by Thomas Mann
No, this world with its fathomless silence did not receive a visitor hospitably. He was an invader who came at his own risk, whose presence was only tolerated in an eerie, foreboding way; and he could sense the menace of mute, elemental forces as they rose up around him—not hostile, but simply indifferent and deadly. Born a stranger to remote, wild nature, the child of civilization is much more open to her grandeur than are her own coarse sons, who have been at her mercy from infancy and whose intimacy with her is more level-headed. They know next to nothing of the religious awe with which the novice approaches her, eyebrows raised, his whole being tuned to its depths to receive her, his soul in a state of constant, thrilled, timid excitement. Dressed in his long-sleeved camel-hair vest and leggings, Hans Castorp actually felt rather impudent standing there on his deluxe skis, listening to the primal silence, to the deadly hush of the winter wilderness; and the sense of relief he felt stir within him on the way home, when the first human dwellings emerged out of the shroud, made him that much more aware of his previous state and told him that for hours now his mood had been one of secret, holy fear. On Sylt, he had stood dressed in white trousers, safe, elegant, and reverent beside the mighty, rolling surf, as if it were a caged lion, yawning and showing its fearful fangs and cavernous gorge. Then he would go for a swim, and a lifeguard would blow on his little horn to warn those brash enough to venture beyond the first breaking wave, or merely to get too close to its onrushing storm—and even the final thrust of the cataract was like the slap of a giant paw against the back of his neck. As a young man, Hans Castorp had learned the exhilarating thrill of brushing up against powers whose full embrace would destroy you. What he had not learned back then, however, was a taste for extending the thrilling contact with deadly nature until it threatened with its full embrace—had not learned to venture out into the enormity as a weak, if well armed and reasonably well equipped child of civilization, or at least to postpone fleeing before the enormity until contact with it verged on a peril that knew no limits, until it was no longer the last thrust of foam and a soft paw, but the wave itself, the gorge, the sea.
In a word: Hans Castorp had found courage up here—if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them, the mastering of the fear of death out of sympathy with them. Sympathy? Yes, within his narrow, civilized breast Hans Castorp did feel sympathy with the elements; and there was a connection between that sympathy and the newfound sense of dignity that he had felt watching silly people on their sleds and that had made a deeper, wider, less comfortable solitude than that afforded by his hotel balcony seem fitting and desirable. From his lounge chair he had observed fog-shrouded mountains, the dance of snowstorms, and in his soul had been ashamed of gaping at it from across the breastwork of comfort. And that was why he had learned to ski—not because the sport was a fad or he had been born with a love of physical activity. And if there was something uncanny about the enormity of the snowing, deadly silence—and as a child of civilization he most certainly felt there was—both his intellect and senses had long ago tasted of the uncanniness up here. A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not exactly a canny experience, or at the least led into uncharted and dangerous regions; and if we can speak of Hans Castorp’s sympathy with the vast winter wilderness, it is because he found it to be, notwithstanding the devout awe it awakened, a suitable arena where he could resolve his tangle of ideas, a convenient spot for someone who, without knowing quite how it had happened, found himself burdened with the duties of “playing king” in regard to the state and condition of the homo Dei.
There was no one here, no meddlesome fellow tooting danger on his little horn, unless it might have been Herr Settembrini, who had called out through his cupped hands to Hans Castorp as he vanished. But filled with courage and sympathy, he had paid no more attention to that call at his back than he had to the words that rang out behind him as he took certain steps on the evening of Mardi Gras: “Eh, ingegnere, un po’ di ragione, sa!”
“Ah, my pedagogic Satana, with your ragione and ribellione,” he thought, “I like you. True, you’re a windbag and organ-grinder, but you mean well, mean better than that caustic little Jesuit and terrorist, that Spanish torturer and flogger with his flashing glasses. And I like you better, too, although he’s almost always right when you two argue and scuffle pedagogically for my poor soul, like God and the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages.”
His legs powdered with snow, he poled his way along, heading for some pale elevation rising higher and higher in a series of broad-sheeted terraces, leading he knew not where—perhaps nowhere. At some point he could no longer make out, their upper regions blended with the sky, which was the same foggy white. No peak, no ridge was visible; it was a misty nothing toward which Hans Castorp pushed his way. And since the real world, the valley populated by human beings, very quickly closed behind him again and was lost from sight, and since no sound could reach him from down there now, he was soon deep in his solitude before he even knew it, more deeply lost than he could ever have wished, so deep that the feeling verged on fear, which is the prerequisite of courage. “Praeterit figura huius mundi,” he said to himself in a Latin that was not humanist in spirit, but a phrase he had picked up from Naphta. He stopped and looked about him. There was nothing to be seen everywhere, absolutely nothing except a few very small snowflakes descending from the white above to the white below, and the silence all around took its power from what it did not say. And as his gaze faltered in the white void blinding him, he felt his heart stirring, pounding from the climb—the cardiac muscle, whose animal shape and pulses he had observed, wickedly spied upon perhaps, amid the crackling sparks of the X-ray chamber. And that stirring sent a wave of emotion over him: a simple and reverent sympathy with his heart, his human heart, with its questions and riddles, beating all alone up here in the icy void.
He pushed on, moving ever higher, skyward. Sometimes he would thrust the end of his ski pole into the snow and watch blue light jump from the deep hole as he pulled it out. It was fun—he stood there for a long time, just trying out this little optical phenomenon over and over. It was such a peculiar, delicate greenish-blue light, icy clear and yet dusky, from the heights and from the depths, mysterious and seductive. It reminded him of the light and color of a certain pair of eyes, slanting eyes that spoke of destiny, the ones Herr Settembrini, taking a disparaging humanistic view, had called “Tartar slits” and “lone-wolf eyes”—reminded him of eyes seen long ago and ineluctably rediscovered, of Hippe’s and Clavdia Chauchat’s eyes. “Glad to,” he whispered into the soundlessness. “And don’t break it. Il est à visser, tu sais.” And in his mind he heard melodious words corning from behind, urging reason.
A foggy wood emerged a little way ahead on his right. He turned toward it to have some earthly goal before his eyes, instead of white transcendence—and suddenly he was racing downward, though he had seen no dip in the terrain. The blinding light prevented his making out any sort of contour; he could see nothing really, everything blurred before his eyes. Obstacles could rise up unexpectedly right in front of him. Unable to make out the angle of decline, he let the slope pull him downward.
The woods that had attracted him lay beyond the trough into which he had unintentionally descended. The slope was covered with loose powder, and after following it a little distance, he realized that it fell away to one side, toward the mountain. He was heading down the trough now, its walls rising on both sides—it seemed to be a fold, a narrow pass leading into the mountain itself. And then the tips of his skis were pointing upward again; the ground rose, there were no more side walls to climb; Hans Castorp’s uncharted route led him upward again, across the open face of the mountain.
He saw the evergreen wood below and behind him now; turning around he quickly descended to the snow-laden firs, a last spur of steep, fogged-in forests, that jutted like a wedge out into open ground. He rested beneath the boughs, s
moked a cigarette. His soul was still weighed down, oppressed, tense from the profound silence, the dangerous solitude, but he was proud of having conquered it and felt a courage that came from his intrinsic right to such surroundings.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. He had set out shortly after dinner, intending to cut most of the main rest cure and tea as well and still be back by nightfall. The thought that he would have several hours to roam in vast open spaces filled him with a delightful calm. He had some chocolate in his breeches pocket and had slipped a little bottle of port into his vest.
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, how
ever. 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.
