After the boys had looked at this pillar, and at the iron ring, and at the place worn in the floor by the footsteps of the prisoner, as long as they wished, they followed the guide on to the end of the dungeon, where they were stopped by the solid rock. Here the guide brought them to a dark and gloomy place in a corner, where, by standing a little back, they could see all the pillars in a row; and he said that if they would count them they would find that there were exactly seven. The boys did so, and they found that there were seven; but they did not understand why the number was of any importance. But the teacher explained it to them. He said that Byron had mentioned seven as the number of the pillars in his poem, and that most people who had read the poem were pleased to observe the correspondence between his description and the reality.
The teacher quoted the lines. They were these:—
"In Chillon's dungeons, deep and old,
There are seven columns, massy and gray,
Dim with a dull, imprisoned ray—
A sunbeam that hath lost its way,
And through the crevice and the cleft
Of the thick wall is fallen and left
Creeping o'er the floor so damp,
Like a marsh's meteor lamp."
In repeating these lines, the teacher spoke in a strong foreign accent. All the boys listened attentively while he spoke, though of course only Rollo and those of the boys who had studied English could understand him.
After this the boys came back through the whole range of dungeons, by the same way that they had come in. They could now see the beam from which the condemned criminals were hung. It passed across from rock to rock, high above their heads, in a dark and gloomy place, and seemed perfectly black with age.
When the party came out of the dungeons, a young woman took them in charge, to show them the apartments above. She conducted them up a broad flight of stone stairs to a massive doorway, which led to the principal story of the castle. Here the boys passed through one after another of several large halls, which were formerly used for various purposes when the castle was inhabited, but are employed now for the storage of brass cannons, and of ammunition belonging to the Swiss government. When the castle was built, the country in which it stands belonged to a neighboring state, called Savoy; and it was the Duke of Savoy, who was a sort of king, that built it, and it was he that confined the prisoners in it so cruelly. Many of them were confined there on account of being accused of conspiring against his government. At length, however, the war broke out between Switzerland and Savoy, and the Swiss were victorious. They besieged this castle by an army on the land and by a fleet of galleys on the lake, and in due time they took it. They let all the prisoners which they found confined there go free, and since then they have used the castle as a place of storage for arms and ammunition.
One of the halls which the boys went into, the guide said, used to be a senate house, and another was the court room where the prisoners were tried. There was a staircase which led from the court room down to the dungeon below, where the great black beam was, from which they were to be hung.
The boys, however, did not pay a great deal of attention to what the guide said about the former uses of these rooms. They seemed to be much more interested in the purposes that they were now serving, and so went about examining very eagerly the great brass cannons and the ammunition wagons that stood in them.
At length, however, they came to something which specially attracted their attention. It was a small room, which the guide said was an ancient torturing room. There was a large wooden post in the centre of the room, extending from the floor to the vault above. The post was worn and blackened by time and decay, and there were various hooks, and staples, and pulleys attached to it at different heights, which the guide said were used for securing the prisoners to the post, when they were to be tortured. The post itself was burned in many places, as if by hot irons.