That was the very devil. Hans Castorp gave vent to several heartfelt curses⁠—of which his lips were too stiff to pronounce the labials. He examined the hut, to get his bearings, and came to the conclusion that he had approached it from the same direction as before⁠—namely, from the rear; and therefore, what he had accomplished for the past hour⁠—as he reckoned it⁠—had been sheer waste of time and effort. But there it was, just as the books said. You went in a circle, gave yourself endless trouble under the delusion that you were accomplishing something, and all the time you were simply describing some great silly arc that would turn back to where it had its beginning, like the riddling year itself. You wandered about, without getting home. Hans Castorp recognized the traditional phenomenon with a certain grim satisfaction⁠—and even slapped his thigh in astonishment at this punctual general law fulfilling itself in his particular case.