|
Magazine
Painted bridges and a dragon mountain
HUGH and COLLEEN GANTZER
A view from Pilatus ... a lonely church at the edge of a cliff.
WE came to Lucern, in a hi-tech Swissrail train, in quest of a dragon. But first, we strolled around this beautiful old, lake-centered, traders' city.
Some of the little squares, we visited today, still carry their bazaar names like the Kommarkt. We had crossed into the old part of town on the covered, wooden, bridge named after corn waste. Back in the 15th Century, when the enterprising millers of Lucern had diverted part of the swift-flowing Reuss River to power their watermills, they used to dump their chaff into the river from this bridge: Spreurbrucke is, literally, the "Chaff Bridge". Hanging from its rafters are paintings depicting the Dance of Death, grim reminders that no one is immortal. This was, probably, necessary in an age when the rich often felt that they were more than human.
The burghers of Lucern were rich but, in those days, the chasm between the rich and the poor was enormous. The Swiss became, in effect, the Gurkhas of Europe and the legendary Swiss Guards were reputed for their unflinching loyalty to their masters.
We strolled up a steep street, where wild ducks quacked for food outside a shop, and into a quiet garden. There, on the other side of a pool, was a huge sculpture of a dying lion cut into a cliff. It commemorates the heroic sacrifice of 26 officers and 700 soldiers, of the Guards, who gave up their lives defending Louis XVI of France, and his family, from the Revolutionaries in 1792.
We crossed over to left bank of the Reuss again, walking through the most photographed bridge in Switzerland, possibly in Europe: the famed Kapellbrucke, or Chapel Bridge, built in the 13th Century. Sadly, many of its 111 paintings, of saints and the history of the town, were destroyed in a fire in August 1993. The bridge has been restored; its stone water tower which was once a torture chamber, still rises at its far end, but the restoration of the paintings has not been very successful. There's been a colour-shift giving them a rather livid hue as if they had all been bruised in a fight for survival.
Happily, the Baroque church of St. Xavier, on the other side, has not been touched by time. This 17th Century church, with a superb Rococo interior dating back to the 18th Century, reminded us of some of the World Heritage churches in Goa. That was an age when churches rivalled opera houses in the grandeur of their interiors: suitable settings for the great religious ceremonials of our faith.
The lights have twinkled on in Lucern, spread below us, lancing golden shafts into the lake. Tomorrow we'll cross lake and soar up to Mount Pilatus where, we have been assured, dragons once lived. It should be an exciting encounter.
* * *
It was; even though we didn't meet a dragon. And now we're back in our castle-hotel, Chateau Gutsch, reliving an exhilarating day.
We really should have spent more time in the Swiss Transport Museum: one of the largest in the world. Hordes of excited children clustered around the working model of a mountain railway system with trains criss-crossing with intricate precision. In the darkened I MAX theatre, with its enormously high and wide screen, we sped down from the Andes and through the Amazon on a mystical quest for healing herbs. Then we soared 170 metres above Lucern on a tethered, hot-air, balloon. There, up in the blue Swiss sky, we met Chidambaram, whose father had worked with The Hindu, his wife Chitra, and their daughters Preeti and Priyankar.
We left the museum, cruised across the lake with vacationers from all over the world, disembarked at Alpnachstad, and walked, past holidaying cyclists, to the Pilatus rail station. The red dragon of Pilatus emblazoned on the hillside and the funicular cars waited at an impossible angle on the sloping track. Because of the angle, we were canted back in our seats rather like being in an aircraft when it makes a steep ascent. Except that the whole of this trip is a steep ascent! And all the while, the thud-clack! of the cog wheels locking onto the toothed track reassured us that we could not slip back.
We needed that reassurance. We crawled up through steep pine forests, along sheer cliffs, through tunnels, clung to the edges of precipices with the mountains falling away to deep valleys. At one point we spotted a determined couple, far, far, below, an infant strapped to the man's back, striding along a narrow ribbon of a path that would have made a goat dizzy. And then, to our great relief, we docked in the gaping maw of the terminal station on Mount Pilatus.
We had climbed 2,000 metres along a 4.27 km track in just 40 minutes.
The wind blew sharp on Pilatus, shredding roiling clouds over the valley of Lucern into veils of cold mist and a persistent drizzle. We strode along a corridor cut into the face of a cliff, sombre with illustrations of the tales of the dragons: of the magical stone they had dropped on the city, a panacea for all ills; of them nurturing a man who had fallen into their den; of the way they returned their inadvertent guest to the city borne on their leathery wings...
There, on those cold and rocky windswept heights, the legends seemed very real. And they certainly lured tourists into the restaurants, natural history museum, and conference rooms of this high place. We stood at a window cut into the cliff and looked down. The mountains fell away in brown and green and blue; a lonely white church sat at the edge of a cliff like a ladybird perched precariously on a green leaf.
At sunset, very reluctantly, we caught a three-stage cable car and swooped down into the valley.
And, as we wrote this in our room in the castle, a shadow moved across the stars above, swiftly. And something whopped in the distance. It must have been a cloud, of course. And a Swissrail locomotive. Of course, of course. Medieval dragons and the hi-tech Swissrail cannot co-exist in the lonely mountains, can they? Or can they?
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
