Chillon [antikvár]

HISTORICAL NOTICE CZ^Iiillon, probably the most picturesque and certainly one of the most interesting of the historical monuments in Switzerland, owes its worldwide notoriety chiefly to Byron's stirring poem The Prisoner of Chillón. Indeed, its debt to the poet is a heavy one, as heavy in proportion as that owed by Switzerland to Schiller. Now well into the second half of the century, the appeal "from tyranny to God" is almost universal, and thus the concluding words of the foregoing sonnet have special application at the present time. Here in the towers and chambers above ground and in dungeons below have passed scenes of the most revolting cruelty, some of the dumb witnesses of which are still standing in gruesome evidence; here within the ancient walls and battlements of the fortress have occurred events of war and of peace that might easily have inspired another poet with material for immortalising deeds of heroism, or perpetuating the scenes of splendour that took place in the sumptuously draped halls of the castle; here the sun shone in all its brightness and the waters of the lake rippled with the plash of many oars and reflected the gorgeous tints of pageantry when knighthood was in flower - here also the sun might well have clouded his rays in very shame to behold the evil that man did towards man, and surely the waves of the lake had often dashed vainly in screaming foam against the stout walls of the prison-house and drowned the despairing shriek of the tortured captive. Chillón has tales to tell of far greater grief and woe than Byron, with all his art, has ventured to portray, but which the grim parapets of this strange stronghold whisper in ghostly witness. The fortress of Chillón stands on a small rocky islet separated from the shore by a natural waterway but a few feet wide; on the other side toward the mountains of Savoy, the rock plunges down almost vertically to a great depth. To put it graphically, if the crescent basin which we call Lake Léman, or the Lake of Geneva, stretching from that town to Villeneuve, were drained of the water supplied to it by the Rhone, and if a beholder stood on the outer wall of Bonivard's prison and gazed into the depths at his feet, he would find himself standing on a pinnacle half as high again as the top of St. Paul's Cathedral from the ground; so deep are the waters that bathe the shore of Chillón. The present level of the water is more than four feet lower than it was in medieval times. The length of the rock is, roughly, 100 yards and the width 50 yards. The earliest history of Chillón is shrouded in the dim perspective of the past. Traces of glacial débris and boulder originating from the Haut-