“Have I?” said Joachim, concerned, and turned to look at his cousin.

“Oh, no, of course I don’t mean you really have⁠—I suppose it just seemed so to me for the moment,” Hans Castorp hastened to assure him. It was the expression “all of us up here,” which Joachim had used several times, that had somehow struck him as strange and given him an uneasy feeling.

“Our sanatorium is higher up than the village, as you see,” went on Joachim. “Fifty metres higher. In the prospectus it says a hundred, but it is really only fifty. The highest of the sanatoriums is the Schatzalp⁠—you can’t see it from here. They have to bring their bodies down on bobsleds in the winter, because the roads are blocked.”