Who could talk more beautifully than Herr Settembrini, who clearer, or in better-rounded periods? Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen thanked him most warmly for all he had said, and mounted the Berghof steps, while Herr Settembrini betook himself once more to his humanistic writing-desk, in the storey above Naphta’s silken cell.

This first visit of the cousins to Naphta, whose course we have described, was followed by two or three others; one, even, in the absence of Herr Settembrini. All of them afforded young Hans Castorp much food for thought, when, in his blue-blossoming retreat, with the image of the human form divine, called Homo Dei , hovering before his mind’s eye, he sat and “took stock.”