The Lake of Lucerne

by Joseph E. Morris

THE GUTSCH, FROM LUCERNE.

There is just one other spot in Lucerne which ought not to be neglected, and this, though sufficiently far removed from Death in his merely antic aspect—from the Death of "graves, of worms, and epitaphs"—has also to do with Death in his nobler guise, for it is the monument of the twenty-six Swiss officers, and seven hundred and sixty Swiss Guards, who fell in defending the Tuileries and their King on August 10, 1792. "Honour to you, brave men," writes Carlyle, "honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it." The monument is fitly a lion, and was hewn out by Lukas Ahorn of Constance, after the model of Thorwaldsen, from a face of living rock; he is pierced by a broken lance and already at point of death, one paw hangs forward limp and helpless, but the other, with claws outstretched, still clutches and guards the Bourbon lilies—a monument of faithfulness to death. The attitude and face of the great lion, "having the most touching expression of broken strength, subdued pain, and courageous self-surrender," are both very grandly conceived. It is sad indeed that the rock itself, though the sculpture is boarded up to protect it from winter frosts, is badly cracked in more than one direction. Closely adjacent to this fine monument, and certainly worth a visit, is the very curious Gletscher Garten, with its wonderful "pot-holes," or "glacier-mills," some of which retain their "mill-stones" still in situ.

IV

Looking eastward from the quays or the lake at Lucerne across the shining expanses of water to the great background of snow-clad Alps—visualizing those Alps in memory as we sit later on at home, by the side of a winter fire—most of us have probably an impression only of a very lovely, and very magnificent, but also very vague and inchoate, huddle of confused and indefinite hills. The highest peak seen at Lucerne from the Schweizerhof Quay is apparently the Tödi (11,887 feet), supreme at the point, or very nearly at the point, where Uri, Glarus, and the Grisons meet, and next to this in actual dignity is perhaps the snowy Titlis (10,627 feet), which rises above Engelberg, and also belongs, like the Tödi, to a bunch of three converging cantons—in this case Uri, Unterwalden, and Berne. Yet these two giants, with their groups of attendant satellites, are so remote from the margin of the lake itself, and so lost amidst the company of their hardly less magnificent peers, that they strike one on the whole with less impress of overwhelming individuality—associate themselves on the whole less easily with our necessarily blurred and imperfect recollections of the Vierwaldstättersee when the lake itself is no longer seen—than two other striking hills of far less elevation, and in one case of far less noble outline, that yet rear themselves more immediately from the exact levels of the lake, and that stand more or less aloof, in conspicuous isolation, not merely from one another, but from the general confraternity of hills. Wordsworth reminds us in an admirable sonnet how

"Pelion and Ossa flourished side by side,
Together in immortal books enrolled"—

yet surely not Pelion and Ossa (I have never seen them) dominate Thessaly more insistently, or confront one another with more marked and divergent character across the intervening valley, than Swiss Rigi and Pilatus confront one another across the blue spaces of the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, or dominate its waters from the exact margin of its shores!

OLD HOUSES AND BRIDGE AT LUCERNE

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.