Working slowly and deliberately⁠—he kept up his soothing habit of porter breakfasts while he was away⁠—he filled his brain with analytic and descriptive geometry, differential calculus, mechanics, projection, hydrostatic; reckoned full and empty displacement, stability, trim moment, and metacentre; and sometimes he got very sick of it. His technical drawings, the draughts and designs of frames, waterlines and longitudinal projections, were not quite so good as the picturesque representation of the Hansa on the high seas; but wherever it was in place to call in the sense perceptions to help out the intellectual, wherever he could wash in the shadows and lay on the cross-sections in the conventional colours, there Hans Castorp showed more dexterity than most.