The line reaches from Lake Luzern in Switzerland to Lake Maggiore in Italy, one hundred and eight miles. One hundred and twenty thousand feet of this is tunneled through mountains of granite. The longest tunnel in the series is 48,936 feet. Few of the smaller tunnels are less than 7,000 feet long. It was thought one hundred and eighty-seven million francs would pay for it, but two hundred and eighty-nine millions are now required. It is the usual blundering in figures that comes with most public enterprises. This particular blundering has bankrupted thousands of innocent people who have bought shares. The extra money is now raised, however, and the awful barrier of granite peaks and fields of snow and ice, between Italy and Switzerland, is to be overcome by skill of man. There was no road over the Gothard for five hundred years, and not until a century ago was a vehicle of any kind ever seen up there. Even now, the wagon road is one of great peril, as I have myself experienced, a whole sledge load of us once barely missing being overwhelmed by an avalanche that fell a hundred feet ahead of us. There were granite boulders in that slide of snow, big as our horses, and the thing fell without a warning, and with a crash that was stupendous. Many lives have been lost in this pass; half the year, even now, it is abandoned entirely to the winds that howl among its mountains of desolation. The tunnel was not quite finished when I was there. The boring machines inside are worked by compressed air, furnished by enormous air compressors outside. These also force air in for ventilation. They compress air also for the peculiar locomotives that are moved by air, not steam. My guide and I got on the front platform of one of these air engines, and were shot into the tunnel for miles through a black cloud of smoke and gas that I thought would kill me, or cause me to fall off the engine. It was Cimmerian darkness. The engineer said: “You shall now see a glimpse of the bowels of hell.” I saw nothing for miles, and then suddenly we came to the weird lights, the big air machines boring into the granite walls, and the half-naked workmen. It was a gruesome picture in there, with the yellow lights, the racket of the machines, and the occasional explosion of dynamite. The water in places burst from the rocks in streams as big as my arm, and with force enough to knock the workmen from their feet. At one spot, the torrent broke through fine crevices, at the rate of four thousand gallons a minute. A special canal was made under the railroad tracks, to carry this river of water out of the tunnel.