The Magic Mountain

An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks’ visit.

From Hamburg to Davos is a long journey⁠—too long, indeed, for so brief a stay. It crosses all sorts of country; goes up hill and down dale, descends from the plateau of Southern Germany to the shore of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across marshes once thought to be bottomless.

At this point the route, which has been so far over trunk-lines, gets cut up. There are stops and formalities. At Rorschach, in Swiss territory, you take train again, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station, where you have to change. Here, after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm, you mount a narrow-gauge train; and as the small but very powerful engine gets under way, there begins the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that seems never to come to an end. For the station of Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route pushes grimly onward into the Alps themselves.

Hans Castorp⁠—such was the young man’s name⁠—sat alone in his little grey-upholstered compartment, with his alligator-skin handbag, a present from his uncle and guardian, Consul Tienappel⁠—let us get the introductions over with at once⁠—his travelling-rug, and his winter overcoat swinging on its hook. The window was down, the afternoon grew cool, and he, a tender product of the sheltered life, had turned up the collar of his fashionably cut, silklined summer overcoat.

It was about eight o’clock, and still daylight. A lake was visible in the distant landscape, its waters grey, its shores covered with black fir-forests that climbed the surrounding heights, thinned out, and gave place to bare, mist-wreathed rock. They stopped at a small station. Hans Castorp heard the name called out: it was “Davos-Dorf.” Soon he would be at his journey’s end. And suddenly, close to him, he heard a voice, the comfortable Hamburg voice of his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, saying: “Hullo, there you are! Here’s where you get out!” and peering through the window saw his cousin himself, standing below on the platform, in a brown ulster, bareheaded, and looking more robust than ever in his life before. He laughed and said again: “Come along out, it’s all right!”

“But I’m not there yet!” said Hans Castorp, taken aback, and still seated.

“Oh, yes, you are. This is the village. It is nearer to the sanatorium from here. I have a carriage. Just give us your things.”

And laughing, confused, in the excitement of arrival and meeting, Hans Castorp reached bag, overcoat, the roll with stick and umbrella, and finally Ocean Steamships out of the window. Then he ran down the narrow corridor and sprang out upon the platform to greet his cousin properly. The meeting took place without exuberance, as between people of traditional coolness and reserve. Strange to say, the cousins had always avoided calling each other by their first names, simply because they were afraid of showing too much feeling. And, as they could not well address each other by their last names, they confined themselves, by established custom, to the “thou.”

“Their bodies? Oh, I see. Imagine!” said Hans Castorp. And suddenly he burst out laughing, a violent, irrepressible laugh, which shook him all over and distorted his face, that was stiff with the cold wind, until it almost hurt. “On bobsleds! And you can tell it me just like that, in cold blood! You’ve certainly got pretty cynical in these five months.”

“Not at all,” answered Joachim, shrugging again. “Why not? It’s all the same to them, isn’t it? But maybe we do get cynical up here. Behrens is a cynic himself⁠—but he’s a great old bird after all, an old corps-student. He is a brilliant operator, they say. You will like him. Krokowski is the assistant⁠—devilishly clever article. They mention his activities specially, in the prospectus. He psychoanalyses the patients.”

“He what? Psychoanalyses⁠—how disgusting!” cried Hans Castorp; and now his hilarity altogether got the better of him. He could not stop. The psychoanalysis had been the finishing touch. He laughed so hard that the tears ran down his cheeks; he put up his hands to his face and rocked with laughter. Joachim laughed just as heartily⁠—it seemed to do him good; and thus, in great good spirits, the young people climbed out of the wagon, which had slowly mounted the steep, winding drive and deposited them before the portal of the International Sanatorium Berghof.

A troop of guests of both sexes approached him. He had seen them coming along the level path halfway up the slope; now they were stalking downhill directly towards him; he heard their voices. They were six or seven persons of various ages: some in the bloom of youth, others rather older. He took a good look at them, from the side, as he walked with bent head, thinking about Joachim. They were tanned and bareheaded, the women in sweaters, the men mostly without overcoats or even walking-sticks, all of them like people who have just gone casually out for a turn in the open. Going downhill involves no sustained muscular effort, only an agreeable process of putting on the brakes in order not to finish by running and tripping head over heels; it is really nothing more than just letting yourself go; and thus the gait of these people had something loose-jointed and flighty about it, which communicated itself to the appearance of the whole group and made one almost wish to be of their lively party.

They came close up to him, he saw their faces clearly. No, they were not all brown: two of the ladies were, on the contrary, distinctly pale; one of them thin as a lath, and ivory-white of complexion, the other shorter and plump, disfigured by freckles. They all looked at him, smiling rather boldly. A tall young girl in a green sweater, with untidy hair and foolish, half-open eyes, brushed past Hans Castorp, nearly touching him with her arm. And as she did so she whistled⁠—oh, impossible!

It happened when he was a lad of thirteen, in knee-breeches, in the lower third form at school. He stood in the school yard in talk with another boy of like years, from a higher form. The conversation had been begun, rather arbitrarily, by himself and, dealing as it did with a narrowly circumscribed subject of a practical nature, could in no case be prolonged; yet it gave him the greatest satisfaction. It took place in the break between the last two periods, a history and a drawing hour for Hans Castorp’s form; the pupils were walking up and down, or standing about in groups, or lounging against the glazed abutments of the school-building wall. A murmur of voices filled the red-tiled courtyard, which was shut off from the street by a wall topped with shingles and provided with two entrance gates. Supervision was exercised by a master in a slouch hat, who munched a ham sandwich the while.

He with whom Hans Castorp spoke was called Hippe, Pribislav Hippe. A peculiarity of this given name was that you were to pronounce it as though it were spelled “Pschibislav”; and the singularity of the appellation suited the lad’s appearance, which did indeed have something exotic about it. Hippe was the son of a scholar and history professor in the gymnasium. He was, by consequence, a notorious model pupil, and, though not much older than Hans Castorp, already a form higher up. He came from Mecklenburg and was in his person obviously the product of an ancient mixture of races, a grafting of Germanic stock with Slavic, or the reverse.