,” he said to himself, quoting Naphta, in a Latin hardly humanistic in spirit. He stopped and looked about. On all sides there was nothing to see, beyond small single flakes of snow, which came out of a white sky and sank to rest on the white earth. The silence about him refused to say aught to his spirit. His gaze was lost in the blind white void, he felt his heart pulse from the effort of the climb⁠—that muscular organ whose animal-like shape and contracting motion he had watched, with a feeling of sacrilege, in the X-ray laboratory. A naive reverence filled him for that organ of his, for the pulsating human heart, up here alone in the icy void, alone with its question and its riddle.