SOME WALKS AROUND LUCERNE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3467, 24 August 1920, Page 54

SOME WALKS AROUND LUCERNE.

By Edith Searxe CtKossiiann.

From Lucerne excursion trams, trains, and steamboats continually hurry to and fro, crowded with tourists visiting some one or other of the celebrated spots in the neighbourhood. The great rivals for favour are the journey to the summit of the Rigi and that to the top of the snowcrowned Pilatus. These two mountains tower up like great monuments of nature, one or the other visible from every ledge or terrace of the foot range on which the town is built. The Rigi I once saw in May wheri cherry blossom whitened the steep mountain side up which the funicular ascends, but there was then little snow to be seen upon the' lofty plateau, and the great view over glittering lakes and streams and heights was in a few moments wrapt away. from sight by moving grey mists, which spread upward until they dissolved in a storm of rain about us. On my last visit the only excursion of any length which I undertook was that to the Burgenstock, a bold projecting point overhanging the western side of the lake. Leaving the steamer, one either ascends by the funicular or trios the more heroic plan of climbing the ascent by foot. Part of the way leads through woods hvith winding paths, but on reaching the shoulder of the hill one finds oneself in an open space of- rock and grass with an uninterrupted view of the distant town deep down below, the lake and the mountains farther north overtopped by the Rigi. The pathway here is hewn out of the living rock. Another stage in the funicular takes the traveller to a greater height, the Flammetschwand. From the summit here in clear light one can see not only the lesser mountains of rock and forest, but range above range, the very Alps themselves, even to the Bernese Oberland. The cornor of Lucerne where I last stayed, and that to which "my "astral body" would most desire to return, lies by the roadway that leads along the eastern side of the mountain below Drei Linden. The garden and the house cling to the hillside, looking down on the Lake and the opposite mountains rising from its edge, the' snow-tipped peaks reflected--in the water. On the other side of the road "are high upland meadows, with the rich luxuriance of Alpine pasture and the peculiar freshness and glow of Alpine green. Cattle are rarely to be seen there. Most of their days are spent shut up in the extensive cowsheds, and there they are fed on cut grass .and hay. They supply abundance of rich milk, but the custom of keep ;: - - them shut' up except at special time nd seasons is not what one would expect from a people so humane and advanced as the Swiss. Beyond the cowsheds are large shadowy trees almost like woodland, and then one comes upon a more open space yet still like a park or garden to a Calvary (the hill chapel, having the stations of the Cross' marked at intervals up its ascent). Instead of following the roadway in a more or less straight line, you might turn off it along the side of the upper meadow where here and there a lovely birch tree trembles with joy of the breeze through all its delicate 'branchlets and leaves. Then still upward to the plateau known as Drei Linden from three lime' trees. Though this is quite an easy walk the view is one of the finest to be got near Lucerne. One morning, instead of climbing so high, I followed the road deeper and deeper into the solitude of the mountain. The path skirted the remnant —or perhaps the outlying portion—of a forest of pine trees lofty and beautiful, they, too, having that indescribable glow and depth of tint that belongs to grass and flowers and trees alike in the Alpine world. , One cannot help thinking that they breathe in and give out a greater joy of life than their' fellow trees in the countries of plains and flats. In the middle of this pine forest, where the way dropped down a little into an enclosed valley, I was surprised to find a real Alpine village or collection of chalets, each with its steep, pointed roof and overhanging eaves, its living rooms above, and below its shed stored" with pine logs, shut in by wide wooden doors- like those of stables and barnyards, or else doorless. All the exterior was blackened with some preparation of pine tar. There was little or nothing about this village of the quaint, almost toylike, prettiness of the popular Swiss chalet, but here, solitary ins the midst of these fragrant green pine woods, it was extraordinarily suggestive, extraordinarily beautiful in its simplicity and its agreement with the scenes around. I guessed it to •be the homes of woodcutters. Chalets like these are, or were, the cummer homes of herdsmen who pastured their cattle in the surrounding meadows until autumn drove them townward.

There was another walk one night taken in the opposite direction from the pine forest—along a narrow green valley behind the town, and separated from it by a ridge, to the old graveyard (the "Friedhof"), a very quiet place not far from the upper reaches of a stream. One's ordinary path into town from the Pension was by a etoepish climb down to the Halden Strasse and the Quai National, along which the trams run. There, one fine but inconstant morning. I started on the wav to Krieno, a village a short way out of Lucerne in the west. From this village, or rather town, I wandered on into "another forest standing on a level and open valley and appearing to be much greater than that other forest up the mountain. Here for some little while I lost my wav, which rather added to the romance of the adventure. _ On trie verge of the woodland was a little rustic chapel to Our Lady, all solitary in the afternoon sunlight, amongst the trees. The door standing open, according to custom in Catholic countries, I entered, and sat down to rest. Then, leaving it again, I came presently into a small Alpine ■village. Chalets here were

much more of the conventional, or perhaps one should say of the typical Swiss style. In some the outside hand railing round the flight of steps leading to the balcony was alaborately carved, and so too, were the balcony railing and the eaves and the corners of the roof. The exterior was stained or died dark brown, but was gay with shutters painted green and with white casements and peeps of flowers and curtains inside. There were more chalets here than in the woodcutters' village. i Later in the afternoon, still in the pine woods, I saw a rougher chalet by itself, and, catching sight of a peasant woman there —one of those thick-set, stronglimbed daughters of the field one often meets amongst toilers of the open—l asked for a drink of milk. She took me through the ground floor, wlrere piles of pine logs were stored, and by a kind of wooden ladder up to .the floor above, a rough and rustic "interior," to an undraped room of wooden walls, where she gave me bread and milk. We failed, however, to keep up any conversation, and when her man came in. I heard her murmur to him that the stranger must have come "from another canton." However, I managed to get some sort of directions for my homeward way, and then went on, the forest and the air darkening around me in a twilight which was not the close of day but one of those swift changes that are common in the Alps. Past the borders of the woodland and orchai'ds - I came upon the first scattered houses of the little town. I never knew the name of that charming little village of chalets nor ever made out where that forest and its chapel are situated, but when I came back from them Kriens (or was it Stanstad?) and the streets of Lucerne looked ordinary and common places by the memory of them. I have made no attempt to describe the visions one gets from such points as Drei Linden or the Burgenstock of the higher Alpine world. Have not we New Zealanders the same visions in our own country —remote snow cities, dome "and pinnacle and celestial wall fairer than crystal and turquoise or flaming with gold and ruby and pearl at sunset? Even our north has its great white domes of Egmont and Ruapehu, while those who dwell on the plains of Canterbury have only to lift their eyes to see a prospect as beautiful as any visible from Lucerne or Berne. But we have not yet learned to appreciate the grandeur and loveliness of our own irealm of snow and ice offering inspiration even from far away and overwhelmingly majestic to the few pilgTims who actually enter it. Thousands of tourists stream into ' Switzerland every year not only from as far off as England and Russia, but from America and the British dominions, merely to catch sight of distant apparitions of the high Alps. But here in New Zealand people of the southern districts, living with as glorious a prospect continually before their eyes, will hardly give up an hour in the year to watching the glow of light, the play of sun and cloud, of sunrise and sunset, upon a scene quite as wonderful. Fewer still would walk a mile out of their way to look upon it from some.height or uninterrupted stretch of plain. Yet some of the very people who play the part of "No Eyes'"' in their own country long to travel in Switzerland.

Buskin, it is true, in. a well-known passage, says that it is the history of mankind woven into the landscape that thrilled him, and that without it the grandest scenery would have left him cold. Perhaps in the case of a few scholars this accounts for our own lack of indifference. But it is not historic interest that attracts the, great majority to Switzerland, though they may have that motive in journeying to Rome or Venice. They do not come to see the .home of. William Tell nor the spot where Winckelried fell, nor /even to admire, as Buskin did, .the mountaineers triumph over the might of nature. The human element may be the greater part of the .attraction,, but it acts in another way. The average travellers come to see landscape that-has been illuminated_ for them by innumerable poets, romanticists, and artists since the days of Bousseau, Byron, Schiller, Buskin himself, Meredith, Dickens, and a host of lesser writers., If we would use our own imagination we might find the lack of written history in New Zealand compensated amidst such manifestations of power as our Alps by this very mystery and silence. Bare of human records, our mountains appeal to us by themselves alone. Both in Switzerland and in New Zealand the real treasure and possession are the mountains themselves ; the difference is that in Switzerland the beautv and the glory and power have been made apparent even to those who cannot or will not use their own minds and see it for themselves. It would be useless to compare one snow realm with another. Switzerland has its flowering fields and gardens, -its pine forests, its blossoming orchards, it. 3 vineyards, its chalets, and its fragments of mediaeval art in the very midst of its rocky heights and at the feet of its snowcrowned peaks. New Zealand has close to pome of its glaciers and peaks a forest more fantastically beautiful and full of faerie enchantment, new fields of flowers, the lure of the untried, and the neighbourhood of the sea. In its more desolate tracts the very barreness of rock masses and moraines and river beds of stones adds to the overwhelming majesty of the scene. Those who have visited the Alps of New Zealand have seen the peers of the Swiss Alps. Those who, from the Canterbury Plains, have in their own hearts and minds caught the gleam and glorv of the far-off ranges, have known and felt as much as many a tourist travels a thousand miles to experience in Switzer land.