The Magic Mountain (87 page)
He happened to speak to Herr Settembrini about his intentions. The Italian almost embraced him for joy. “Why, yes, but of course, my good engineer. For God’s sake, do it! Don’t ask anyone—just do it. Your guardian angel has been whispering in your ear. Do it at once, before the happy notion deserts you. I’ll come along, go to the shop with you; let’s be off at once to purchase those blessed utensils. I would gladly accompany you into the mountains, moving alongside you with wings on my heels, like Mercury himself—but I dare not. Ah, to dare it—and I would if it were only a matter of ‘dare not.’ But I cannot, I am a ruined man. But as for you—it most definitely cannot hurt you, not if you’re reasonable and don’t overdo it. And what if it does hurt you just a tad—it will still have been the work of your guardian angel, which . . . but I shall say no more. What an excellent plan! Here for two years and still capable of such inspiration! Oh, no, you’re solid at the core; there’s no reason to despair of you. Bravo, bravo! You shall tweak the nose of your Prince of Shades up there. Buy your racing footwear, have it sent to me or Lukaček, or to the retailer of foodstuffs downstairs. You can fetch it from there to go out and practice, and away you’ll glide.”
And that is how it was done. With Herr Settembrini looking on and playing the critical expert, although he knew absolutely nothing about sports, Hans Castorp purchased a pair of spiffing skis in a specialty shop on the main street—good solid ash, shellacked a light brown, with first-rate leather straps and pointed tips turned up slightly; he also bought poles with iron tips and snow rings, and could not be talked out of carrying it all on his shoulder to Settembrini’s quarters, where he quickly came to an agreement with the grocer about storage for his equipment. Having spent a great deal of time watching how skis were used, he began to practice on his own—but well away from the crowds on the beginners’ hill; he chose an almost treeless slope not far behind the Berghof, and he would blunder up and down it every day, occasionally with Herr Settembrini watching from a little distance, propped on his cane, his ankles charmingly crossed, greeting each improvement in skill with cries of “Bravo!” One day Hans Castorp was steering his way down the shoveled, looping path, on his way back to Dorf to return his skis to the grocer’s, when he ran into the director—but nothing came of it. Behrens did not even recognize him, although it was a bright afternoon and the beginner almost ran him down. Wrapped in a cloud of cigar smoke, the director stomped on past.
Hans Castorp discovered that you quickly learn a skill if you truly need to. He made no pretense of becoming a virtuoso. What he required to know he learned in a few days, without overheating or having to fight for breath. He worked hard at keeping his feet nicely parallel, leaving a set of even tracks, practiced how to push himself off by steering with his poles, learned to negotiate obstacles, leaping over little mounds with arms widespread, rising and falling like a ship on a stormy sea; and after about the twentieth try he no longer upended when he put on the brakes by executing a telemark turn at full speed, sticking one leg out and bending the other at the knee. He gradually increased the range of his activities. One day Herr Settembrini saw him vanish in a burst of white fog; cupping his hands and calling after him to be careful, the contented pedagogue turned homeward.
The wintry mountains were beautiful—not in a gentle, benign way, but beautiful like the wild North Sea under a strong west wind. They awakened the same sense of awe—but there was no thunder, only a deathly silence. Hans Castorp’s long, pliant footwear bore him in all directions: along the slope on the left in the direction of Clavadel or to the right on past Frauenkirch and Glaris, the shadowy ghost of the Amselfluh massif looming up out of the fog behind them; he also skied the valley of the Dischma and the hills rising behind the Berghof, in the direction of the wooded Seehorn, only the very tops of its two snow-clad peaks visible above the tree line, and toward the Drusatscha woods, behind which he could see the pale, murky outline of the Rhätikon chain buried under snow. He even took his skis in the cablecar to the top of Schatzalp to glide about happily up there, abducted into a world of shimmering, powdery slopes, sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, from where in good weather he had a glorious panorama of the scene of his adventures.
He reveled in the skill he had acquired, which opened up inaccessible worlds and almost obliterated barriers. It permitted him the solitude he sought, the profoundest solitude imaginable, touching his heart with a precarious savagery beyond human understanding. On one side might be a wooded ravine plunging into snowy mists, and on the other a rocky precipice with monstrous, cyclopean masses of snow that formed vaulted caves and humpbacked domes. When he would stop—not moving a muscle, so that he could not hear even himself—the silence was absolute, perfect, a padded soundlessness, like none ever known or perceived anywhere else in the world. There was not a breath of wind to brush softly against the trees, not a rustle, not the call of a bird. It was primal silence to which Hans Castorp listened as he stood there, leaning on one pole, his head tilted to the side, his mouth open; and silently, unrelentingly the snow went on falling, drifted down in a gentle hush.
No, this world with its fathomless silence did not receive a visitor hospitably. He was an invader who came at his own risk, whose presence was only tolerated in an eerie, foreboding way; and he could sense the menace of mute, elemental forces as they rose up around him—not hostile, but simply indifferent and deadly. Born a stranger to remote, wild nature, the child of civilization is much more open to her grandeur than are her own coarse sons, who have been at her mercy from infancy and whose intimacy with her is more level-headed. They know next to nothing of the religious awe with which the novice approaches her, eyebrows raised, his whole being tuned to its depths to receive her, his soul in a state of constant, thrilled, timid excitement. Dressed in his long-sleeved camel-hair vest and leggings, Hans Castorp actually felt rather impudent standing there on his deluxe skis, listening to the primal silence, to the deadly hush of the winter wilderness; and the sense of relief he felt stir within him on the way home, when the first human dwellings emerged out of the shroud, made him that much more aware of his previous state and told him that for hours now his mood had been one of secret, holy fear. On Sylt, he had stood dressed in white trousers, safe, elegant, and reverent beside the mighty, rolling surf, as if it were a caged lion, yawning and showing its fearful fangs and cavernous gorge. Then he would go for a swim, and a lifeguard would blow on his little horn to warn those brash enough to venture beyond the first breaking wave, or merely to get too close to its onrushing storm—and even the final thrust of the cataract was like the slap of a giant paw against the back of his neck. As a young man, Hans Castorp had learned the exhilarating thrill of brushing up against powers whose full embrace would destroy you. What he had not learned back then, however, was a taste for extending the thrilling contact with deadly nature until it threatened with its full embrace—had not learned to venture out into the enormity as a weak, if well armed and reasonably well equipped child of civilization, or at least to postpone fleeing before the enormity until contact with it verged on a peril that knew no limits, until it was no longer the last thrust of foam and a soft paw, but the wave itself, the gorge, the sea.
In a word: Hans Castorp had found courage up here—if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them, the mastering of the fear of death out of sympathy with them. Sympathy? Yes, within his narrow, civilized breast Hans Castorp did feel sympathy with the elements; and there was a connection between that sympathy and the newfound sense of dignity that he had felt watching silly people on their sleds and that had made a deeper, wider, less comfortable solitude than that afforded by his hotel balcony seem fitting and desirable. From his lounge chair he had observed fog-shrouded mountains, the dance of snowstorms, and in his soul had been ashamed of gaping at it from across the breastwork of comfort. And that was why he had learned to ski—not because the sport was a fad or he had been born with a love of physical activity. And if there was something uncanny about the enormity of the snowing, deadly silence—and as a child of civilization he most certainly felt there was—both his intellect and senses had long ago tasted of the uncanniness up here. A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not exactly a canny experience, or at the least led into uncharted and dangerous regions; and if we can speak of Hans Castorp’s sympathy with the vast winter wilderness, it is because he found it to be, notwithstanding the devout awe it awakened, a suitable arena where he could resolve his tangle of ideas, a convenient spot for someone who, without knowing quite how it had happened, found himself burdened with the duties of “playing king” in regard to the state and condition of the
homo Dei
.
There was no one here, no meddlesome fellow tooting danger on his little horn, unless it might have been Herr Settembrini, who had called out through his cupped hands to Hans Castorp as he vanished. But filled with courage and sympathy, he had paid no more attention to that call at his back than he had to the words that rang out behind him as he took certain steps on the evening of Mardi Gras: “
Eh, ingegnere, un po’ di ragione, sa!
”
“Ah, my pedagogic Satana, with your
ragione
and
ribellione
,” he thought, “I like you. True, you’re a windbag and organ-grinder, but you mean well, mean better than that caustic little Jesuit and terrorist, that Spanish torturer and flogger with his flashing glasses. And I like you better, too, although he’s almost always right when you two argue and scuffle pedagogically for my poor soul, like God and the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages.”
His legs powdered with snow, he poled his way along, heading for some pale elevation rising higher and higher in a series of broad-sheeted terraces, leading he knew not where—perhaps nowhere. At some point he could no longer make out, their upper regions blended with the sky, which was the same foggy white. No peak, no ridge was visible; it was a misty nothing toward which Hans Castorp pushed his way. And since the real world, the valley populated by human beings, very quickly closed behind him again and was lost from sight, and since no sound could reach him from down there now, he was soon deep in his solitude before he even knew it, more deeply lost than he could ever have wished, so deep that the feeling verged on fear, which is the prerequisite of courage. “
Praeterit figura huius mundi
,” he said to himself in a Latin that was not humanist in spirit, but a phrase he had picked up from Naphta. He stopped and looked about him. There was nothing to be seen everywhere, absolutely nothing except a few very small snowflakes descending from the white above to the white below, and the silence all around took its power from what it did not say. And as his gaze faltered in the white void blinding him, he felt his heart stirring, pounding from the climb—the cardiac muscle, whose animal shape and pulses he had observed, wickedly spied upon perhaps, amid the crackling sparks of the X-ray chamber. And that stirring sent a wave of emotion over him: a simple and reverent sympathy with his heart, his human heart, with its questions and riddles, beating all alone up here in the icy void.
He pushed on, moving ever higher, skyward. Sometimes he would thrust the end of his ski pole into the snow and watch blue light jump from the deep hole as he pulled it out. It was fun—he stood there for a long time, just trying out this little optical phenomenon over and over. It was such a peculiar, delicate greenish-blue light, icy clear and yet dusky, from the heights and from the depths, mysterious and seductive. It reminded him of the light and color of a certain pair of eyes, slanting eyes that spoke of destiny, the ones Herr Settembrini, taking a disparaging humanistic view, had called “Tartar slits” and “lone-wolf eyes”—reminded him of eyes seen long ago and ineluctably rediscovered, of Hippe’s and Clavdia Chauchat’s eyes. “Glad to,” he whispered into the soundlessness. “And don’t break it.
Il est à visser, tu sais.
” And in his mind he heard melodious words corning from behind, urging reason.
A foggy wood emerged a little way ahead on his right. He turned toward it to have some earthly goal before his eyes, instead of white transcendence—and suddenly he was racing downward, though he had seen no dip in the terrain. The blinding light prevented his making out any sort of contour; he could see nothing really, everything blurred before his eyes. Obstacles could rise up unexpectedly right in front of him. Unable to make out the angle of decline, he let the slope pull him downward.
The woods that had attracted him lay beyond the trough into which he had unintentionally descended. The slope was covered with loose powder, and after following it a little distance, he realized that it fell away to one side, toward the mountain. He was heading down the trough now, its walls rising on both sides—it seemed to be a fold, a narrow pass leading into the mountain itself. And then the tips of his skis were pointing upward again; the ground rose, there were no more side walls to climb; Hans Castorp’s uncharted route led him upward again, across the open face of the mountain.
He saw the evergreen wood below and behind him now; turning around he quickly descended to the snow-laden firs, a last spur of steep, fogged-in forests, that jutted like a wedge out into open ground. He rested beneath the boughs, smoked a cigarette. His soul was still weighed down, oppressed, tense from the profound silence, the dangerous solitude, but he was proud of having conquered it and felt a courage that came from his intrinsic right to such surroundings.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. He had set out shortly after dinner, intending to cut most of the main rest cure and tea as well and still be back by nightfall. The thought that he would have several hours to roam in vast open spaces filled him with a delightful calm. He had some chocolate in his breeches pocket and had slipped a little bottle of port into his vest.