So it was settled, Joachim was to go. Rhadamanthus had released him; not rite , not with a clean bill of health, yet half approvingly, on the ground, and in recognition, of his constant spirit. He would go down: first with the narrow-gauge road as far as Landquart, then to Romanshorn, then across the wide, bottomless lake, over which in the legend the rider rode, across all Germany, and home. He would stop there, in the valley world, among men with no notion of the way to live, ignorant of “measuring” and of the whole ritual of rug-wrapping, of fur sleeping-sacks, of the three daily walks, of⁠—it was hard to say, hard to count all the things of which those down below stood in blank ignorance; but the mere picture of Joachim, after a year and a half up here, living in the darkness of that flat-landish incomprehension⁠—a picture only of Joachim, with hardly the faintest hypothetical reference to Hans Castorp himself⁠—so bewildered the young man that he closed his eyes and waved it away with a motion of the hand, murmuring: “Impossible!”