THE BERNESE ALPS FROM MOUNT PILATUS
not also the bazaars full of Brummagem trinkets and what not?—strange, mysterious effect of Alpine air upon the human system!
From the Rigi it is well to turn to Mount Pilatus. The experience will be in but small measure a repetition; for Pilatus has marked individuality. Although Alpnachstad, the starting-point of the Pilatus Railway, is one of the few places on the Lake which may be reached by rail from Lucerne, not many people, I imagine, avail themselves of this means of transit. To take the train, as being quicker than the steamboat, is a false economy; in Switzerland less haste means wider experience and finer views. The tree-clothed cliff of the Bürgenstock is never seen to greater advantage than when the boat heads for Kehrsiten, after leaving Kastanienbaum (where, by the way, it is said that the first horse-chestnut trees on the Lake were planted); nor is Pilatus ever more picturesque than when seen from the quay-side at Stansstad. But more than this—for those who invariably see dignity and beauty in man’s labours, and who think that “ugliness means failure of some kind”—there is, from Kehrsiten, an admirable view of the open ironwork shaft of the electric lift which decorates the lovely Hammetschwand; and after passing the swing bridge which gives entrance to the Alpnacher-See, there are the Cement Works of Rotzloch, where the gorge, the trees, the whole hillside are as though dressed for some bal poudre—even the piermaster.
It was in late October when I was last upon Pilatus. Fog ruled the roast about Lucerne; a fog so dense, though white, that the steamboats moved with the utmost caution, feeling their way as much by incessant interchange of bell-signals with the shore as by the compass. That the beech woods were ablaze with autumn’s waning energy was known, but little besides grey, ghostlike objects could be seen as the train started with a jerk upon its strenuous journey. Nor was there anything but fog and phantoms for some twenty minutes or more. Then slowly the fog lightened, the phantoms took on the form of trees, grew warmer in tint, still warmer and still clearer, until the golden, red-brown woods, purpled in part by distance, became revealed, all wreathed about with trails of veil-like mist. Before the lower, rock-strewn pastures of the Matt-Alp were reached, every vestige of the fog was left lying compact below, and the train was labouring upwards towards a radiant, cloudless sky. The Alps, of course, are rich in such experience as this, but I can remember nothing that ever more nearly realized my conception of fairyland. Indeed, if it were not like saying that a lovely hothouse orchid is so natural as to seem to be made of wax, I would declare that the piercing of the fogzone that day on the autumn-tinted sides of Mt. Pilatus resembled nothing so much as the grand transformation scene of our Christmas-time theatres, when gauze veil after gauze veil is slowly rolled away, and from grey, then tinted mystery emerges brilliant, spotless colour.
What a wonderful journey this railway provides! If any proof were needed of the high eminence of Swiss engineers and of the indomitable spirit and resource which the Alps breed in their children, here assuredly it is. Beasts, plants, birds, and insects are not alone to feel the influence of Alpine circumstance upon character; hare and saxifrage, ptarmigan and fritillary are not the only pupils trained in Nature’s Alpine school. Man, in common with the chamois and the edelweiss, the eagle and the erebia, owes priceless capacity to the life imposed by high-flung precipice and pasture. Nursed in all the rigour and beneficence accompanying contact with high altitudes, he develops much of that amazing efficiency, that impelling adaptiveness which is so admired in “Alpines”. The will to master the worst and to enjoy the best is never more alert than in the dweller among mountains. And this fact is borne in upon the imagination as the train climbs panting up the face of the Eselwand, in every way the culminating labour of its journey. Here the track has been carved upon a sheer precipice, and it makes one dizzy to think of the workmen’s initial efforts to gain a foothold. Some idea of the resource and nerve that must have been required can be gathered by standing upon the Kulm Station platform and turning to gaze down the way the train came up; or, better still, on the rocks beyond the hotel and facing the Esel’s fearsome cliff to which the line so desperately clings; for from this vantage-ground the Titlis and the Alps of Uri, Unterwalden, and the Grisons rise beyond and between the Esel and the Matthorn, giving terrible depth to the gaunt masses of these latter, and thus suggesting the magnitude of the task performed by the railway builders.
A large part of the superiority of Pilatus over the Rigi lies in its magnificent foreground: invaluable adjunct to the panorama. A vast, unbroken horizon is well for a time, but it is all of a piece, and its very immensity becomes wearisome. Humanity is more at home with partially hidden views. To have everything simultaneously discovered is, for many subtle but important reasons, to impose a limit upon interest. A certain amount of interruption gives durability to pleasure. Delightful combinations are present, and the eye can rest reposefully upon portions which in themselves are perfect pictures. In this manner, then, Pilatus is more attractive than either the Rigi or the Stanserhorn. The panorama itself may be much the same from all three of these eminences, but from Pilatus it is enhanced by the mighty foreground. All about the summit are wild, weird places of fascination, and this was particularly so during those late autumnal days, with the dense, billowy sea of fog below, covering the whole Lake, stretching away over the plain towards the Jura, straggling up the valleys towards Engelberg and the Brünig Pass, and leaving such prominences as the Rigi, the Bürgenstock, and the Stanserhorn like islands floating on a scarcely moving ocean. The huge, abrupt escarpments of Pilatus looked the more impressive for the purple shadows which they threw upon this milk-white sea; and the choughs, circling and whistling about the crags, lent just that eerie note which has been so fruitful of legend in the past.
For fiery dragons once had their lairs upon these heights. Renward Cysart, town clerk of Lucerne in the sixteenth century, says so; and he tells of how they were often seen flying backwards and forwards between Pilatus and the Rigi. One day, he avers, a cooper from Lucerne, while climbing Pilatus, missed his footing, fell into a cavern, and on coming to his senses, found himself confronted with “two large, terrible, and monstrous dragons”, which, however, did him no harm, but allowed him to live with them until the return of summer, when he, clinging to the tail of one of his delightful hosts, was landed in a safe place, from whence he reached home and recounted his adventure, which recountal was handed down through several generations until it came to Master Cysart who, therefore, vouches for its accuracy, though regretting “that the day, year, and name have, through carelessness, passed into forgetfulness”. Dragons were common objects of the Alps in those and previous days. The country between Stans and Kernwald (well seen from Pilatus) was ravaged, about the year 1240, by an enormous specimen, which was slain by one Winkelried, an ancestor of the hero of Sempach. Legend usually has relative truth at the back of it, and although we may feel inclined to dismiss dragons and their doings as unalloyed fabrications of primitive, superstitious minds, yet certain authorities hold that the dragon was a species of enormous serpent formerly inhabiting some parts of the Alps, but now extinct there.
Pilatus is said to obtain its name from what is perhaps the most important of the host of legends connected with the mountain. Although there has been an attempt to derive Pilatus from pileatus, meaning “hatted” (in reference to the “hat” or hood of cloud which so frequently sits upon the summit), the more probable derivation seems to be from the one-time belief that Pontius Pilate’s remains were buried in a lake near the summit of the mountain. According to this legend, Pontius Pilate committed