Hans Castorp had feared oversleeping the time since he had been so exceedingly tired, but he was up earlier than necessary and had plenty of leisure to follow his morning habits in detail, highly civilized habits including a rubber tub and a wooden bowl with green Lavender soap and the straw brush that went with it played a leading role – and to combine the unpacking and putting away with the business of cleaning and body care. Raising the silver-plated plane over his cheeks covered with perfumed foam, he recalled his confused dreams and, smiling indulgently, shook his head at so much nonsense with the superiority of a man shaving in the daylight of reason. He didn’t feel very rested, but fresh with the young day.

While he was drying his hands, he stepped out onto the balcony with powdered cheeks, in his file d’écosse underpants and red morocco slippers, which ran through and was divided into individual room areas only by means of opaque glass walls that did not quite protrude to the railing .The morning was cool and cloudy. Long banks of fog lay motionless in front of the lateral heights, while heavy clouds, white and gray, hung down over the more distant mountains. Patches and streaks of sky-blue were visible here and there, and when the sun shone the village at the bottom of the valley shimmered white against the dark pine forests of the slopes. There was morning music somewhere, probably in the same hotel where there had been a concert last night. Chorale chords sounded muted, after a pause a march followed, and Hans Castorp, who loved music from the heart because it had a very similar effect on him as his breakfast porter, namely deeply calming, numbing, persuaded to doze off, listened happily to the Head tilted to one side, with open mouth and slightly reddened eyes.

Down below the path looped up to the sanatorium, which he had come the previous evening. Short-stemmed, star-shaped gentians stood in the damp grass of the slope. Part of the platform was fenced off as a garden; there were gravel paths, flower borders and an artificial rock grotto at the foot of a stately silver fir. A tin-roofed hall, in which deckchairs stood, opened to the south, and next to it a reddish-brown flagpole was erected, on the cord of which the flag sometimes unfolded—an imaginary flag, green and white, with the emblem of medicine, a serpent’s staff , in the middle.

A woman was walking about the garden, an elderly lady with a somber, even tragic appearance. Dressed entirely in black, with a black veil wrapped around her tousled black-grey hair, she paced restlessly and at a steady pace, knees bent and arms hanging stiffly forwardalong the paths and stared straight ahead, with transverse wrinkles on his forehead, with coal-black eyes under which sagging skin sacks hung. Her aging face, pale from the South, with the large, careworn mouth drawn down on one side, reminded Hans Castorp of the image of a famous tragedian that he had once seen, and it was uncanny to see the pale, black woman, apparently without knowing it , matched her long, sorrowful steps to the beat of the marching music.

Hans Castorp looked down at her with thoughtful sympathy, and it seemed to him that her sad appearance was darkening the morning sun. At the same time, however, he caught something else, something audible, noises coming from the next room on the left, the room of the Russian couple, according to Joachim, and which likewise did not want to go with the bright, fresh morning, but somehow made it sticky rails. Hans Castorp remembered hearing something like that last night, but his tiredness prevented him from paying attention. It was a struggle, giggling, and gasping, the offensive nature of which could not remain hidden from the young man for long, although at first, out of good nature, he tried to interpret it harmlessly. One could have given other names to this good nature,he didn’t want to know anything about what he was hearing: an expression of modesty that wasn’t entirely original, but which he used to adopt on certain occasions.

So with this expression he withdrew from the balcony into the room so as not to listen any longer to events that seemed serious, even shattering, to him, although they revealed themselves with giggles. But in the room, the hustle and bustle beyond the wall could only be heard more clearly. There was a chase around the furniture, it seemed, a chair rumbled, people grabbed each other, there was clapping and kissing, and then it came to be the sound of a waltz, the used-up melodious phrases of a popular song, coming from outside and further accompanied the invisible scene. Hans Castorp stood with the towel in his hands and listened against his better will. And suddenly he blushed under his powder, for what he had plainly seen coming had come, and the game was now without doubt animalistic. Good Lord, thunderstorm! he thought, turning to finish his toilet with deliberately noisy movements. Well, it’s a married couple, for God’s sake, that’s fine as far as it goes. But in the bright morning, that’s strong. And I feel like they didn’t keep the peace last night. After all, they’re sick while they’re here, or at least one of them, so some rest would be in order. But what’s really scandalous is self-evident, he thought angrily, that the walls are so thin and you can hear everything so clearly, that’s an intolerable state of affairs! Cheaply built, of course, shamefully cheaply built! Will I get to see the people afterwards or even be introduced to them? That would be extremely embarrassing. for god’s sake, it’s fine so far. But in the bright morning, that’s strong. And I feel like they didn’t keep the peace last night. After all, they’re sick while they’re here, or at least one of them, so some rest would be in order. But what’s really scandalous is self-evident, he thought angrily, that the walls are so thin and you can hear everything so clearly, that’s an intolerable state of affairs! Cheaply built, of course, shamefully cheaply built! Will I get to see the people afterwards or even be introduced to them? That would be extremely embarrassing. for god’s sake, it’s fine so far. But in the bright morning, that’s strong. And I feel like they didn’t keep the peace last night. After all, they’re sick while they’re here, or at least one of them, so some rest would be in order. But what’s really scandalous is self-evident, he thought angrily, that the walls are so thin and you can hear everything so clearly, that’s an intolerable state of affairs! Cheaply built, of course, shamefully cheaply built! Will I get to see the people afterwards or even be introduced to them? That would be extremely embarrassing. or at least one of them, some forbearance would be in order. But what’s really scandalous is self-evident, he thought angrily, that the walls are so thin and you can hear everything so clearly, that’s an intolerable state of affairs! Cheaply built, of course, shamefully cheaply built! Will I get to see the people afterwards or even be introduced to them? That would be extremely embarrassing. or at least one of them, some forbearance would be in order. But what’s really scandalous is self-evident, he thought angrily, that the walls are so thin and you can hear everything so clearly, that’s an intolerable state of affairs! Cheaply built, of course, shamefully cheaply built! Will I get to see the people afterwards or even be introduced to them? That would be extremely embarrassing.And here Hans Castorp was surprised, because he noticed that the blush that had risen on his freshly shaved cheeks just now would not go away, or at least not the feeling of warmth that accompanied it, but was fixed there and nothing else was that dry facial heat from which he had suffered last night, which he had gotten rid of in his sleep, and which on this occasion had returned. This did not make him any friendlier towards the neighboring spouses, but he murmured a very negative word against them with pursed lips and then made the mistake of cooling his face again with water, which considerably aggravated the evil. So it was that his voice trembled sullenly as he answered his cousin, who had been knocking on the wall calling out to him,