Settembrini looked at him. He seemed not to have been listening. His eyes were set again, they had taken on a fixed stare, and he said: “Yes, yes, yes,” and “I see, I see, I see,” each three times, just as he had done in the morning, in a considering, deriding tone, and giving a sharp sound to the s ’s.

“Twenty-four?” he asked after a while.

“No, twenty-eight,” Hans Castorp said. “Twenty-eight fish-sauces. Not sauces in general, special sauces for fish⁠—that is the monstrous part of it.”