THE SEVEN TOWERS, LOOKING OVER LUCERNE FROM THE GUTSCH.
So far the realm of legend. The realm of actual history is scarcely less astonishing, and attaches itself to legend by imperceptible ties. It is history that the city of Lucerne in the Middle Ages did actually prohibit the ascent of the mysterious hill: it is history that six priests in 1307 were condemned to several months of imprisonment for daring to visit the forbidden lake. The legend of the pact with the travelling scholar had at least one important variant, for it was believed that by throwing a stone into the pool the spirit could be at any time provoked, and his evil influence set free to work havoc on lake and fell. It was to avert this constant menace at the hands of audacity, or scepticism, that the city fathers promulgated the law by which access to the hill was prohibited. It was only with the Renaissance, and with the birth of the new spirit of rationalism, that the old beliefs became untenable, and that the old terrors were rendered empty—as Gareth cleaves the helm of the silent terror that
"Names himself the Night and oftener Death,"
and reveals inside "the bright face of a blooming boy." The terrors were already grown more than a little threadbare when Conrad Gesner, the naturalist, ascended the mountain in 1555; they must nearly have vanished altogether in another thirty years, when the Curé of Lucerne, "before a crowd of witnesses, flung stones and rubbish into the lake without raising anything more than a ripple." At the bottom, however, of all these wild stories there is a substratum of truth, for Pilatus is really a great brewer of storms, and the peasants of the neighbourhood still prognosticate the weather from the disposition of the clouds upon its summit. Thus Roseberry Topping, in Cleveland, or what greedy iron-masters have left of it, was supposed as long ago as the time of Camden to foretell the coming storm:
"If Roseberry Topping wears a cap
Let Cleveland then beware of a clap."
Roseberry and Pilatus are in other respects curiously analogous; each is of a typically peaked appearance; and each is situated on the extreme edge of the hill group to which it belongs. Pilatus, it may be noted, is now ascended by a railway, and thus heaps of "unappreciative trippers" are now lightly conveyed every fine summer day to the once weirdly mysterious summit, to which the medieval climber won only surreptitiously, and perhaps in awe and terror. It is surely the anti-climax of unromantic common sense.
The Rigi, which confronts Pilatus across the lake in such startling dissimilarity, is perhaps the most popular hill in Europe, and is certainly in a sense the most vulgar. It is bad enough that a hill should be desecrated by a single mountain railway: it is intolerable that it should be degraded by three! How many people ascend to the Rigi Kulm on a day of tolerable weather in August from either Vitznau or Arth-Goldau one would hardly dare to guess; how many are housed at night in one or other of the monster hotels—at Rigi Kulm, at Rigi Kaltbad, at Rigi Staffel, at Rigi Scheidegg—that oppress and burden its weary summits is a matter not to be dwelt on. This is not the place to attempt a dissertation on the quæstio vexata of mountain railways. To the writer (who is prejudiced) the thing seems axiomatic: all that goes to make up mountain grandeur, all that is of the spirit,
"Of eye and ear—both what they half create,
And what perceive"—
all that renders a mountain a mountain, as opposed to a mere elevated mass of matter—
"Of stratified rock
Inclined at an angle of xty degrees"—