24 DRAGONS 



the least chance of war with neighbouring tribes. To pre- 

 pare for battle, like Eagnar, they jumped into water, and 

 then rolled themselves in the dust until their bodies were 

 covered with it ; then they allowed the sun, which, of 

 course, is always very powerful in Africa, to bake it into 

 a sort of cake or mud-pie crust, which formed the first 

 layer of defensive armour ; when that was sufficiently 

 dry and hard they repeated the process, not once or 

 twice only, but again and again, until they thought their 

 coat of mail, if we may so call it, strong enough to be 

 proof against the arrows of the enemy. 



A very worthy writer, who .lived about 1600, has told 

 us that he quite believes in the reality of winged dragons. 

 After giving us some wonderful stories about them, he 

 remarks that ' from these and similar tales we can easily 

 see that what we find in other authors about winged 

 dragons is all true.' 



Switzerland, especially that part of it round about 

 the Lake of Lucerne, was famous for these creatures. 

 There is opposite to the town of Lucerne a mountain, 

 called Pilatus, from the tradition that Pontius Pilate, 

 when banished by the Eoman Emperor Tiberius, 

 wandered there, and threw himself into a black lake at 

 the summit. His ghost is supposed to haunt the place ; 

 once a year it appears, clothed in robes of office, and 

 whoever is unlucky enough to see it, will die before the 

 year is out. Mount Pilatus often has on a cap of clouds, 

 and it is said that the weather will be fine, or the reverse, 

 according as Pilatus has his cap off or on. We may well 

 imagine it, therefore, to be a wild, eerie sort of place, in 

 every way suitable for dragons to take up their abode. 

 Our old author then tells us that a peasant one morning 

 was mowing hay; he looked up, and at that moment 

 there issued from Pilatus a huge dragon, which flew 

 across the lake to a mountain on the other side. In its 

 flight there dropped from it something which the peasant 

 could not clearly distinguish, for he was too frightened 



