“Yes,” said Joachim. “I was rather queer at first. Don’t think too much of it. I told you it isn’t so easy to accustom oneself to the life up here. But you will get right again after a bit. Look, that bench is in a pretty place. Let’s sit down awhile and then go home. I must take my cure.”

The path had become level. It ran now in the direction of Davos-Platz, some third of the height, and kept a continuous view, between high, sparse, windblown pines, of the settlement below, gleaming whitely in the bright air. The bench on which they sat leaned against the steep wall of the mountainside, and near them a spring in an open wooden trough ran gurgling and plashing to the valley.

Joachim was for instructing his cousin in the names of the mist-wreathed Alpine heights which seemed to enclose the valley on the south, pointing them out in turn with his alpenstock. But Hans Castorp gave the mountains only a fleeting glance. He sat bent over, tracing figures on the ground with the ferrule of his cityish silver-mounted walking-stick. There were other things he wanted to know.