Rollo in Geneva Part 14

There was a man there, dressed in the uniform of a soldier. He was a sort of sentinel, to keep the door of the castle. He had a table on one side, with various engravings spread out upon it, representing different views of the castle, both of the interior and of the exterior.

There were also little books of description, giving an account of the castle and of its history, and copies of Byron's poem, the Prisoner of Chillon. All these things were for sale to the visitors who should come to see the castle.

The engravings were kept from being blown away by the wind by means of little stone paper weights made of rounded pebble stones, about as large as the palm of the hand, with views of the castle and of the surrounding scenery painted on them. The paper weights were for sale too.

The boys looked at these things a moment, but did not seem to pay much attention to them. They walked on, following their teacher, to the end of the bridge room, where they came to the great castle gates. These were open, too, and they went in. They found themselves in a paved courtyard, with towers, and battlements, and lofty walls all around them. There was a man there, waiting to receive them in charge, and show them into the dungeons.

He led the way through a door, and thence down a flight of stone steps to a series of subterranean chambers, which were very dimly lighted by little windows opening towards the lake. The back sides of the rooms consisted of the living rock; the front sides were formed of the castle wall that bordered the lake.

"Here is the room," said the guide, "where the prisoners who were condemned to death in the castle in former times spent the last night before their execution. That stone was the bed where they had to lie."

So saying, the guide pointed to a broad, smooth, and sloping surface of rock, which was formed by the ledge on the back side of the dungeon. The stone was part of the solid ledge, and was surrounded with ragged crags, just as they had been left by the excavators in making the dungeon; but whether the smooth and sloping surface of this particular portion of the rock was natural or artificial, that is, whether it had been expressly made so to form a bed for the poor condemned criminal, or whether the rock had accidentally broken into that form by means of some natural fissure, and so had been appropriated by the governor of the castle to that use, the boys could not determine.

The guide led the boys a little farther on, to a place where there was a dark recess, and pointing up towards the ceiling, he said,--

"There is where the criminals were hung. Up where I point there is a beam built into the rock; and from that the rope was suspended."

The boys all crowded round the spot, and looked eagerly up, but they could not see any beam.

"You cannot see it," said the guide, "now, because you have just come out from the light of day. We shall come back this way pretty soon, and then you will be able to see it; for your eyes will then get accustomed a little to the darkness of the dungeon."

So the guide went on, and the boys followed him.

They next came into a very large apartment. The front side and the back side of it were both curved. The back side consisted of the living rock.

The front side was formed of the outer castle wall, which was built on the rock at the very margin of the water. In the centre was a range of seven ma.s.sive stone columns, placed there to support the arches on which rested the floor of the princ.i.p.al story of the castle above. The roof of this dungeon of course was vaulted, the arches and groins being carried over from this range of central pillars towards the wall in front, and towards the solid rock behind. All this you will plainly see represented in the engraving.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DUNGEON IN THE CASTLE OF CHILLON.]

This great dungeon was lighted by means of very small loopholes cut in the wall, high up from the floor. The light from these windows, instead of coming _down_, and shining upon the floor, seemed to go _up_, and to lose itself in a faint attempt to illuminate the vaulted roof above. The reason was, that at the particular hour when the boys made their visit, the beams of the sun which shone directly from it in the sky were excluded, and only those that were reflected upward from the waters of the lake could come in.

The guide led the boys to one of the central pillars, and pointed to an iron ring which was built into the stone. He told them that there was the place where one prisoner was confined in the dungeon for six years.

He was chained to that ring by a short chain, which enabled him only to walk to and fro a few steps each way about the pillar. These steps had worn a place in the rock.

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, ma.s.sy 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive doorway, which led to the princ.i.p.al story of the castle. Here the boys pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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.

The boys saw another place in a room beyond, which was in some respects still more dreadful than this. It was a place where there was an opening in the floor, near the wall of the room, that looked like a trap door. There was the beginning of a stone stair leading down. A small railing was built round the opening, as if to keep people from falling in. The boys all crowded round the railing, and looked down.

They saw that the stair only went down three steps, and then it came to a sudden end, and all below was a dark and dismal pit, which seemed bottomless. On looking more intently, however, they could at length see a glimmer of light, and hear the rippling of the waves of the lake, at a great depth below. The guide said that this was one of the _oubliettes_, that is, a place where men could be destroyed secretly, and in such a manner that no one should ever know what became of them. They were conducted to this door, and directed to go down. It was dark, so that they could only see the first steps of the stair. They would suppose, however, that the stair was continued, and that it would lead them down to some room, where they were to go. So they would walk on carefully, feeling for the steps of the stair; but after the third there would be no more, and they would fall down to a great depth on ragged rocks, and be killed. To make it certain that they would be killed by the fall, there were sharp blades, like the ends of scythes, fixed in the rock, far below, to cut them in pieces as they fell.

It seems these tyrants, hateful and merciless as they were, did not wish, or perhaps did not dare, to destroy the souls as well as the bodies of their victims, and so they contrived it that the last act which the poor wretch should perform before going down into this dreadful pit should be an act of devotion. To this end there was made a little niche in the wall, just over the trap door, and there was placed there an image of the Virgin Mary, who is worshipped in Catholic countries as divine. The prisoner was invited to kiss this image as he pa.s.sed by, just as he began to descend the stair. Thus the very last moment of his life would be spent in performing an act of devotion, and thus, as they supposed, his soul would be saved. What a strange combination is this of superst.i.tion and tyranny!

After seeing all these things, the boys returned towards the entrance of the castle. They met several parties of ladies and gentlemen coming in; and just as they got to the door again, the carriage containing Mr. and Mrs. Holiday drove up. So Rollo bade the teacher and all the boys good by, after accompanying them a few minutes, as they walked along the road towards the place where they were to go. By this time his father and mother had descended from their carriage, and were ready to go in. So Rollo joined them, and went through the castle again, and saw all the places a second time.

When they came out, and were getting into the carriage, Mr. Holiday said that it was a very interesting place.

"Yes," said Mrs. Holiday; "and we have seen all that Byron speaks of in his poem, except the little island. Where is the little island?"

Mr. Holiday pointed out over the water of the lake, where a group of three tall trees seemed to be growing directly out of the water, only that there was a little wall around them below. They looked like three flowers growing in a flower pot set in the water.

"Yes," said Mrs. Holiday, "that must certainly be it. It corresponds exactly." So she repeated the following lines from Byron's poem, which describes the island in the language of one of the prisoners, who saw it from his dungeon window,

"And then there was a little isle, Which in my very face did smile-- The only one in view; A small green isle, it seemed no more, Scarce broader than my dungeon floor; But in it there were three tall trees, And o'er it blew the mountain breeze, And by it there were waters flowing, And on it there were young flowers growing, Of gentle breath and hue."

"That's pretty poetry," said Rollo.

"Very pretty indeed," said his father.

The horse now began to trot along the road. The little island continued in view for a while, and then disappeared, and afterwards came into view again, as the road went turning and winding around, following the indentations of the sh.o.r.e.

At length, after a short but very pleasant ride, the party arrived safely at the inn again at Villeneuve.

CHAPTER XIII.

PLAN FORMED.

The reason why the Lake of Geneva is of a crescent form is, that that is the shape of the s.p.a.ce in the bottom of the valley which it fills. There are two ranges of mountains running in a curved direction almost parallel to each other, and the s.p.a.ce between them, for a certain distance, is filled with water, owing to the spreading out of the waters of the Rhone in flowing through. Thus the lake is produced by the valley, and takes its form from it.

The valley does not come to an end when you reach the head of the lake, but continues for more than a hundred miles beyond, the two mountain ranges continuing to border it all that distance, and the River Rhone to flow through the centre of it. Thus at Villeneuve you look in one direction, and you have a winding valley filled with water, extending for fifty miles, to Geneva; while in the other direction, the same valley--though now the floor of it is a green and fertile plain--continues, with the same stupendous walls of mountain bordering the sides of it, for a hundred miles or more, to the sources of the Rhone.

There is another thing that is very curious in respect to this valley, and that is, that the floor of it is as flat, and smooth, and level, almost, where it is formed of land, as where it is formed of water.

Geologists suppose that the reason why the bottom of the valley, when it consists of land, is so perfectly level, is because the land has been formed by deposits from the river, in the course of a long succession of ages. Of course the river could never build the land any higher, in any part, than it rises itself in the highest inundations. Indeed, land formed by river deposits is almost always nearly level, and the surface of it is but little raised above the ordinary level of the stream, and never above that of the highest inundations.

It must, however, by no means be supposed that because the surface of the valley above the head of the lake is flat and level, that it is on that account monotonous and uninteresting. Indeed, it is quite the reverse. It forms one of the richest and most enchanting landscapes that can be conceived. It is abundantly shaded with trees, some planted in avenues along the roadside, some bearing fruit in orchards and gardens, and some standing in picturesque groups about the houses, or in pretty groves by the margin of the fields. The land is laid out in a very charming manner, in gardens, orchards, meadows, and fields of corn and grain, with no fences to separate them either from each other or from the road; so that in walking along the public highway you seem to walk in one of the broad alleys of an immense and most beautiful garden.

Besides all these beauties of the scene itself, the pleasure of walking through it is greatly increased by the number and variety of groups and figures of peasant girls and boys, and women and men, that you meet coming along the road, or see working in the fields, all dressed in the pretty Swiss costume, and each performing some curious operation, which is either in itself, or in the manner of performing it, entirely different from what is seen in any other land.

Rollo followed the main road leading up the valley a little way one evening, while his father and mother were at Villeneuve, in order, as he said, to see where the diligences went to. He was so much pleased with what he saw that he went back to the hotel, and began studying the guide book, in order to find how far it was to the next town, and what objects of interest there were to be seen on the way. He was so well satisfied with the result of his investigations that he resolved to propose to his father and mother to make a pedestrian excursion up the valley.