[The First Pages and Selected Excerpts]

CHAPTER I

Arrival

An unassuming young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, for a three-week visit.

From Hamburg to Davos is a long journey—far too long, indeed, for so brief a stay. It crosses all kinds of country, climbing hills and descending into valleys, leaving the plateau of southern Germany behind, descending to the shores of Lake Constance, crossing its bounding waters, and continuing over marshlands once thought to be bottomless.

At this point the journey, which until then has followed the main railway lines, becomes more complicated. There are stops and formalities. At Rorschach, on Swiss territory, one takes another train, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station where a change is necessary. There, after a long and windy wait in a place entirely devoid of charm, one boards a narrow-gauge train; and as the small but powerful engine pulls away, the thrilling part of the journey begins: a steep and relentless climb that seems as though it will never end. Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route presses onward into the Alps themselves.

Hans Castorp—that was the young man's name—sat alone in his little compartment, upholstered in grey. Beside him were his alligator-skin travelling bag, a gift from his uncle and guardian, Consul Tienappel—let us get the introductions over with at once—his travelling rug, and his winter overcoat hanging from its hook. The window was open, the afternoon air was growing cool, and he, a delicate product of a sheltered life, had turned up the collar of his fashionable, silk-lined summer coat. On the seat beside him lay a paperbound volume entitled *Ocean Steamships*. Earlier in the journey he had studied it from time to time, but now it lay forgotten, while the breath of the panting engine streamed through the window and covered its cover with particles of soot.

Two days of travel separated the young man—still too young to have put down firm roots in life—from his own world, from everything he regarded as his own duties, interests, cares, and prospects. The distance was far greater than he had imagined when he had sat in the carriage on his way to the station. Space, rolling and unfolding between him and his native land, possessed and exercised powers that we generally attribute to time. Hour by hour it brought about changes in him like those wrought by time, yet in a manner even more striking.

Space, like time, creates forgetfulness; but it does so by physically freeing us from our surroundings and restoring us to something of our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can, in the blink of an eye, turn a pedant and a Philistine into something resembling a vagabond. Time, we say, is Lethe; but a change of air is a similar draught, and if it works less thoroughly, it works more quickly.

Such was the experience of young Hans Castorp. He had not intended to take the journey seriously or become deeply involved in it. He had merely meant to get it over with as quickly as possible, since it had to be made, then return as he had left and resume his life at the point where, for the moment, he had been forced to lay it aside.

Only yesterday he had been enclosed within the familiar circle of his thoughts, entirely occupied by two matters: the examination he had just passed and his impending entry into the firm of Tunder and Wilms, shipbuilders, foundrymen, and machine manufacturers. With as much impatience as his temperament allowed him to feel, he had mentally counted off the coming three weeks. But now it was beginning to seem that his present circumstances demanded his complete attention, and that it would hardly do to take them too lightly.

Being carried upward into regions where he had never before drawn breath, where he knew that unusual conditions of life prevailed—conditions that could only be described as sparse or meagre—was beginning to affect him and fill him with a certain uneasiness.

Home and ordinary life lay not merely far behind him; they lay fathoms beneath him, while he continued to climb above them. Suspended between them and the unknown, he wondered how he would fare.

Perhaps it had been unwise, born as he was only a few feet above sea level, to come directly to these great heights without spending at least a day or two somewhere in between. He wished he were already at the end of his journey; once there, he could begin to live as he would anywhere else, instead of being constantly reminded by the relentless ascent of the strange and incongruous situation in which he found himself.

He looked out of the window. The train wound its way in curves along the narrow pass. He could see the front carriages and the labouring engine, vomiting great clouds of brown, black, and greenish smoke that drifted away into the air. Water roared in the abysses to the right; on the left, among the rocks, dark fir trees rose toward a stone-grey sky.

The train passed through pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight returned, it revealed deep chasms with villages nestled far below. Then the pass closed in again. They wound through narrow defiles, with traces of snow lying in cracks and crevices. There were stops at miserable little station huts, as well as at larger stations, from which the train sometimes departed in the opposite direction, making one lose all sense of the compass.

Magnificent vistas opened before the traveller's awestruck eyes: a solemn, phantasmagorical world of towering peaks into which their route twisted and wound, appearing and disappearing with every turn of the track.

Hans Castorp reflected that they must have risen above the zone of shade trees, and probably even above that of songbirds. The thought filled him with such a sense of life's impoverishment that he experienced a brief attack of dizziness and nausea and covered his eyes with his hand for a few seconds.

Then it passed.

He realized that they had stopped climbing. They had reached the summit of the pass, and the train was now moving smoothly along the level floor of the valley.

It was about eight o'clock, and it was still daylight. In the distance he could see a lake, its waters grey, its shores covered with dark fir forests that climbed the surrounding slopes, thinned out, and finally gave way to bare, mist-wreathed rock.

They stopped at a small station.

Hans Castorp heard the name called out: “Davos-Dorf.”

Soon he would reach the end of his journey.

And suddenly, close beside him, he heard a familiar voice—the comfortable Hamburg voice of his cousin Joachim Ziemssen.

“Hallo! There you are! This is where you get off!”

Looking through the window, he saw his cousin himself standing on the platform below, wearing a brown ulster, bare-headed, and looking more robust than he had ever seen him before.

Joachim laughed and called again:

“Come on out. It’s all right!”

“But I’m not there yet!” Hans Castorp protested, taken aback, still seated in his compartment.

“Oh yes, you are. This is the village. It’s closer to the sanatorium from here. I have a carriage. Just give us your things.”

[...]

### Selected Passage

“And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps merely an infection, a sickness of matter? Was what one might call the original procreation of matter itself only a disease—a growth produced by the morbid stimulation of something immaterial?

Was the first step toward evil, toward desire and death, taken precisely at that moment when the first increase in the density of the spiritual occurred—that pathologically luxuriant growth produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration? This process, partly pleasurable and partly an act of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to substance.

This was the Fall.”

[...]

### Selected Passage

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his age and of his contemporaries.

He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as firmly established and simply take them for granted, remaining as far from adopting a critical attitude toward them as our good Hans Castorp himself was. Yet it is entirely possible for him, nevertheless, to have a vague awareness of the shortcomings of his age and to find them harmful to his own moral well-being.

All kinds of personal aims, hopes, purposes, and prospects hover before the eyes of the individual, and from them he draws the impulse toward ambition and achievement.

But if the life around him, if his own age, however outwardly stimulating, seems at bottom empty of the nourishment required by such aspirations; if, in private, he recognises it as hopeless, directionless, and powerless, offering only a hollow silence in response to all the questions that man asks—consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow inevitably asks—about the ultimate, absolute, and abstract meaning of all his efforts and activities, then a certain paralysis of the personality is bound to occur.

The more upright the character, the more inevitable this paralysis becomes: a kind of palsy that may spread from the spiritual and moral sphere into the physical and organic as well.

In an age that offers no satisfying answer to the eternal questions “Why?” and “To what end?”, a man capable of achievement beyond the expected measure must possess either a moral detachment and single-mindedness that are exceedingly rare and almost heroic in nature, or an exceptionally robust vitality.

Hans Castorp possessed neither.

And thus he must be regarded as mediocre—though in an entirely honourable sense.