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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.