For the roads were really hardly passable. They streamed with water and reeked with mist. The Hofrat, indeed, said it was not mist, only cloud; but in Hans Castorp’s judgment this was quibbling. The spring fought out a bitter struggle, with a hundred setbacks into the depth of winter; the battle lasted months long, well into June. There were times in March when the heat was almost unendurable, as one lay, in the lightest of clothing, in the reclining-chair on the balcony, with the little parasol erected against the sun. In those days some of the ladies plumped for summer, and arrayed themselves in muslins for early breakfast—excusably, perhaps, in view of the singularity of the climate up here, which was favourable to illusion on the score of weather, jumbling, as it did, all the seasons together. Yet their forehandedness was but shortsightedness after all, showing paucity of imagination, the stupidity which cannot conceive anything beyond the present moment; even more was it an avidity for change, a time-devouring restlessness and impatience. It was March by the calendar, therefore it was spring, which meant as good as summer; and they pulled out their summer clothes, to appear in them before autumn should overtake them. Which, in fact, it did. With April, cold, wet, cloudy weather set in. A long spell of rain turned at length into flurries of fresh snow. Fingers were stiff in the loggia, both camel’s-hair rugs were called into service, it did not lack much of putting the fur sleeping-sack in requisition anew; the management brought itself to turn on the heat, and on all hands were heard bitter complainings—the spring had betrayed them. Toward the end of the month the valley lay deep in snow; but then it thawed, just as certain experienced or weather-sensitive among the guests had prophesied it would: Frau Stöhr, the ivory Levi, but equally the Widow Hessenfeld, smelt and felt it simultaneously, before ever the smallest little cloud showed itself over the top of the granite formation to the south. Frau Hessenfeld got colic, Fräulein Levi became bedridden, and Frau Stöhr, drawing back her lips from her ratlike teeth with the churlish expression she had, daily and hourly gave utterance to her superstitious fear of a haemorrhage—for it was common talk that the thaw brought them about, or at least favoured them. It became unbelievably warm. The heat was turned off, balcony doors were left open all night, and still it was over fifty degrees in the morning. The snow melted apace, it turned grey, became porous and saturated; the drifts shrank together, and seemed to sink into the earth. There was a gurgling, a trickling and oozing, all abroad. The trees dripped, their masses of snow slid off; the shovelled-up barricades in the streets, the pallid layers carpeting the meadows, disappeared alike, though not all at once, they had lain too heavy for that. Then what lovely apparitions of the springtime revealed themselves! It was unheard-of, fairylike. There lay the broad meadows, with the cone-shaped summit of the Schwarzhorn towering in the background, still in snow, and close in on the right the snow-buried Skaletta glacier. The common scene of pasture and hayrick was still snow-clad, though with a thin and scanty coat, that everywhere showed bare patches of dark earth or dry grass sucking through. Yet after all, the cousins found, what a curious sort of snow it was! Thick in the distance, next the wooded slopes, but in the foreground a mere sprinkling at most; the stretches of discoloured and winter-killed grass were dappled or sprigged with white. They looked closer, they bent down surprised—it was not snow, it was flowers: snow-flowers, a snow of flowers, short-stemmed chalices of white and palest blue. They were crocuses, no less; sprung by millions from the soggy meadow-bottom, and so thick that one actually confused them with the snow into which they merged.
They smiled at the deception, and for joy at the wonder before their eyes—at this timorous and lovely assumption of protective coloration, as it were, on the part of these first shy returning motions of organic life. They picked some of the flowers, studied the structure of their charming cups, and stuck them in their buttonholes; wore them home and put them in glasses on their stands; for the deathly torpor of the winter had lasted long indeed—however short it had seemed.
But that flowery snow was soon covered with real; even the blue soldanellas and red and yellow primroses that followed on suffered the same fate. What a fight that was, spring had to wage up here, before it finally conquered! It was flung back ten times before it could get a foothold—back to the next onset of winter, with icy wind, flurries of snow, and a heated house. At the beginning of May—for while we have been talking of crocuses, April has merged into
