The Magic Mountain

monarchs to the south were always in snow. But the storm and the fall in the temperature both continued. A pale grey sky hung low over the valley; it seemed to dissolve in flakes and fall soundlessly and ceaselessly, until one almost felt uneasy. It turned colder by the hour. A morning came when the thermometer in Hans Castorp’s room registered 44°, the next morning it was only 40°. That was cold. It kept within bounds, but it persisted. It had frozen at night; now it froze in the daytime as well, and all day long; and it snowed, with brief intervals, through the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh days. The snow mounted apace, it became a nuisance. Paths had been shovelled as far as the bench by the watercourse, and on the drive down to the valley; but these were so narrow that you could only walk single file, and if you met anyone, you must step off the pavement and at once sink knee-deep in snow. A stone-roller drawn by a horse, with a man at his halter, rolled all day long up and down the streets of the cure, while a yellow diligence on runners, looking like an old-fashioned post-coach, plied between village and cure, with a snowplough attached in front, shovelling the white masses aside. The world, this narrow, lofty, isolated world up here, looked now well wadded and upholstered indeed: no pillar or post but wore its white cap; the steps up to the entrance of the Berghof had turned into an inclined plane; heavy cushions, in the drollest shapes, weighed down the branches of the Scotch firs⁠—now and then one slid off and raised up a cloud of powdery white dust in its fall. Round about, the heights lay smothered in snow; their lower regions rugged with the evergreen growth, their upper parts, beyond the timber line, softly covered up to their many-shaped summits. The air was dark, the sun but a pallid apparition behind a veil. Yet a mild reflected brightness came from the snow, a milky gleam whose light became both landscape and human beings, even though these latter did show red noses under their white or gaily-coloured woollen caps.

In the dining-room the onset of winter⁠—the “season” of the region⁠—was the subject of conversation at all seven tables. Many tourists and sportsmen were said to have arrived and taken up residence at the hotels in the Dorf and the Platz. The height of the piled-up snow was estimated at two feet; its consistency was said to be ideal for skiing. The bob-run, which led down from the northwestern slope of the Schatzalp into the valley, was zealously worked on, it would be possible to open it in the next few days, unless a thaw put out all calculations. Everyone looked forward eagerly to the activities of these sound people down below⁠—to the sports and races, which it was forbidden to attend, but which numbers of the patients resolved to see, by cutting the rest-cure and slipping out of the Berghof. Hans Castorp heard of a new sport that had come from Scandinavia, “ski-jöring”: it consisted in races in which the participants were drawn by horses while standing in their skis. It was to see this that so many of the patients had resolved to slip out.⁠—There was talk too of Christmas.

Christmas! Hans Castorp had never once thought of it. To be sure, he had blithely said, and written, that he must spend the winter up here with Joachim, because of what the doctors had discovered to be the state of his health. But now he was startled to realize that Christmas would be included in the programme⁠—perhaps because (and yet not entirely because) he had never spent the Christmas season anywhere but in the bosom of the family. Well, if he must he must; he would have to put up with it. He was no longer a child; Joachim seemed not to mind, or else to have adjusted himself uncomplainingly to the prospect; and, after all, he said to himself, think of all the places and all the conditions in which Christmas has been celebrated before now!

Yet it did seem to him rather premature to begin thinking about Christmas even before the Advent season, six weeks at least before the holiday! True, such an interval was easily overleaped by the guests in the dining-hall: it was a mental process in which Hans Castorp had already some facility, though he had not yet learned to practise it in the grand style, as the older inhabitants did. Christmas, like other holidays in the course of the year, served them for a fulcrum, or a vaulting-pole, with which to leap over empty intervening spaces. They all had fever, their metabolism was accelerated, their bodily processes accentuated, keyed up⁠—all this perhaps accounted for the wholesale way they could put time behind them. It would not have greatly surprised him to hear them discount the Christmas holiday as well, and go on at once to speak of the New Year and Carnival. But no⁠—so capricious and unstable as this they were not, in the Berghof dining-room. Christmas gave them pause, it gave them even matter for concern and brain-racking. It was customary to present Hofrat Behrens with a gift on Christmas eve, for which a collection was taken up among the guests⁠—and this gift was the subject of much deliberation. A meeting was called. Last year, so the old inhabitants said, they had given him a travelling-trunk; this time a new operating-table had been considered, an easel, a fur coat, a rocking-chair, an inlaid ivory stethoscope. Settembrini, asked for suggestions, proposed that they give the Hofrat a newly projected encyclopaedic work called The Sociology of Suffering; but he found only one person to agree with him, a book-dealer who sat at Hermine Kleefeld’s table. In short, no decision had been reached. There was difficulty about coming to an agreement with the Russian guests; a divergence