get changed.”

Hans Castorp regarded him earnestly as they drove. “But seems to me you’ve made a splendid recovery,” he said, shaking his head.

“You really think so, don’t you?” answered Joachim; “I think I have too.” He drew himself up straighter against the cushions, but immediately relaxed again. “Yes, I am better,” he explained, “but I am not cured yet. In the left lobe, where there were rales, it only sounds harsh now, and that is not so bad; but lower down it is still very harsh, and there are rhonchi in the second intercostal space.”

“How learned you’ve got,” said Hans Castorp.

“Fine sort of learning! God knows I wish I’d had it sweated out of my system in the service,” responded Joachim. “But I still have sputum,” he said, with a shoulder-shrug that was somehow indifferent and vehement both at once, and became him but ill. He half pulled out and showed to his cousin something he carried in the side pocket of his overcoat, next to Hans Castorp. It was a flat, curving bottle of bluish glass, with a metal cap.

“Most of us up here carry it,” he said, shoving it back. “It even has a nickname; they make quite a joke of it. You are looking at the landscape?”

Hans Castorp was. “Magnificent!” he said.

“Think so?” asked Joachim.

They had driven for a space straight up the axis of the valley, along an irregularly built street that followed the line of the railway; then, turning to the left, they crossed the narrow tracks and a watercourse, and now trotted up a high-road that mounted gently toward the wooded slopes. Before them rose a low, projecting, meadow-like plateau, on which, facing southwest, stood a long building, with a cupola and so many balconies that from a distance it looked porous, like a sponge. In this building lights were beginning to show. It was rapidly growing dusk. The faint rose-colour that had briefly enlivened the overcast heavens was faded now, and there reigned the colourless, soulless, melancholy transition-period that comes just before the onset of night. The populous valley, extended and rather winding, now began to show lights everywhere, not only in the middle, but here and there on the slopes at either hand, particularly on the projecting right side, upon which buildings mounted in terrace formation. Paths ran up the sloping meadows to the left and lost themselves in the vague blackness of the pine forest. Behind them, where the valley narrowed to its entrance, the more distant ranges showed a cold, slaty blue. A wind had sprung up, and made perceptible the chill of evening.

“No, to speak frankly, I don’t find it so overpowering,” said Hans Castorp. “Where are the glaciers, and the snow peaks, and the gigantic heights you hear about? These things aren’t very high, it seems to me.”

“Oh, yes, they are,” answered Joachim. “You can see the tree line almost everywhere, it is very sharply defined; the fir-trees leave off, and after that there is absolutely nothing but bare rock. And up there to the right of the Schwarzhorn, that tooth-shaped peak, there is a glacier⁠—can’t you see the blue? It is not very large, but it is a glacier right enough, the Skaletta. Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn, in the notch⁠—you can’t see them from here⁠—have snow all the year round.”

“Eternal snow,” said Hans Castorp.

“Eternal snow, if you like. Yes, that’s all very high. But we are frightfully high ourselves: sixteen hundred metres above sea-level. That’s why the peaks don’t seem any higher.”

“Yes, what a climb that was! I was scared to death, I can tell you. Sixteen hundred metres⁠—that is over five thousand feet, as I reckon it. I’ve never been so high up in my life.” And Hans Castorp took in a deep, experimental breath of the strange air. It was fresh, and that was all. It had no perfume, no content, no humidity; it breathed in easily, and held for him no associations.

“Wonderful air,” he remarked, politely.

“Yes, the atmosphere is famous. But the place doesn’t look its best tonight. Sometimes it makes a much better impression⁠—especially when there is snow. But you can get sick of looking at it. All of us up here are frightfully fed up, you can imagine,” said Joachim, and twisted his mouth into an expression of disgust that was as unlike him as the shoulder-shrug. It looked irritable, disproportionate.

“You have such a queer way of talking,” said Hans Castorp.

“Have I?” said Joachim, concerned, and turned to look at his cousin.

“Oh, no, of course I don’t mean you really have⁠—I suppose it just seemed so to me for the moment,” Hans Castorp hastened to assure him. It was the expression “all of us up here,” which Joachim had used several times, that had somehow struck him as strange and given him an uneasy feeling.

“Our sanatorium is higher up than the village, as you see,” went on Joachim. “Fifty metres higher. In the prospectus it says a hundred, but it is really only fifty. The highest of the sanatoriums is the Schatzalp⁠—you can’t see it from here. They have to bring their bodies down on bobsleds in the winter, because the roads are blocked.”

“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

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