The Magic Mountain

all probability, for the dry heat in the face persisted, as though after drinking wine, or sitting in an overheated room. And however cold it got, the radiators were never heated unless it snowed, so it was of no avail to take refuge in one’s chamber, since it was quite as comfortable on the balcony, when one lay in one’s excellent chair, wrapped in a paletot and two good camel’s-hair rugs put on according to the ritual. As comfortable? It was incomparably more so. It was, in Hans Castorp’s reasoned judgment, a state of life which more appealed to him than any in all his previous experience, so far as he could remember. He did not propose to be shaken in this view for any carbonaro or quill-driver in existence, no matter how many malicious and equivocal jokes he made on the subject of the “horizontal.” Especially he liked it in the evening, when with his little lamp on the stand beside him and his long-lost and now restored Maria alight between his lips he enjoyed the ineffable excellencies of his reclining-chair. True, his nose felt frozen, and the hands that held his book⁠—he was still reading Ocean Steamships⁠—were red and cramped from the cold. He looked through the arch of his loggia over the darkening valley, jewelled with clustered or scattering lights, and listened to the music that drifted up nearly every evening for almost an hour. There was a concert below, and he could hear, pleasantly subdued by the distance, familiar operatic selections, snatches from Carmen, Il Trovatore, Freischütz; or well-built, facile waltzes, marches so spirited that he could not help keeping time with his head, and gay mazurkas. Mazurka? No, Marusja was her name, Marusja of the little ruby. And in the next loggia, behind the thick wall of milky glass, lay Joachim, with whom Hans Castorp exchanged a word now and then, low-toned, out of consideration for the other horizontallers. Joachim was as well off in his loggia as Hans Castorp in his, though, being entirely unmusical, he could not take the same pleasure in the concerts. Too bad! He was probably studying his Russian primer instead. But Hans Castorp let Ocean Steamships fall on the coverlet and gave himself up to the music; he contemplated with such inward gratification the translucent depth of a musical invention full of individuality and charm that he thought with nothing but hostility of Settembrini and the irritating things he had said about music⁠—that it was politically suspect was the worst, and little better than the remark of Grandfather Giuseppe about the July Revolution and the six days of creation.

Joachim, though he could not partake of Hans Castorp’s pleasure in the music, nor the pungent gratification purveyed by Maria, lay as snugly ensconced as his cousin. The day was at an end. For the time everything was at an end; there would be no more emotional alarums, no more strain on the heart-muscles. But equally there was the assurance that tomorrow it would begin all over again, all the favouring probabilities afforded by propinquity and the household regimen. And this pleasing combination of snugness and confident hope, together with the music and the restored charms of Maria, made the evening cure a state almost amounting to beatification for young Hans Castorp.

All which had not prevented the guest and novice from catching a magnificent cold, either in the evening rest-cure or elsewhere. He felt the onset of catarrh, with oppression in the frontal sinus, and inflamed uvula; he could not breathe easily through the passage provided by nature; the air struck cold and painfully as it struggled through, and caused constant coughing. His voice took on overnight the tonal quality of a hollow bass the worse for strong drink. According to him, he had not closed an eye, his parched throat making him start up every five minutes from his pillow.

“Very vexatious,” Joachim said, “and most unfortunate. Colds, you know, are not the thing at all, up here; they are not reçus. The authorities don’t admit their existence; the official attitude is that the dryness of the air entirely prevents them. If you were a patient, you would certainly fall foul of Behrens, if you went to him and said you had a cold. But it is a little different with a guest⁠—you have a right to have a cold if you want to. It would be good if we could check the catarrh. There are things to do, down below, but here⁠—I doubt if anyone would take enough interest in it. It is not advisable to fall ill up here; you aren’t taken any notice of. It’s an old story⁠—but you are coming to hear it at the end. When I was new up here, there was a lady who complained of her ear for a whole week and told everybody how she suffered. Behrens finally looked at it. ‘Make yourself quite easy, madame,’ he said; ‘it is not tubercular.’ That was an end of the matter! Well, we must see what can be done. I will speak to the bathing-master early tomorrow morning, when he comes to my room. Then it will go through the regular channels, and perhaps something will come of it.”

Thus Joachim and the regular channels proved reliable. On Friday, after Hans Castorp returned from the morning round, there was a knock at his door, and he was vouchsafed the pleasure of personal acquaintance with Fräulein von Mylendonk⁠—Frau Director, as she was called. Up to now he had seen this over-occupied person only from a distance, crossing the corridor from one patient’s room to another, or when she had popped up for a moment in the dining-room and he had been aware of her raucous voice. But now he himself was the object of her visit. His catarrh had fetched her. She knocked a short, bony knock, entered almost before he had said come in,