Molly's spirits rose as the mercury in the barometer fell. "Would you care for people if they were always good-tempered, or weather if it were always fair?" she asked me (we were sitting together in the tonneau, Jack driving). "I revel in storms, and if we have one to-night, when we are on the Pass, one of the dearest wishes of my life will be gratified. 'A storm on the St. Gothard!' Haven't the words a thunder-roll? Sunlight and mountain passes don't belong together. I like to think of great Alpine roads as the fastnesses of giants, who threaten death to puny man when he ventures into their power." It had been arranged that we should "potter" (as Winston called it) round the arms of the star-fish lake, until we reached Flüelen; that from there we should steal as far as we dared up the Reussthal while daylight lasted, dine at some village inn, and then, instead of returning to the lowlands of Lucerne, make a dash across the mighty barrier that shut us away from Italy. Under a lowering sky, and buffeted by short, sharp gusts of wind, which seemed the heralds of fiercer blasts, we swung along the reedy shores of the narrowing lake, the broken sides of the Rigi standing finely up on our right hand. Winston was satirical about the poor Rigi and its railway, calling it the Primrose Hill and the Devil's Dyke of Switzerland, the paradise of trippers, a mountain whose sides are hidden under cataracts of beer-bottles; but from our point of view, the vulgarities of the maligned mountain were mellowed by distance, and I neither could nor would look upon it as contemptible. Leaving the Lake of the Forest Cantons, we spun along the margin of the tamer sheet of Zug, to pass, beyond Arth, into the great wilderness caused by the fearful landslide of a century ago, when a mighty mass of rock and earth split off from the main bulk of the Rossberg and thundered down into the valley. The slow processes of nature had done much to cover up decently all traces of the Titan's rage, but the huge, bare scar on the side of the Rossberg still told its tale of tragedy. By the peaceful Lowerzer See the road undulated pleasantly, and at Schwyz (the hub of Swiss history) we had tea, the torn and imposing pyramids of the two Myten bravely rearing their heads above the mists that encumbered the valleys.