ever encountered. She said "disinfiskate" - and in full earnest. And she called the assistant Krokowski the "fomulus." One had to swallow that without twisting one's face. Besides, she was addicted to gossip, as most people up here were, and she said of another lady, Frau Iltis, that she wore a "sterilet." "She calls it a sterilet - that is priceless!" And half reclining, thrown back against the backs of their chairs, they laughed so much that their bellies shook and both got hiccups almost at the same time.

In between, Joachim became sorrowful and remembered his lot.

"Yes, here we sit and laugh," he said with a pained face, and now and then interrupted by the shocks of his diaphragm; "and meanwhile there is no telling when I shall get away from here, for when Behrens says another half year, then that is calculated narrowly; one must be prepared for more. But it is hard, say yourself whether it is not sad for me. There I had already been accepted, and next month I could be taking my officer's examination. And now I loiter about here with the thermometer in my mouth and count the blunders of this uneducated Frau Stöhr and miss my time. A year plays such a role at our age; down below in life it brings so many changes and advances with it. And I must stagnate here like a water hole - yes, just like a foul pond, it is by no means too harsh a comparison..."

Strangely enough, Hans Castorp answered this only by asking whether one could actually get porter here, and when his cousin looked at him in some astonishment, he saw that the other was in the act of falling asleep - in fact, he was already asleep.

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

"There is no time at all," said Hans Castorp with a heavy tongue. But he went along nevertheless, somewhat bent and stiff-legged, like a man being almost pulled to the floor by weariness - yet he violently pulled himself together when, in the only dimly lit hall, he heard Joachim say:

"There sits Krokowski. I think I must quickly introduce you."

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

"May I, please, introduce my cousin Castorp from Hamburg, Doctor. He has only just arrived."

Dr. Krokowski greeted the new housemate with a certain cheerful, sturdy, and encouraging heartiness, as if he meant to indicate that face to face with him every embarrassment was superfluous and only joyful confidence was in place. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered, fat, considerably shorter than the two standing before him, so that he had to lay his head back at an angle in order to look into their faces - and extraordinarily pale, of a translucent, indeed phosphorescent pallor, which was heightened still further by the dark glow of his eyes, the blackness of his brows, and his rather long full beard ending in two points, which already showed a couple of white threads. He wore a black, double-breasted sack suit, already somewhat worn, black openwork, sandal-like low shoes with thick gray woolen socks, and a soft, falling collar of the kind Hans Castorp had until then seen only on a photographer in Danzig, and which in fact gave Dr. Krokowski's appearance a studio-like stamp. Smiling cordially, so that the yellowish teeth became visible in his beard, he shook the young man's hand and, in a baritone voice and with somewhat foreign, dragging accents, said:

"Welcome among us, Herr Castorp! May you settle in quickly and feel at ease in our midst. You come to us as a patient, if I may permit myself the question?"

It was touching to see how Hans Castorp labored to show himself polite and master his sleepiness. He was annoyed at being in such poor form and, with the suspicious self-consciousness of young people, saw signs of indulgent mockery in the assistant's smile and encouraging manner. He answered by speaking of the three weeks, mentioned his examination as well, and added that, thank God, he was entirely healthy.

"Truly?" asked Dr. Krokowski, thrusting his head obliquely forward as if teasing and strengthening his smile... "But then you are a phenomenon highly worthy of study! I, namely, have never yet encountered an entirely healthy person. What examination did you take, if the question is allowed?"

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

"Ah, engineer!" And Dr. Krokowski's smile seemed to withdraw, for the moment losing something of its force and heartiness. "That is sturdy work. And so you will take no medical treatment here of any kind, neither in a physical nor in a psychical respect?"

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

Then Dr. Krokowski's smile broke forth victoriously again, and as he shook the young man's hand anew he cried in a loud voice:

"Well then, sleep well, Herr Castorp - in the full feeling 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 elevator was no longer attended, and so they covered the stairs on foot, silent and somewhat confused by the encounter with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim accompanied Hans Castorp to Number Thirty-four, where the limping man had duly delivered the newcomer's luggage, and they chatted for another quarter of an hour while Hans Castorp unpacked his night things and washing things and smoked a thick, mild cigarette with it. He did not get to the cigar today, which seemed strange and extraordinary to him.

"He looks very important," he said, spurting out the inhaled smoke as he spoke. "Wax-pale he is. But with his chaussure, listen, things stand horribly. Gray woolen socks and then those sandals. Was he actually offended at the end?"

"He is somewhat 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 that. He is not especially well-disposed toward me either, because I do not confide enough in him. But now and then I do tell him a dream, so that he has something to dissect."

"Well, then I have simply hit him on the head," said Hans Castorp peevishly; for it made him dissatisfied with himself to have offended someone, and so weariness came over him again with renewed strength.

"Good night," he said. "I am falling over."

"I will fetch you for breakfast at eight," said Joachim, and went.

Hans Castorp made only a hurried night toilet. Sleep overpowered him scarcely after he had extinguished the little bedside lamp, but he started up once more when he remembered that someone had died in this bed the day before yesterday. "It will not have been the first time," he said to himself, as if that could serve to calm him. "It is simply a deathbed, an ordinary deathbed." And he fell asleep.

But as soon as he had fallen asleep, he began to dream, and dreamed almost without interruption until the next morning. Chiefly he saw Joachim Ziemßen, in a strangely contorted position, riding down an inclined track on a bobsled. He was as phosphorescently pale as Dr. Krokowski, and in front sat the gentleman rider, who looked very indistinct, like someone one had merely heard coughing, and steered. "That makes no difference to us at all - to us up here," said the contorted Joachim, and then it was he, not the gentleman rider, who coughed in such a gruesomely mushy way. At this Hans Castorp had to weep bitterly and saw that he must run to the pharmacy to get himself some cold cream. But on the way Frau Iltis was sitting with a pointed snout and holding something in her hand that was evidently supposed to be her "sterilet," but was nothing more than a safety razor. This made Hans Castorp laugh again, and so he was tossed back and forth between various emotions until morning grayed through his half-open balcony door and woke him.