Part 2

Of these mountain twins of central Switzerland, Pilatus is by far the more imposing, not merely in point of elevation--the Rigi is less by a thousand feet--and immeasurably in grace of peaked and rocky outline, but also in wealth of legendary lore, and even of actual historical significance. Of legend, because Pontius Pilate, according to one account, smitten with remorse after the crucifixion of Our Saviour, ascended these lonely summits in the course of his miserable wanderings, and drowned himself here in the little pool (which is now dried up) on the Bründlen Alp, which lies on the less well-known slopes of the hill descending from the highest peak, or Tomlishorn (6,995 feet), in the direction of the Rumligbach. According, however, to another version, which first appears in the pages of Eusebius, Pontius Pilate committed suicide at Rome; and it was only after a series of strange vicissitudes and wanderings, recalling, though less hallowed than, those of the body of St. Cuthbert, that his corpse was flung at last, like so much carrion, into this little mountain tarn. First it was thrown into the Tiber, but the evil spirit could not rest, and storms and floods that fell upon Rome necessitated its removal to Vienne, near Lyons, where again it found watery burial in the Rhone. Vienne, however, was now visited in turn by commotions like those at Rome; the Lake of Geneva, the next place of interment, proved equally infelicitous; and it was only finally in untrodden solitudes, beneath the grey limestone peaks of the Frackmünd (or _Fractus Mons_), that the hateful body, which earth refused to receive in peace, was suffered at last to hide itself in uneasy but permanent sepulchre. For "even here the wicked spirit could not rest from evil-doing. Storm and rain enveloped the mountain, the lake burst its banks, Alps were ruined, and herds swept away. At last a travelling scholar confronted the ghost, and by his magic forced him to accept a pact by which, on condition of one day's freedom, he was to remain at rest for the remainder of the year. The bargain was kept. The land was at peace, but yearly on Good Friday any shepherd who approached the haunted tarn saw, seated on a throne of rock above the water, a terrible figure clad in the red robes of magistracy." One would hasten to suppose that the story had been invented in explanation of the name; but the name Pilatus (perhaps from _pileatus_, the capped mountain, from its well-known cloud-compelling qualities) is said to date only from the eighteenth century, whilst the story is at least as old as the fourteenth.

So far the realm of legend. The realm of actual history is scarcely less astonishing, and attaches itself to legend by imperceptible ties. It is history that the city of Lucerne in the Middle Ages did actually prohibit the ascent of the mysterious hill: it is history that six priests in 1307 were condemned to several months of imprisonment for daring to visit the forbidden lake. The legend of the pact with the travelling scholar had at least one important variant, for it was believed that by throwing a stone into the pool the spirit could be at any time provoked, and his evil influence set free to work havoc on lake and fell. It was to avert this constant menace at the hands of audacity, or scepticism, that the city fathers promulgated the law by which access to the hill was prohibited. It was only with the Renaissance, and with the birth of the new spirit of rationalism, that the old beliefs became untenable, and that the old terrors were rendered empty--as Gareth cleaves the helm of the silent terror that

"Names himself the Night and oftener Death,"

and reveals inside "the bright face of a blooming boy." The terrors were already grown more than a little threadbare when Conrad Gesner, the naturalist, ascended the mountain in 1555; they must nearly have vanished altogether in another thirty years, when the Curé of Lucerne, "before a crowd of witnesses, flung stones and rubbish into the lake without raising anything more than a ripple." At the bottom, however, of all these wild stories there is a substratum of truth, for Pilatus is really a great brewer of storms, and the peasants of the neighbourhood still prognosticate the weather from the disposition of the clouds upon its summit. Thus Roseberry Topping, in Cleveland, or what greedy iron-masters have left of it, was supposed as long ago as the time of Camden to foretell the coming storm:

"If Roseberry Topping wears a cap Let Cleveland then beware of a clap."

Roseberry and Pilatus are in other respects curiously analogous; each is of a typically peaked appearance; and each is situated on the extreme edge of the hill group to which it belongs. Pilatus, it may be noted, is now ascended by a railway, and thus heaps of "unappreciative trippers" are now lightly conveyed every fine summer day to the once weirdly mysterious summit, to which the medieval climber won only surreptitiously, and perhaps in awe and terror. It is surely the anti-climax of unromantic common sense.

The Rigi, which confronts Pilatus across the lake in such startling dissimilarity, is perhaps the most popular hill in Europe, and is certainly in a sense the most vulgar. It is bad enough that a hill should be desecrated by a single mountain railway: it is intolerable that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at night in one or other of the monster hotels--at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg--that oppress and burden its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. This is not the place to attempt a dissertation on the _quæstio vexata_ of mountain railways. To the writer (who is prejudiced) the thing seems axiomatic: all that goes to make up mountain grandeur, all that is of the spirit,

"Of eye and ear--both what they half create, And what perceive"--

all that renders a mountain a mountain, as opposed to a mere elevated mass of matter--

"Of stratified rock Inclined at an angle of xty degrees"--

is gone in a moment when you thus strip a hill of its proper attributes--of its mystery, of its remoteness, of its difficulty of access; and there remains nothing save bulk, which you get in the Great Pyramid; and prospect, which you get from the Eiffel Tower; and a clever bit of engineering (diabolically clever), which is just as well got in the Great Wheel at Kensington. Yet frankly it must be confessed that if something had to be sacrificed to gratify the sensation-mongers, and the lazy, and the impotent, the Rigi might best be immolated. Just this one hill, perhaps, might be spared: but was it necessary to bind to the horns of the altar every other hill of medium size in Switzerland--the Niesen, and the Brienzer, Rothhorn, and the Schynige Platte, and the Beatenberg; to say nothing, on the shores of Lake Lucerne itself, in addition to the Rigi, of the Burgenstock, and Pilatus, and the Stanserhorn; and elsewhere in Switzerland of the deeper crime of the Jungfrau, and in Savoy of the crowning infamy of Mont Blanc?

The Rigi, in fact, owing to its peculiar configuration and structure, is less hurt by this eruption of mountain railways than any other mountain in the Alps. The hill is really a whole agglomeration of hills--of which the Rigi Kulm (5,905 feet) is merely the culminating summit--which occupy very roughly the rectangular area that lies between the lakes of Lucerne, Zug, and Lowerz, and are formed largely of horizontal layers of red conglomerate, or pudding-stone, rock. The hill is thus distinctly of the lumpy type of mountain, as opposed to its rival, Pilatus, which belongs to the vertical, or peaked; and owes what beauty it possesses to its long bands of ruddy precipice, down which dangle short spouts of more or less exiguous cascade, and to the solemn masses of dark wood that gird its middle flanks. The towering crags of Pilatus, like tongues of shivering flame, have here no rival in these long, parallel belts of forest, rock, and open lawn, that rise above the lake in stately tier above tier, and are hardly wilder at their summits than along the margin of the lake:

"And as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view."

It is not difficult among glades like these for a mountain railway to worm its way obscurely, and to hide its ugly presence beneath the garment of thick woods.

It is the fashion to spend the night on the Rigi, and to witness the sunrise next day. The writer has done it once, but the experience was disappointing: it was already broad daylight, and the whole landscape was already coldly visible, when the little group of shivering penitents was marshalled on the summit to watch the up-burst of a sun that itself seemed cold and grey. It may be better worth the trouble if one rises for actual daybreak, or when the sun issues forth more royally from his chamber in the east. On the whole, perhaps, it is better to avoid the Rigi in its stereotyped sensational aspects, and to investigate its secret--for secret to yield it assuredly has--unconventionally, and out of the season. I have crossed its saddle from Goldau to Weggis, between the Rigi Rotstock and the Schild, during the later days of March, when the track by which I climbed was still white with virgin snow. This was, in fact, the old pilgrim path by which devotees once ascended--may possibly still ascend--to worship at the little upland chapel (rebuilt in 1715-21) of Our Lady of the Snow ("Maria zum Schnee"). This shrine is the centre of a little colony, the oldest and quaintest of all that have developed on the Rigi; and just because it lies in a hollow of the summit peaks, and commands no distant views, has escaped the bitter ravages of modern exploitation. The spot is called Rigi Klösterli, because inhabited all the year round by a little group of Capuchin friars from the community at Arth, who dwell in the little hospice and serve the little chapel. This was an old centre for goat-whey cure, and the inns are delightfully old-fashioned of aspect; the whole appearance of the spot, indeed, is full of local character, whereas most other settlements on the Rigi are cosmopolitan and commonplace. The salvation of the place is its utter lack of view: you must scramble up steep grass slopes, towards the south, to the summit of the saddle, to enlarge your horizon in a few steps from a barrier of green hill-side to a prospect so vast that you seem suddenly to have before you all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory thereof. I do not know, indeed, that the actual range of view is greater than that commanded in France from the top of the Puy-de Dôme--

"Si Dôme était sur Dôme On verra les portes de Rome"--

and certainly it is not so majestic as many more restricted views of particular groups of Alps, seen--as mountain views are almost always seen to best advantage--from the slopes, or from the summits, of lesser hills. But except from the marble roofs of Milan Cathedral there is perhaps no other generally recognized and easily accessible point of view from which it is possible, merely by turning the head, to command so long a line of crowding Alpine summits, extending from the Sentis, in the extreme east, to Pilatus in the west, for a distance of roughly one hundred and twenty miles--

"Hill peers o'er hill, and Alps o'er Alps arise."

Yet here, when we stand on the crest in unaccustomed solitude in the first stirrings of the spring, when the giant hotels are still mostly shut and empty, and when the high-level railway between the Kaltbad and the Scheidegg is happily obscured beneath icicle and snowdrift, there is yet no intimate revelation of the true inward spirit of Alpine scenery:

"The difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite."

The Land of Promise lies fair before us; but here, on the saddle of the Rigi, we still linger on the threshold, though the biting morning breeze come, pine-scented, through the forest, and though the musical cow-bells tinkle for ever on the "high mountain pastures, where day first appears."

V

Of the five great primary divisions of the Vierwaldstättersee--and one is driven, however anxious to preserve the configuration of the cross, to recognize a fifth, and separate, division in the Bay, or Lake, of Uri--of the five great divisions of the Lake of Lucerne, that which extends to the quays of Lucerne itself is the most placid and domestic in respect of actual shore-line. True, there is always a background of lofty mountain, sufficiently magnificent and sufficiently near at hand to impress itself on the landscape as a component, and even dominant, feature; but the actual littoral in this compartment of the lake--and Lucerne, unlike Zurich or Geneva, but to some extent like Como, is literally partitioned into compartments--is softly arcadian in character, with low, gently swelling hills of slight, inconclusive contour, knee-deep with hay and flowers, and shoulder-deep with apple-blossom and orchard. Next, I think, in ascending scale is the Bay of Küsnacht, so called from the big village at its head. The north-west shore of this is again of mildly pastoral character; but directly from its south-east margin rise the deep, dark woods of the Rigi, supplying that hint of real Alpine sublimity--it is still merely a hint--that is wholly absent from the immediate shores of the little Lucernersee strictly so-called. The road from Lucerne to Küsnacht, where it skirts this bay beyond the big, scrambling village of Meggen, is one of the pleasantest view-points within easy touch of Lucerne whence to enjoy across the water the noble mountain background that screens the south shore of the main lake. On a mild spring evening, when this splendid landscape is an ætherialized study in black and white; when the snowflakes and cowslips are pushing up in thousands through the quickly growing grass; when the host of margent rushes scarcely quivers in the stillness; and when the opposite mountains are reflected without a ripple in the calm and silent lake, it is hard to believe that all this exquisite beauty, which seems so unearthly and unexplored, is really the much boasted, much advertised, much visited "Lovely Lucerne"--it is difficult to realize that the paddle of a steamer ever churns this unruffled mirror, or that the harsh whistle of the ascending locomotive ever wakes the echoes on steadfast Rigi. Those who visit Lucerne only in the deadly oppression of the high season, when every lake-side quay swarms like an ant-hill, and every village rings like Babel, are apt to carry away wrong impressions of this still absolutely unimpaired lake. The playground at seasons is densely packed, but the place has received no permanent wrong; those who can reconcile Nature and a crowd will be happy here even in August, when

"All Bedlam or Parnassus is let out;"

those, on the other hand, who seek the mountains, not exactly perhaps in the spirit of Manfred, but at any rate in Manfred's happier mood--

"No eyes But mine now drink this sight of loveliness; I should be sole in this sweet solitude"--

will easily find solace here in early spring, or late autumn, when the place is like a desert. No one has done the place a permanent wrong. Who can claim as much for the holly steeps of Windermere--for the distorted Clarens shore of Lake Geneva?

Küssnacht itself is a large, typically Swiss, village, at the foot of the low pass--yet altogether too low to be dignified by the name of pass--that at this point intervenes between the basins of Zug and Lucerne. The place has this significance, that here for the first time, as we perambulate the lake, we encounter spots associated with the legend of William Tell. I suppose one must call it legend, and concede so much to the "higher critics," though Ruskin's clarion anger rings loud and clear. "A sort of triumphant shriek, like all the railway whistles going off at once at Clapham Junction, has gone up from the Fooldom of Europe at the destruction of the myth of William Tell. To us, every word of it was true--but mythically luminous with more than mortal truth.... The myth of William Tell is destroyed forsooth? and you have tunnelled Gothard and filled, maybe, the Bay of Uri--and it was all for you and your sake that the grapes dropped blood from the press of St. Jacob, and the pine-club struck down horse and helm in Morgarten glen?" If the history of William Tell itself is unauthentic, we must not demand authenticity for its visible memorials and sites. Gesler's Castle above Küssnacht--or the fragments that remain of it--certainly never belonged to Gesler; whilst the chapel at the head of the Hohle Gasse, or Hollow Way, was certainly rebuilt in 1644, and did not exist at all at the end of the fifteenth century. This is the traditional spot where Tell, after escaping from the boat at the Tellsplatte, and running by way of Schwyz and the back of the Rigi, waited for Gesler on his return from Altdorf, and shot him dead with his terrible cross-bow before he could reach his castle-gate at Küssnacht. It is worth the traveller's while to press on a mile or two further in the direction of Arth, though this is to exchange the basin of the lake of Lucerne for that of the lake of Zug. The Zugersee lies almost at once beneath us, at a slightly lower level (roughly sixty feet) than the Vierwaldstättersee, and altogether of more placid and softer character--a pleasant thing to look at in the tender evening light, with its shore line embowered amidst orchards and deep rich meadows, and dotted in every direction with peaceful farms, but destitute of mountain grandeur, save immediately towards its head, where the dark forests of the Rigi, towards the west, and of the Rossberg, towards the east, open a gloomy "Gate of the hills," beyond which, though really above Schwyz and the little lake of Lowerz, the tall, bare rock pyramids of the Great and Little Mitre (Gross and Kleine Mythen) tower up in cleft magnificence above the cradle of Swiss freedom.

As to the story of William Tell, this, alas! has gone the way of our own tales of Robin Hood (whom Mr. Sydney Lee dismisses as a "mythical forest elf") and his Merry Men of Sherwood Forest. The legend first appears in the manuscript "Weisses Buch," so-called from its white binding, that is still preserved at Sarnen, and which was written between 1467 and 1476; and in the poem called the "Tellenlied," which dates from about 1474. Tell, however, is supposed to have lived at about the commencement of the fourteenth century. There are certainly some scraps of evidence that suggest in combination that the later Tell myth (as, for that matter, are presumably most myths) is based on some substratum of solid historical fact. Thus, there is said to be evidence that a religious observance of some kind was instituted in connection with Tell in the place where he lived in 1387; and it is stated, though not earlier than 1504, that a chapel was erected on the Tellsplatte, as the country people believed in commemoration of the landing there of William Tell, in 1388. The story as now commonly reported--that Tell refused to do obeisance to the Austrian Arch-duke's cap at Altdorf; that he shot the apple off his son's head at the brutal bidding of Gesler in the market-place of the same town; that he afterwards escaped from Austrian custody by springing from the boat to the shore at the Tellsplatte during the onset of a sudden squall; and that he shot the tyrant through the heart as the latter neared his castle hall at Küssnacht--first assumed its present form, in which it has been dramatized by Schiller, at the hands of Tschudi of Glarus, in the first half of the sixteenth century. Even as early, however, as the close of this same century the very existence of William Tell had been questioned by Guilmann in his _De Rebus Helveticis_. Voltaire was duly sceptical as to the story of the boy and the apple ("l'histoire de la pomme est bien suspecte"); but the patriotic faith of Canton Uri was still sufficiently strong at the close of the eighteenth century to consign to the flames at the hand of the public hangman the sceptical "Guillaume Tell; fable danoise." The result, however, as expressed curtly in Murray's handbook, is that Tell has been banished from authentic history. Exactly similar legends or sagas of the tenth century are found in Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Holstein, and on the Rhine; and our Clym of the Clough shoots at an apple on his son's head--

"But Cloudesle cleft the apple in two, His son he did not nee'."

Thus William Tell, like Arnold von Winkelried, recedes into the dim borderland of legend and history. After all, it is no irreparable loss. The individual Arnold, the individual Tell, were units merely of the great company of authentic, unnamed heroes who smote the Austrian tyrant at Sempach and Morgarten, who triumphed against the Burgundian at Grandson, Morat, and Nancy.

The third division, in still ascending scale of mountain grandeur, of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons is that which extends south-westward from the intersection of the cross, and is known--certainly towards its extremity, and perhaps throughout its length--from the little village at its head as the Lake of Alpnach. Here the general effect is more definitely mountainous than that which has awaited us in sailing the two previous compartments: Rigi is now exchanged for Pilatus as the presiding genius and dominant monarch of the scene; whilst the Alps of Unterwalden, and, beyond the low pass of the Brünig, the greater Alps of the Berner Oberland--the triple Maiden, Monk, and Giant--the Peak of Storms, and the Peak of Shrieking--at last supply that mountain background which everyone must have missed when looking up the water towards Küssnacht or Lucerne. The Oberland giants, it is true, are set at too great distance to impress the eye, however much they may affect the imagination, with the same sense of impending mountain majesty as we find in the Bay of Uri; but Pilatus and the Stanserhorn are both immediate and splendid objects; whilst even the dark, pine-clad crags of the little Bürgenstock, which is literally, like Catullus' Sermio, "all-but-island"--for it needs but the raising of the lake a very few feet, and the consequent flooding of the low isthmus between Stans and Buochs, to complete its insulation--push out into the lake with an assertive individuality that is wholly out of keeping with their relatively insignificant height (actually less than four thousand feet). Roughly half-way up, at a point where the lake is narrowed to the dimensions of a river by the sudden, sharp intrusion of the tall black cliffs of the Lopperberg (a footstool of Pilatus), the strait thus strangely created is spanned across to Stanstad by an ugly iron bridge. The crass utilitarianism, in fact, that mars, though it cannot wholly disfigure, so much that is beautiful in Switzerland, and that contributes so little to the honour of the modern Switzer (however well it may fill his purse), is altogether painfully too evident along the shores of this division of the Lake of Lucerne. The hideous lines of electric wires along the margin of the lake are only less detestable than those that degrade the Pass of Llanberis; this bridge across the narrows is as ugly as may be; whilst Baedeker (with his usual businesslike lack of romanticism) duly chronicles in a single breath the presence of "water-falls and Portland cement factories" in the neighbouring glen of the Rotzloch.