Attitudes toward Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 462

Pardon me for not writing. I have been on the Mount of Jove [the Roman name
for the Great St. Bernard Pass]; on the one hand looking up to the heavens of
the mountains, on the other shuddering at the hell of the valleys, feeling myself
so much nearer heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard.
“Lord,” I said, “restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them, that they come
not into this place of torment.” Place of torment, indeed, where the marble pave-
ment of the stony ground is ice alone, and you cannot set your foot safely; where,
strange to say, although it is so slippery that you cannot stand, the death (into
which there is every facility for a fall) is certain death, (COOLIDGE 1889: 8-9)
Tales of monsters and supernatural perils added to the fears of travelers and moun-
tain dwellers. King Peter III of Aragon (b. 1236) set out to prove it was possible to climb
Pic Canig (2,785 m, 9,135 ft), then believed to be the highest peak in the Pyrenees. Rest-
ing by a small lake near the summit, he absently threw a stone into the water. Suddenly,
“a horrible dragon of enormous size came out of it, and began to fly about in the air, and
to darken the air with its breath.” The full account may be found in Gribble's The Early
Mountaineers (1899).
Perhaps the most famous legend is that of Mount Pilatus (2,129 m, 6,985 ft) in the
Swiss Alps. As the story goes, Caesar was angry with Pilate for crucifying Jesus, so he
had Pilate brought to Rome to be put to death. His body was tied to a stone and dropped
into the Tiber River, where it caused a great turmoil. The body was therefore retrieved,
and was eventually placed in a small lake on Mount Pilatus, in the Swiss territory of Lu-
cerne. From that time on, if anybody shouted or threw a stone into the lake, Pilate would
avenge himself by stirring up a great tempest. He also rose from the water on each
Good Friday and sat on a nearby rock; if anybody saw him, that person would surely die.
So great was their fear of the tempests he might cause that the government of Lucerne
forbade anybody to approach the lake; in 1387, six men who broke this regulation were
imprisoned (Coolidge 1889).
An excellent collection of these beliefs is contained in Johann Jacob Scheuchzer's It-
inera per Helvetia Alpinas regionses, published in 1723. Scheuchzer, a professor at the
University of Zurich, was a highly respected botanist who was credited with being the
first to attempt to formulate a theory of glacier formation and movement (Gribble 1899).
He had a penchant for the extraordinary, however, and firmly believed that dragons
lived in mountains. His topic is a mixture of the real and unreal, containing many ac-
counts of sightings of these creatures, with several illustrations of the various dragon
forms.
Belief in dragons had almost died out before the time of Scheuchzer, however. In
1518, four scholars climbed Mount Pilatus and visited the lake with no ill effects and,
in 1555, Conrad Gesner, a professor of medicine at the University of Zurich, climbed
the mountain by special permission of the Lucerne Magistrates, to prove that there was
nothing to fear. Only 30 years later, a group of villagers, led by the pastor of Lucerne,
climbed to the lake, threw stones, and defiantly mocked the spirit of Pilate, chanting
“Pilat, wirf aus dein kathl” (“Pilate, cast out your crud!”) (Gribble 1899: 46-50).
It is probably fair to say that many medieval Europeans who had any acquaintance
with mountains feared them or, at the very least, would have considered it a waste of
time to climb to the top of one, but there were exceptions. In 1336, the poet Petrarch