The Magic Mountain Read Online Free PDF

individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state—indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.
    And Hans Castorp experienced much the same thing. He had not planned to take this trip particularly seriously, to become deeply involved in it. His intention had been, rather, to put it behind him quickly, simply because that was how things had to be, to return quite the same person he had been at departure, and to pick up his life again where he had been forced to leave it lying for the moment. Only yesterday he had been totally caught up in his normal train of thought, preoccupied with what had just occurred, his exams, and with what was about to occur, his joining the firm of Tunder and Wilms (dockyards, machine works, and boilers), and looking well beyond these next three weeks with as much impatience as his nature allowed. But now it seemed to him that present circumstances demanded his full attention and that it was inappropriate to shrug them off. Being lifted like this into regions whose air he had never breathed before and whose sparse and meager conditions were, as he well knew, both unfamiliar and peculiar—it all began to excite him, to fill him with a certain anxiety. Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing. Hovering between home and the unknown ahead, he asked himself how he would do up there. Was it unwise and unhealthy, perhaps, for him, born only a few feet above sea level and accustomed to breathing that air, to be suddenly transported to such extreme regions without spending at least a few days someplace in between? He wished he had already reached his goal, because once you were up there, he thought, you lived just as people did everywhere, instead of having the climb constantly remind you of how unsuitable these precincts were. He looked out—the train was winding through a narrow pass; you could see the forward cars and the laboring engine, emitting great straggling tatters of brown, green, and black smoke. Water roared in the deep ravine on his right; dark pines on his left struggled up between boulders toward a stony gray sky. There were pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight returned, vast chasms were revealed, with a few villages far below. These views closed again, too, and were followed by new passes with patches of snow left in clefts and crevices. The train pulled into dingy little stations and backed out again on the same set of tracks, confusing your sense of direction until you no longer knew whether you were heading north or south. Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a world of ineffable, phantasmagoric Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve. Hans Castorp thought about how he had left hardwood forests far below him, and songbirds, too, he presumed; and the idea that such things could cease, the sense of a world made poorer without them, brought on a slight attack of dizziness and nausea, and he covered his eyes with his hand for a second or two. This passed. He realized that their climb was coming to an end, that they had taken the crest. The train was now rolling more comfortably along the level floor of a valley.
    It was almost eight o’clock, but still daylight. A lake appeared in the distant landscape; its surface was gray and from its shores black pine forests climbed the surrounding slopes, grew thinner toward the top, and gave way at last to bare, fog-enshrouded rock. They stopped at a little station, Davos-Dorf, as Hans Castorp learned when someone outside shouted the name—he would be at journey’s end shortly. And suddenly, right beside him, he heard his cousin Joachim Ziemssen saying