Both Uses of

motley
in
The Magic Mountain

Seated among the Germans and Swiss were bearded, elegant Russians, looking barbarically rich, and Dutchmen with traces of Malayan blood— all intermixed with a sprinkling of indeterminate sorts who spoke French and came from the Balkans or the Levant, a motley set of adventurers for whom Hans Castorp had a certain weakness but whom Joachim spurned as dubious and lacking in character.†
Chpt 5.8

And he was not mistaken in assuming that the members of his motley circle of friends would at least get used to not getting used to one another.†
Chpt 7.4 *

Definitions:

(1) (motley)
consisting of a haphazard assortment of different kinds of a thing -- sometimes implying that the collection does not go well together and is of low quality
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
meaning too rare to warrant focus:

More rarely, motley can refer specifically to different colors.

Much more rarely (though commonly in classic literature) motley references a multicolored woolen fabric woven of mixed threads in 14th to 17th century England; or to a court jester's costume made of such fabric. This sense of the word is still reasonably common in the expression motley fool which refers to a jester in such garb.