In this enclosure there are, perhaps, twenty of them, varying in depth from thirty to fifty feet, and about the same distance across.
Tibbitts believed they were artificial, and said he should dig a few for his Hotel and Ruin Company, but he is entirely mistaken. The glacier mills are genuine and the same forces are at work to-day under every ice-field, and doing the work precisely as this was done. However, there is no reason why he should not manufacture a few—tourists would take them just the same, and be just as well satisfied. He claims that with nitro-glycerine he can do in five hours the work that requires centuries to accomplish with water and rock, which demonstrates the supremacy of mind over matter.
Mont Pilatus, just out of Lucerne, is something you must see whether you want to or not. It isn’t a very remarkable mountain, but the astute hotel keeper and the more rapacious hackman, has made it necessary for you to spend more money than you want to, by seeing Mont Pilatus. It is a proper mountain to see, nothing extraordinary, as a mountain, but you are compelled to go anyhow, and you do. And this is why you go.
PONTIUS PILATE.
There has to be a legend for every point of sufficient interest to attract a traveler, and so Pilatus has its legend. You are told gravely that after Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the blood of our Savior, and saw him go to his death, instead of saving him as he might have done, he was struck with remorse, returned to Rome, and pursued by a feeling which he could not get rid of, made his way to this mountain in Switzerland, and lived in a cave therein, a recluse, expiating by a life of solitude the crime he had been guilty of in shedding innocent blood.
And they show you gravely and without a blush, a pond in the top of the mountain, where, after he became an old man, he ended the life that was a burden to him, by drowning himself therein, and they tell you of the earthquakes and things of unpleasant nature that followed his demise. The Arch Enemy of mankind was on hand in person to seize him, and when he had struck the water he was taken bodily by His Satanic Majesty and whisked away to the lower regions.
