The Magic Mountain (47 page)

As he lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the bodily warmth preserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty night illumined by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its horny, scalelike regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation. Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its weight on one leg, the hip-bone stood out sharply under the flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent knee against the inside of the supporting leg, and poised the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired symmetry of its limbs and trunk. The acrid, steaming shadows of the arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic darkness, just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly below. Under the impulsion of a central organ and of the motor nerves originating in the spinal marrow, chest and abdomen functioned, the peritoneal cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membrane of the respiratory canal, saturated with secretions, streamed out between the lips, after it had joined its oxygen to the hæmoglobin of the blood in the air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework of bones—marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones, vertebræ—which with the addition of lime had developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong enough to support the body weight; with the capsules and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, its more than two hundred muscles, its central organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secretions; with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly complicated interior surface, communicating through the body-openings with the outer world—he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built up out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses and functions, separated, differentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth.

This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent with their essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic elements that the functions of some had become limited to sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others only understood how to change their shape or produce digestive secretions through contraction; others, again, were developed and functional to no other end than protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or reproduction. There were modifications of this organic plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the multitude of subordinate entities were only grouped in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living unit. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell colonies; he read about half-organisms, algæ, whose single cells, enveloped in a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, which, if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to procreation. The act of fructification, the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding of every multiple-celled individual, as it did at the beginning of every row of generations of single elementary forms, and led back to itself. For this act was carried through many species which had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation; until a moment came when the non-sexually produced offspring found themselves once more constrained to a renewal of the copulative function, and the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent cells, the association of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle came full again when sexcells, specially developed elements for the purpose of reproduction, had established themselves and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on afresh.

Our young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the organism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of conception, which the protoplasm of the outside of the ovum arched against its approach. There was no conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In some animals, the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who for long had given it Greek and Latin names as an independent form of life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and animalculists: the first of whom asserted that the egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human being, the male element being only the incitement to its growth; while the second saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed forth, to which the egg performed only the office of “nourisher in life’s feast.” In the end they agreed to concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of which, after all, sprang from originally indistinguishable procreative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructified egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellæ of the mucous membrane; saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close itself in to form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin the functions of receiving and digesting food. That was the gastrula, the protozoon, primeval form of all animal life, primeval form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and the inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved to be primitive organs out of whose foldings-in and -out, were developed the glands, the tissues, the sensory organs, the body processes. A strip of the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm, thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself into a nerve canal, became a spinal column, became the brain. And as the fœtal slime condensed into fibrous connective tissue, into cartilage, the colloidal cells beginning to show gelatinous substance instead of mucin, he saw in certain places the connective tissue take lime and fat to itself out of the sera that washed it, and begin to form bone. Embryonic man squatted in a stooping posture, tailed, indistinguishable from embryonic pig; with enormous abdomen and stumpy, formless extremities, the facial mask bowed over the swollen paunch; the story of his growth seemed a grim, unflattering science, like the cursory record of a zoological family tree. For a while he had gill-pockets like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable, contemplating the various stages of development through which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous development of the mucous membrane of the olfactory organs; his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part in the play of the features, and were much better adapted than ours for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a third, nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting the third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary trace, and which was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers from the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine, many molars, and sound-pouches on the larnyx the better to roar with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of the intestinal cavity.

Anatomy presented our investigator with charts of human limbs, skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons: those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm, the upper and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with which medicine, that subdivision of the humanities, had gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the development of which presented new points of view—among them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself reminded of his own field—or shall we say his former field?—the scientific calling which he had announced himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr. Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his arrival up here. In order to learn something—it had not much mattered what— he had learned in his technical school about statics, about supports capable or flexion, about loads, about construction as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature; but just as little might one say that they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in such a way that the static demands were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the demands made by draught and pressure upon it, can withstand the same weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible that, step for step with the formation of the solid exterior, the inner parts, which were mechanically superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The thigh-bone was a crane, in the construction of which organic nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic nature generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.

But with all this the achievements of the protoplasm remained unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it should understand itself. Most of the bio-chemical processes were not only unknown, it lay in their very nature that they should escape attention. Almost nothing was known of the structure or composition of the living unit called the “cell.” What use was there in establishing the components of lifeless muscle, when the living did not let itself be chemically examined? The changes that took place when the
rigor mortis
set in were enough to make worthless all investigation. Nobody understood metabolism, nobody understood the true inwardness of the functioning of the nervous system. To what properties did the taste corpuscles owe their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of excitation of certain sensory nerves by odour-possessing substances? In what, indeed, the property of smell itself? The specific odours of man and beast consisted in the vaporization of certain unknown substances. The composition of the secretion called sweat was little understood. The glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals undoubtedly played an important rôle, but whose significance for the human species we were not in a position to explain. The physiological significance of important regions of the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to mention the vermiform appendix, which was a mystery; in rabbits it was regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of which there was nothing to say as to how it got in or renewed itself. But what about the white and grey substance which composed the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and the grey inlay of the
pans Varolii?
The substance composing the brain and marrow was so subject to disintegration, there was no hope whatever of determining its structure. What was it relieved the cortex of activity during slumber? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself—as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened oxidization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there not an increased expenditure of warmth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But such contraction took place only in the case of “chills and fever,” for otherwise, in fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the central nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did not know how to define it.