Hans Castorp on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat a married woman and feverish fellow patient is perched high above the world dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight he will remain on this magic mountain for seven years removed from the real world but irresistibly drawn into the sanatoriums own complex vertiginous society which in Manns hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War. Flooded with feeling with powerful evocations of disease with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural The Magic Mountain is equally remarkable for Manns treatment of time the flatland time of healthy active people and the inelastic present of the people up here for whom illness is a lifelong career.