The Magic Mountain (88 page)

The sun’s position could hardly be made out for the thick fog that encompassed it. Behind him, at the entrance to the valley, at the notch in the mountains that he could not see, clouds were darkening, and the thickening mist seemed to be advancing. It looked like snow, more snow—it was in such short supply, after all—a good, solid squall of it. And in fact, little soundless flakes were falling more heavily now across the slope ahead.

Hans Castorp stepped out from under the tree to let a few fall on his sleeve and to examine them with the connoisseur’s expert eye. They looked like shapeless tatters, but more than once he had held his good magnifying glass up to them and knew that they were collections of dainty, precise little jewels: gemstones, star insignia, diamond brooches—no skilled jeweler could have produced more delicate miniatures. Yes, there was something special about this light, loose, powdery white stuff that weighed down the trees, covered the breadth of the land, and carried him along on his skis, something that made it different from the sand on the shore at home, of which it had reminded him. It was not made up of tiny grains of rock, but, as everyone knew, consisted of myriads of water droplets, violently gathered up and frozen into manifold, symmetrical crystals—little pieces of an inorganic substance, the wellspring of protoplasm, of plants and human beings; and among all those myriads of magical stars in their secret, minuscule splendor never intended for the human eye, no two were alike. It was all the result of an endless delight in invention, in the subtlest variation and embellishment of one basic design: the equilateral, equiangular hexagon. And yet absolute symmetry and icy regularity characterized each item of cold inventory. Yes, that was what was so eerie—it was anti-organic, hostile to life itself. Snowflakes were too regular; when put into the service of life, the same substance was never so regular as that. Life shuddered at such perfect precision, regarded it as something deadly, as the secret of death itself; and Hans Castorp thought he understood why the architects of ancient temples had intentionally and covertly built little deviations from symmetry into their rows of columns.

He pushed off, skidding forward on his wooden runners, and headed first along the edge of the woods and then down across the deep snow of the slope into the fog below; rising and falling, skiing effortlessly with no particular goal, he moved through the dead terrain, which with its bare, billowy expanses, dry vegetation of dark, solitary, jutting scrub pines, and horizon bounded by soft swells, bore a striking resemblance to a landscape of dunes. Hans Castorp nodded his head in satisfaction when he stopped to feast his eyes on the similarity; his face stung, his limbs tended to tremble, and a peculiar, intoxicating blend of excitement and weariness came over him, but he found it all quite tolerable because it was so familiar, reminding him of the stimulating, yet sleep-inducing effects of air drenched with the sea. He was delighted by this freedom to roam, by his own winged independence. No path ahead demanded he follow it, and none lay behind him either, to lead him back the way he had come. At first he had left tracks in the snow with his poles, planting them deep, but very soon he quite intentionally freed himself of their tutelage, because it reminded him of the man blowing his little horn and seemed inconsistent with his own innermost feelings for this vast winter wilderness.

Turning now to the right, now to the left, he pushed his way along between snow-clad hillocks, behind which lay another slope, then an open plain, then a great mountain, whose softly cushioned ravines and passes seemed inviting and accessible. Yes, the lure of distance and height, of one solitude opening onto the next, had a very strong effect on Hans Castorp, and though it meant risking getting back late, he pressed ahead ever deeper into the wild silence, into this uncanny world that boded no good—ignoring a tense uneasiness that was growing into real fear as the sky continued to darken much too early, falling like a gray veil over the whole region. Fear made him realize he had secretly, and more or less purposely, been trying to lose his bearings all this time, to forget in what direction the valley and town lay—and that he had been totally successful at it. And yet he could tell himself that if he turned around now and held a course downhill, he would quickly reach the valley, though possibly at some distance from the Berghof—all too quickly; he would be back too early, would not have used his time to the full. Although if he waited until the snowstorm overtook him, he might very well not be able to find his way home all that soon. But he refused to flee ahead of time because of that—let fear, genuine fear of the elements, oppress him as much as it liked. His actions were hardly those of a sportsman, because a sportsman is a man of caution, who gets involved with the elements only as long as he knows he is their lord and master and prudently yields when he must. But there is only one word for what was happening in Hans Castorp’s soul: defiance. And although the word certainly can be used pejoratively, even when—or particularly when—a sense of wicked adventure is bound up with genuine fear, if we give it a little thought this much at least becomes clear: that a great many things gather (or, as Hans Castorp the engineer would have said, “accumulate”) in the soul of a young person, of a young man who has lived for years as this young man had; and then comes a day when something elemental erupts in a fierce, impatient cry of “Oh, so what!” or “I’ll chance it!”—when, in short, prudence is defied, even repudiated. And so he plunged ahead in his long, wooden slippers, gliding down the slope and pushing his way up the next hill, atop which, a little farther off, stood a wooden hut—a hayshed or little barn, with its roof weighted down with stones. It faced the next mountain, whose ridges bristled with firs and above which more foggy peaks towered. The rock wall directly behind the hut was steep and dotted with scattered groups of trees, but it could be circumvented by following what looked like a moderate climb on the right, from where you would then be able to see what lay beyond; and Hans Castorp set out to research the matter, leaving the open field with the hut behind him and skiing down into a rather deep ravine that dropped off from right to left.

He had just begun to climb again when—admittedly, just as expected—it began to snow and blow with a vengeance. In a word, the snowstorm that had been threatening for so long had now arrived—that is, if the term “threat” can apply to blind, unknowing elements that have no intention of destroying us, which might be reassuring in some sense, but are monstrously indifferent, and even that only secondarily. “Hello there!” Hans Castorp thought and came to a stop as the first gust drove a thick flurry against him. “That’s quite a little breeze. Goes right to the bone.” And, indeed, it was a very ugly wind. One did not notice the general dreadful cold—it was approaching zero, in fact—when the dry air was still and inert, as was usually the case; it felt almost balmy. But the moment the wind picked up, the cold cut through flesh like a knife, and when it really started blowing, as now—because that first sweeping gust had been only a harbinger—seven fur coats could not suffice to protect your bones from the horrendous icy blast. Hans Castorp, however, was not wearing seven fur coats but only a woolen vest, which would normally have been quite enough for him—he even found it annoying at the first hint of sunshine. The wind, by the way, was at his back, and somewhat to one side, so there was little reason to turn around and take it head-on; and this consideration, added to his obstinacy and his basic “Oh, so what!” attitude, only made the crazy fellow push on, dodging the few isolated firs and bearing down on the mountain in the hope of getting beyond it.

There was certainly no pleasure in this, however. All he could see were dancing flakes, which seemed not to fall but simply to fill the air in a throng of dense eddies; the icy blasts singed his ears with sharp pain, took the strength from his legs, and numbed his hands, until he no longer knew if he was holding his poles or not. The snow blew into his collar and melted down his back, it flung itself across his shoulders and pelted his right side; he felt as if he were turning into a snowman, a pole held stiff in each hand. But as unbearable as these conditions were, they were mild by comparison, for when he turned around things only got worse. And yet the return home had now become a task he could probably put off no longer.

And so he stopped, gave an angry shrug, and turned his skis around. The head wind promptly took his breath away, so that he had to go through the awkward procedure of turning around once more just to get some air and regain enough composure to confront his indifferent foe. By lowering his head and carefully regulating his intake of breath, he then managed to set off in the opposite direction—only to be surprised, despite his own forebodings, at how difficult it was to make any progress, primarily because he could see nothing and was so short of breath. He was forced to halt every other moment, either to turn for a gulp of air or with head still bent low to blink up ahead—and see nothing but white darkness, although he needed to avoid running into trees or being toppled by some other obstruction. Masses of flakes flew directly into his face, then melted, freezing his features. They flew into his mouth and vanished with a faint watery taste, plastered his eyelashes, making him squint and blink, inundated his eyes until there was no hope of even trying to see—which would have been useless in any case, because the veil of blinding white obstructed his view and made the act of seeing almost totally impossible. And when he forced himself to look, he was staring into nothing, into white, whirling nothing. Only at odd intervals did ghostly shadows of the external world loom up before him: a scrub pine, a stand of firs, the pale silhouette of the barn he had just passed.

He skied past the shed, trying to find his way back across the open slope where it stood. But there was no way; to keep to one direction, the approximate direction of home and the valley, was more a matter of luck than sense, because although he could sometimes just make out his hand in front of his face, he never once saw the tips of his skis; and had he been able to see better, there were still plenty of other impediments to frustrate his progress: snow full in the face, a storm as an adversary that robbed you of air and constantly forced you to turn and snatch for a breath—how could any man, be he Hans Castorp or someone much stronger, have made any progress here? He stopped, gasped, blinked to squeeze the water out of his eyelashes, knocked away the coat of snowy armor that encased the front of his body—and realized that under these circumstances, it was unreasonable even to hope for progress.

Hans Castorp was making progress nonetheless—or rather, he was moving. But whether it was purposeful movement, movement in the right direction, or whether it might not have been better to stay where he was (which, however, did not seem feasible), that remained to be seen. Even theoretically, chances were against it; and from a practical point of view, Hans Castorp soon came to believe that there was something not right about the ground under his feet, that it was somehow not what it should be, by which he meant the gentle slope that he had regained only after an exhausting climb back up the ravine and that needed to be retraversed. The level stretch had been too short, the ground was rising again. Apparently the rage of the storm, coming from the southwest, from the entrance to the valley, had pushed him back. He had been making false progress for a good while now; wrapped in a vortex of white night, he had worn himself out blindly working his way ever deeper into the indifferent menace.

“Wouldn’t you know!” he said between his teeth and pulled up short. He did not choose words full of pathos, although it seemed to him at that moment as if an icy hand had gripped his heart, making it twitch and then hammer rapidly against his ribs, just as it had the day Rhadamanthus first discovered the moist spot on his lung. For he realized he had no right to grand words and gestures—he had chosen defiance and all the hazards of his present situation could be chalked up against himself alone. “Not bad,” he said and felt how his facial features, the muscles governing the expression on his face, no longer obeyed his will and were incapable of revealing anything, whether fear, rage, or disdain—they were frozen. “What now? Down across here and then straight ahead, following my nose right into the wind? Easier said than done,” he added with a choked gasp, but all the same went on speaking in a whisper as he forced himself into motion again. “But I have to do something, I can’t just sit down and wait here until I’m covered beneath hexagonal symmetry. And then when Settembrini comes to check up on me with his little horn, he’ll find me squatting here with eyes turned to glass, a snowy cap cocked to one side.” He realized he was talking to himself—and saying rather strange things at that. He reprimanded himself for it, but went right on, sotto voce, but emphatically, even though his lips were so numb that he did not bother to use them and spoke without the consonants that they helped form, which then reminded him of a previous occasion on which the same thing had happened. “Shut up and try to make some progress here,” he said. And then he added, “It seems to me you’re talking drivel, that you’re a little muddleheaded. And in certain respects, that is not good.”

And this realization—that in terms of his getting out of there this was not good—was a pure ascertainment of reason, a conclusion reached by an alien, impartial (though, granted, concerned) person. But the more physical part of him was inclined to abandon itself to the muddled state threatening to engulf him as exhaustion grew; he did take note of this tendency, however, and let his thoughts linger on it. “This is the typical mode of experience of someone lost in a mountain snowstorm, who never finds his way home,” he thought as he struggled along, the phrases emerging in tattered, breathless fragments—discretion forbade his putting it more explicitly. “Someone hearing about it later imagines how ghastly it must have been, but forgets that illness—and my present situation is more or less an illness—batters its victim until they get along with one another. The senses are diminished, a merciful self-narcosis sets in—those are the means by which nature allows the organism to find relief. And yet you have to fight against such things, because there are two sides to them, they’re really highly ambiguous. And your evaluation all depends on which side you view them from. They mean well, are a blessing really, as long as you don’t make it home; but they also mean you great harm and must be fought off, as long as there is any chance of getting home—which is my case, since I do not intend, my stormily pounding heart does not intend, to lie down and be covered by stupid, precise crystallometry.”