_Lucerne and The Rigi._
PHOTOGRAPHS, casts and carvings of the Lucerne Lion are well-nigh as
plentiful as copies of the Beatrice of the Palazzo Barberini. All—even
the best of these—fall lamentably short of expressing the simple
grandeur of Thorwaldsen’s boldest work. The face of a perpendicular
sandstone cliff was hewn roughly,—not smoothed nor polished in any
part. Half-way up was quarried a niche, and in this, as in his lair,
lies a lion, nearly thirty feet long. The splintered shank of a lance
projects from his side. The head—broken or bitten off in his mortal
throe, lies by the shield of France, which is embossed with the _fleur
de lys_. One huge paw protects the sacred emblem. He has dragged
himself, with a final rally of strength to die upon, while caressing
it. He will never move again. The limbs are relaxed, the mighty frame
stretched by the convulsion that wrenched away his life. He is dead—not
daunted;—conquered,—not subdued. The blended grief and ferocity in his
face are human and heroic, not brutal. In the rock above and below the
den are cut a Latin epitaph, and the names of twenty-six men.
“_Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti. Die X Aug. II et III Sept., 1792_;”
begins the inscription. The date tells the story.
Who has not read, oft and again, how the Swiss Guard of twenty-six
officers and seven hundred and fifty privates were cut to pieces to a
man in defence of the royal prisoner of the Tuileries against the mob
thirsting for her blood? In the little shop near the monument they show
a fac-simile of the king’s order to the Guards to be at the palace upon
the fatal day. Trailing vines have crept downward from the top and
fissures of the cliff. Tall trees clothe the summit. A pool lies at
the base, a slender fountain in the middle. There are always travelers
seated upon the benches in front of the railing guarding the water’s
brink, contemplating the dead monarch. It is the pride of Lucerne.
Just above it is the Garden of the Glacier, lately uncovered. The earth
has been removed with care, revealing cup-like basins in the sandstone,
worn by the glacial action of the round stones lying in the bottom of
the hollows.
“Do you believe it?” I overheard an American girl ask her cavalier, as
they leaned over the railing of a rustic bridge crossing the largest
“cup.”
“Not a bit of it! It’s gotten up to order by some of these foreign
scientifs. Stones are too round, and the marks of grinding too plain.
Fact is—the Glacial Theory is the nobby thing, now-a-days, and if
there’s no trick about this concern, it’s _proved_—clear as print! But
they’ve done it too well. Nature doesn’t turn out such smooth jobs.”
It _is_ very smooth work. Those who believe in the authenticity of
the record, gaze with awe at the stones, varying in size from a
nine-pin ball to boulders of many tons’ weight, forced into their
present cavities by the slow rotation of cycles. Ball and boulder have
been ground down themselves in all this wear and tear, but the main
rock has been the greater sufferer. The glacier was the master and
resistless motive-power.
The great Glacier of the Uri-Rothestock was in sight of my bed-room
windows, flanked by the eternal snow-line of the Engelberger Alps.
Across the lake from the city loomed Mt. Pilatus.
“If Pilatus wears his cap, serene will be the day;
If his collar he puts on, you may venture on your way.
But if his sword he wields, at home you’d better stay”—
is an English translation of a Lucerne rhyme. Guide-books refer to him
as the district-barometer. Our experience—and we watched him narrowly
for a month,—proved him to be as unstable as was he for whom he was
named. There is a gloomy tarn upon the southern declivity in which
Pontius Pilate drowned himself, a remorseful exile, driven from palace,
judgment-seat and country, but unable to evade the torment of memory
and the accusing vision of “that Just Man.” So runs the popular legend,
and that the “cap,” “collar” and “sword” of the mountain rise from this
dark and accursed lake. Moreover, it is believed by the peasants that
storms follow the approach of a foreigner to the haunted spot. With all
his humors and untruthfulness, Pilatus deserves a better name. He is a
striking and magnificent accessory to a view that is glorious in every
aspect.
Every rood of ground around Lake Lucerne, otherwise known as the Lake
of the Four Cantons, is memorable in the history of the gallant little
Republic. Near it, Arnold Winkelried gathered into his breast the red
sheaf of spears upon the battle-field of Sempach, July 9th, 1386.
The Confederate Brethren of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, met at Rütli
upon the very border of the lake, on the night of November 7th, 1307,
and swore to give no rest to mind or body until Switzerland should be
free.
William Tell was born at Bürglen, a few miles above Fluelen. It is
fashionable to call him a myth, and his biography symbolical. If our
opinion on this head had been demanded prior to our going to Lucerne,
the spirit, if not the letter of our reply would have been akin to
Betsey Prig’s “memorable and tremendous words,”—“I don’t believe
there’s no sich a person!” By the time we had re-read Schiller’s
“William Tell,” and visited, with it in hand, Altorf, Küssnacht and
Tell’s Platte, we credited the tales of his being and daring almost as
devoutly as do the native Switzers.
Küssnacht is but a couple of miles back from the lake in the midst of
a smiling country lying between water and mountains. A crumbling wall
on a hill-side to the left of the road was pointed out to us as the
remains of Gessler’s Castle, pulled down and burned by the Confederates
the year after the Oath of Rütli. The Hollow Way in which Tell shot him
is a romantic lane between steep, grassy banks and overhanging trees.
It was by this that Gessler approached the tree behind which Tell lay,
concealed, cross-bow in hand. The exact place of the tyrant’s death
is marked by a little chapel. A fresco in the porch depicts the scene
described by Schiller. The purple Alpine heather blossoms up to the
church-door, and maiden-hair ferns fringe the foundation walls. The
short, warm season in Switzerland is blessed by frequent and copious
showers; the face of the earth is freshly green and the herbage almost
as luxuriant as are the spring-crops of Italy. We drove a mile beyond
the chapel to Immensee, a hamlet upon Lake Zug. Lunch was spread for
us at a round table in the lakeside garden of a _café_. The Rigi rose
abruptly from the southern and narrower end of the blue sheet. Drifts
of gauzy haze were sailing slowly across the broad brow.
“Almost six thousand feet high!” remarked Prima, following the outlines
with thoughtful eyes, “And Zug is thirteen hundred feet deep. Lake Thun
fifteen hundred. One’s imagination needs Swiss training in order to
grasp such figures.”
The opposite heights were a much lower group, graceful in undulation
and form, and heavily wooded. To our right as we sat, was a barren
line, like a mountain-road, running sharply down the side of one of the
range.
“The Goldau Landslip!” We had heard of it almost as long and frequently
as of the Wyllie disaster in the White Mountains. In 1806, a strip of
the mountain, one thousand feet long and one hundred thick, slid, on a
September afternoon, at first slowly, then, with frightful velocity,
until it crashed, three thousand feet below, upon four peaceful
villages at the foot of the slope and into the Lake of Lowerz. To this
day, a solemn mass is said in the sister-village of Artli, upon the
anniversary of the calamity, for the souls of the four hundred-and-odd
men, women and children who perished in that one hour. Lowerz, forced
thus suddenly from its bed, reared, a tottering wall of waters, eighty
feet high, and fell backward upon islands and shores, bearing churches,
dwellings and trees before it. It is a mere pond now, a little over a
mile wide, and but fifty feet deep, the _débris_ of the slide having
settled in it. A peaceful eye of light, it reflected the quiet heavens
as we looked back upon it from the hill above Immensee, but the awful
track on which neither tree nor bush takes root, leads down into it.
Tell’s Platte—or “Leap”—is marked by a tiny chapel upon the extremest
water’s edge near Rütli. Its foundations are built into the rock upon
which the patriot sprang from Gessler’s boat. The present shrine
belongs probably to the sixteenth century, but the original chapel was
consecrated,—declare the annalists of the country, and the English
translator of Schiller,—when men who had seen and known Tell were alive
and present at the ceremony. An altar stands within the recess—it is
only that. The front is arched and pillared, and the steps are washed
by the wake of each passing steamer. A great Thanksgiving Mass for
Swiss liberty is performed here once in the year, attended by a vast
concourse of people in gaily-decorated boats. There is not room on the
shelving shore for a congregation.
Altorf is a clean Swiss village where the window-curtains are all
white, and most of the casements gay with flowers, and where the
children, clean, too, but generally bare-legged and bare-headed, turn
out in a body to gather around the strangers who stop to look at the
monument. A very undignified memorial it is of the valiant Liberator.
A big, burly plaster statue of the father, erected on the ground where
Tell stood to shoot at the apple, brandishes the reserved arrow in
the face of an imaginary bailiff. “With which I meant to kill you had
I hurt my son!” says the inscription on the pedestal. The lime-tree
to which the boy Albert was tied to be shot at was one hundred and
forty-seven measured paces away. A fountain is there now, adorned by
the statue of the magistrate who gave it to the town. Upon the sides of
a tower that antedates Tell’s day, are faded frescoes, commemorating
the apple-shot, his jump from the rocking boat and Gessler’s death.
The Swiss are not enthusiastic idealists. They believe—very much—in a
veritable Tell, preserve with jealous and reverential affection all
traces of his existence and national services.
Our first ascent of the Rigi was made in company with two of our
American “boys,” college-mates who had “run over” to pass a three
months’ vacation upon “the other side.” Letters announcing this
intention had been sent to us from home, and a later missive from
London, containing a copy of their “itinerary,” repeated the invitation
to join them at the steamboat landing in Lucerne, July 23d, 4.10 p.m.
for a sail up the lake and a night on the Rigi.
“But how very-very extror’nary! Quite American in point of fact!”
ejaculated an English lady, to whom I spoke at the lunch-table of our
intended excursion. “When you have heard nothing from them in three
weeks! They may have altered their plans entirely. You will not meet
them, you may be sure.”
I smiled confidently. “The engagement is of six weeks’ standing. They
will keep it, or we should have had a telegram.”
The steamboat touched at our side of the lake for passengers and I got
on there, while Caput, who had an errand in the town, walked around
by the iron bridge. I watched him cross it; noted what we had cause,
afterward, to recollect,—the white radiations from the stone pavement
that forms the flooring of the long causeway, and that the deck was hot
to my feet.
“The intensest sun-blaze I have ever felt!” he said, coming aboard at
the railway terminus. “Strangely sickening too! It made the brain reel!”
The train was puffing into the station. Among the earliest to step on
the gangway were two bronzed youths on whose beards no foreign razor
had fallen. Each carried a small satchel and had no other luggage or
_impedimenta_ incompatible with a quick “run.” New Yorkers going out to
Newark or Trenton to pass the night with friends would have evinced as
much sense of strangeness.
“We planned everything before sailing from home,” they said when we
commended their punctuality “Lucerne and the Rigi were written down for
to-day.”
They had never seen Lucerne before, but they had “studied it up” and
were at home on the lake so soon as they got the points of the compass
and we had swung loose from the pier. They would return with us to the
town on the morrow and spend a day in seeing it. Including the Lion,
of course, and the Glacial Garden and the old covered bridge with the
queer paintings of the Dance of Death. And hear the grand organ in the
Stifts-Kirche at vespers. The city-walls were better-preserved than
they had imagined they would be. The nine watch-towers—where were they?
They could count but six. They were on the lookout for the four arms
that make the lake cruciform and traced them before we could designate
them. Was that old tower in the rear of the handsome château over there
the famous Castle of Hapsburg? Pilatus they recognized at a glance, and
the different expression of his shore from the cheerful beauty of the
Lucerne side, the pleasant town and the rising background of groves and
fields, gardens and orchards. Vitznau? Were we there so soon? The sail
had been to the full as charming as they had anticipated.
All this was, as the English lady had said, “quite American.” To
us, used for many months to alternate _douches_ of British _nil
admirai-ism_ and hot baths of Italian and French exaggeration of
enthusiasm, the clear, methodical scheme of travel, the intelligent
appreciation of all that met the eye, the frank, yet not effusive
enjoyment of a holiday, well-earned and worthily-spent, were as
refreshing as a dipper of cool water from the homestead spring would
have been on that “blazing” day.
If we had never gone up the Mount Washington Railway, the ascent of
the Rigi would have been exciting. The cars are less comfortable
than those on the New Hampshire mountain, and the passengers all
ride up backward, for the better enjoyment of the view,—a miserable
arrangement for people of weak stomachs and heads. Mt. Washington had
been a thrilling terror that fascinated me as did ghost-stories in my
childhood. The Rigi is a series of gentle inclines with but one span
of trestle-work that could have scared the most indefatigably-timid
woman. But Mt. Washington offers no such prospect as was unfolded for
us in wider and more wondrous beauty with each minute. The sun was
setting when, instead of entering the Hotel Rigi-Kulm where our rooms
had been engaged by telegraph from Lucerne, we walked out upon the
plateau on which the house stands. Against the southwestern horizon
lay the Schreckhörner, Finsteraarhorn, and—fairest of “maidens,”—the
Jungfrau,—faint blushes flickering through the white veils they have
worn since the fall of the primeval snow. On the south-east the
Bristenstock, Windgelle, Ober-Alp, and a score of minor mounts, unknown
to us by name, caught and repeated the reflected fires of the sunset.
The air was perfectly still, and the distances so clear as to bring
out the lines of heights like penciled curves, that are seldom seen
even from an outlook embracing an area of three hundred miles. “Alps
on Alps!” Mountain rising behind and overtopping mountain, until the
sublime succession melted into the outlined curves just mentioned. In
the direction of Lucerne, stretched right beneath us what seemed a
level, checkered expanse of farms, groves and villages, lighted, once
in a while, by the gleam of a lake (we counted ten without stirring or
turning from where we stood) and intersected by an hundred streams. The
twilight was gathering upon the plain. When the light had died out from
lake and river, we stood in the sunshine, and the snow-summits were
deepening into crimson. The air was chill, but we lingered to show our
friends the “Alpen-glow,”—to us a daily-renewed and lovely mystery.
The lowlands were wrapped in night; the ruddied snows paled into
pink,—ashes-of-roses,—dead white. The West was pallid and still. The
day had waned and died, blankly and utterly. When, suddenly, from peak
to peak, glowed soft flame,—a flush of exquisite rose-color, quivering
like wind-blown fire, yet, lasting a whole minute by my watch, ere it
trembled again into dead whiteness. Another minute, and the phenomenon
recurred, but less vividly. It was a blush that rose and blenched as
with a breath slowly drawn and exhaled. One could not but fancy that
the white-breasted mountains heaved and fell with the glow in long
sighs, before sinking and darkening into slumber.
“It is really night now!” Caput broke the silence. “We will go in.
But it was worth staying to see, though one had witnessed the like a
thousand times.”
We came out again after an excellent dinner, but the wind had risen,
the night was piercingly cold, and we were driven into our beds. By
nine o’clock there was nowhere else to go. The lights were extinguished
in the _salon_ and main halls, and bed-room fires had not been thought
of. The only suggestion of comfort was in the single beds heaped higher
than they were broad with blankets and _duvets_. The window at the foot
of my couch was unshuttered. Sleep was slow in coming, while the wind
thundered like rock-beaten surf against the house, threatened to burst
the rattling casements.
I pulled another pillow under my head, and had a picture before me that
made me revel in wakefulness. The moon was up and near the full. The
horizon was girdled with effulgence, sparkling, chaste—inconceivable.
The valleys were gulfs of purple dusks; the forest-slopes black as
death. I could discern the glitter of granitic cliffs, and upon
inferior hills, the sheen of snow-banks left in sunless hollows. Had
my eyes been sealed, I should have pronounced it a tempestuous night.
Could I have closed my ears, the divinest calm had brooded upon the
world enclosed within the white mountains.
“The strength of the hills is His also!” The strength of these heights!
Serenity of power! The perfectness of Peace!
I did not mean to sleep. There would be other nights,—and days—if I
chose to take them—for that. But the bugle-call at half-past three
startled me from slumber in which moonlight and mountains were
forgotten as though they were not. The snow-tops were dimmer in the
dawn than they were under the high moon, the sky behind them dun and
sullen. Guests are forbidden by English, French and German placards to
“take the blankets from their beds.” The wisdom of the prohibition was
palpable to all who assembled upon the plateau to see the sun-rise.
The wind was still furious, the morning colder than the night, and, I
think, not ten people out of the forty or fifty shiverers present had
made a regular toilette. Ladies had thrown on double flannel wrappers,
and tied up their heads in hoods and scarfs. Gentlemen had donned
dressing-gowns, and some had come forth in slippered haste. All wore
cumbrous shawls, waterproof cloaks and railway rugs. One half-frozen
Frenchman was enveloped in a strip of bed-side carpet brought from his
chamber. A more serious annoyance than cold or gale, was the dust,
raised by the latter,—or more correctly speaking, minute grains of
attrite granite that offended eyes and nostrils. I had dressed snugly
and warmly, and tied a thick veil over my face and ears, but the wind
tore viciously at my wraps, and the pulverized particles sifted through
the net until I could scarcely breathe, even by turning my back upon
it, while my three cavaliers formed a close guard between me and the
hurricane. We could not forget discomfort, but we disregarded it when
we had cleared our eyes from the stinging sand.
The lower landscape was still in shadow, the mountains wrapped
in bluish-gray indistinctness. Presently, warm glows of color
suffused the dun vapors of the lower heavens,—saffron and rose and
carmine;—quivering arrows of amber light shot upward and outward
from an unseen center below the horizon verge,—and, one by one, as
beacons respond to the flash of the signal-fire, the loftiest tips of
Finsteraarhorn, Schreckhörner, Wetterhorn, the Monch, the Eiger—the
Jungfrau—flamed up above the mists. Floods of changeful lights rolled
down upon the lesser hills, revealing peak, chasm and valley; pouring,
finally, a benign deluge over the plain. It was not a swift, capricious
darting of rays hither and yon, but a gradual growth of the power
of the light into a fullness of occupation. The sun came in calm
stateliness out of his chamber in the east, and the world was awake.
Early as it was, women and boys were threading the crowd with
chamois-horn paper-cutters and knobby bunches of dirty Edelweiss and
Alpine roses for sale at Rigi-Kulm—(or tip-top) prices. An Englishman,
in an Indian-pattern dressing-gown, a smoking-cap bound over his ears
with a Madras handkerchief,—swore roughly at them collectively, and at
one poor hag in particular, as she offered the shabby bouquet.
“Picked but yesterday, milor’, from the edge of a glacier.
Milor’ knows—”with a ghastly smirk—“that the Edelweiss is the
betrothal-flower?”
He may have understood the wretched _patois_ of Swiss-German-French. He
probably comprehended nothing except that she wanted him to buy what
he styled, not inaptly—“filthy rubbish.” But he would have sworn as
vehemently in either case, for the wind had tangled him up badly in his
voluminous skirts, and while striving to disengage his calves with one
hand he held on to his cap—possibly to his peruke—with the other.
“Monsieur!” implored the woman, lifting the flowers to the face of that
one of “our boys” nearest me.
He shook his head with a smile,—being American, and a gentleman—gave a
look at her pinched visage and poor garments, and his hand moved toward
his pocket.
“I don’t want them, you know!” to me. “But—” another merciful glance.
“_Combien?_” I said to the woman.
She had, in my hearing, asked the Anglo-Indian to give her half a franc
for the bunch.
She now protested that the three Edelweiss were cheap at five sous
(cents) each, and the three Alpine roses should go as a bargain to “_le
beau Monsieur_” at three cents a piece.
“You are a cheat—and a very foolish one!” I said. To my young
friend—“American sympathy is a marketable commodity over here. Only, he
who gives it, pays in current coin her who receives it.”