But as a matter of fact, that tone was far less usual in our present sphere than it is elsewhere in the world. Hans Castorp had considered himself pretty well-informed on the subject of the above-named “fact of life” which has always and everywhere been such a favourite target for shafts of wit. And he may have been right in so considering. But now he found that the knowledge he had had down in the flat-land had been most inadequate, that he had actually been in a state of simple ignorance. For his personal emotions in the time of his stay up here⁠—upon the nature of which we have been at some pains to enlighten the reader, and which had been at moments so acute as to wring from the young man that cry of “Oh, my God!”⁠—had opened his eyes, had made him capable of hearing and comprehending the wild, the overstrained, the namelessly extravagant key in which all the “affairs” up here were set. Not that, even up here, they did not make jests on the subject. But up here, far more than down below, jests seemed out of place. They made one’s teeth to chatter, and took away one’s breath, they betrayed themselves too plainly for what they were, a thin and obvious disguise for a hidden extremity⁠—or rather, an extremity impossible to hide.