Down this slope; follow your nose home, I suppose, and keep your face to the wind⁠—though that is a good deal easier said than done,” he went on, panting with his efforts, yet actually speaking half aloud, as he tried to move on again: “but something has to happen, I can’t sit down and wait, I should simply be buried in six-sided crystalline symmetricality, and Settembrini, when he came with his little horn to find me, would see me squatting here with a snowcap over one ear.” He realized that he was talking to himself, and not too sensibly⁠—for which he took himself to task, and then continued on purpose, though his lips were so stiff he could not shape the labials, and so did without them, as he had on a certain other occasion that came to his mind. “Keep quiet, and get along with you out of here,” he admonished himself, adding: “You seem to be woolgathering, not quite right in your head, and that looks bad for you.”