At that hour his twitching lips had stammered and babbled, in his own and foreign tongues, for the most part without his own volition, the maddest things: pleas, prayers, proposals, frantic projects, to which all consent was denied, and rightly: as, that he might be permitted to accompany the genius beyond the Caucasus; that he might follow after it; that he might await it at the next spot which its free and untrammelled spirit should select as a domicile; and thereafter never be parted from it more⁠—these and other such rash, irresponsible utterances. No, all that our simple young adventurer carried away from that hour was his ghostly treasure trove, and the possibility, perhaps the probability, of Frau Chauchat’s return for a fourth sojourn at the Berghof⁠—sooner or later, as the state of her health might decree. But whether sooner or later⁠—as she had said again at parting⁠—Hans Castorp would by that time be “long since far away.” It was a prophecy whose slighting note would have been harder to bear had he not known that prophecies are sometimes made in order that they may not