On the wooded heights above the town of Cintra, north of Lisbon, stands Pena Castle. From it one gets an amazing panoramic picture of the Tagus and surrounding country. While many Portuguese castles are in ruins, this one, owned by the government and formerly used by the royal family, is kept in excellent repair. Moors regarding the possible circumnavigation of Africa, which had been accomplished by Phoenician adventurers about 600 B. C., and attempted by the Carthaginian Admiral Hanno, sailing south from the Strait of Gibraltar, at a later period. By 1460, when Prince Henry died at Sagres, his enthusiasm and guiding hand had sent the Portuguese flag down 1,500 miles of the West African coast. I have seen Prince Henry's portrait in an old manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris-an earnest, intelligent face, clean-shaven save for the wide-brimmed black hat portrayed by Dutch painters of that period. Affonso Henriques, Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Camoëns are the four biggest names in Portuguese history. Affonso Henriques was the George Washington of his country; Camoëns was the singer of the days of Portugal's maritime glory, Vasco da Gama the sung; but it was Prince Henry who blew life into the sails. So I thought as I stood at nightfall on the bold Sagres headland, looking up at the star-lit blue of the heavens and down A Tiny Principality Which the Visitor May Encompass in a Single View Affords Adventurous Climbs Among Steep Pastures and Quaint Villages BY MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS AUTHOR OF "CZECHOSLOVAKIA, THE KEY-LAND TO CENTRAL EUROPE," "LATVIA, HOME OF THE LETTS," "THE I With Illustrations from Photographs by the Author F YOU are a map traveler, Liechtenstein-bound, follow the castled Rhine, skirt the Black Forest to Basel, swing east past the Falls to the shed at Friedrichshafen, where Uncle Sam's Zeppelin, the Los Angeles, was built, and you are on the Lake of Constance, or Bodensee, shared by Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. Turn south for 20 miles up the broad valley between Switzerland and Austria and you reach the northern tip of the Principality of Liechtenstein, which for the next 15 miles looks west across the Rhine. To reach Liechtenstein in person requires self-discipline. One must leave Paris and Switzerland behind and stop short of Vienna and Budapest. Forego an evening in Paris, be aboard the Budapest sleeper just before 9 and before lunch time you will arrive at Buchs. In the station the Babel of tongues was being systematized by linguistic hybrids who translated confusion into sense. Yet the queue stopped so long that the express snorted impatiently. Then we moved on. "My word!" ejaculated the man in front of me. "It was a Dutchman trying to talk Esperanto to the booking clerk." "You people don't care to learn new languages," objected another Esperanto delegate, still aggressively enthusiastic after a Zurich convention in favor of a common medium of expression. "But here in Central Europe we do.” * We rolled across an imposing canal, passed over the Rhine, and, after two miles, stopped. *See, also, "The Battle-Line of Languages in Central Europe,” by A. L. Guerard, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for February, 1923. "No one gets out here," proclaimed the conductor. He was misinformed. I saw my trunk outside, noticed the name "Schaan-Vaduz" on the station, salvaged my suitcase and camera, and dropped from the moving train into Liechtenstein. To the right the narrow plain between mile-high mountains and the Rhine stretched away toward Sargans, off the south tip of the Lilliputian land. To the left was the "low country." The express had tossed me off at the division line between Schellenberg and Vaduz, once separate units, and fiefs of the Roman Empire. One who thinks of the Principality as a part of the Swiss Customs Union expects this small mountain-side State to be west of the Rhine, leaning against St. Gallen instead of hanging to the shoulder of Vorarlberg. But political changes hurdle a river easier than mile-high mountains do. Until 1919, free Liechtenstein was economically allied to Austria. The "K. K.," denoting Kaiser and King, on the Schaan post office, though partly obliterated, is still visible. Here the Rhine is no romantic river for deep-water sailors, with a prima donna mermaid parading her tresses before bobbed-haired tourists. It is a shallow, stony torrent bed, now dry in spots, now foaming with the force of Alpine glaciers. Man has taken the river in hand, overcome its meandering habits, and confined it between prosaic, though curving, banks.* Between the Rhine and the sway-back ridge of Liechtenstein is a narrow plain * See, also, "Rediscovering the Rhine: A Trip by Barge from the Sea to the Headwaters of Europe's Storied Stream," by Melville Chater, in the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE for July, 1925. perched above its nest and looking at the eggs between its feet. To the right of the castle the bottlegreen forest, veiling the faces of halfdomes upon whose tops are pleasant plateaus, merges into the broken pattern of the rolling Triesenberg, whose chalet groups dot a parklike region between barren terminal mountains. Below is Triesen, from whose one factory chimney Ruhr coal smokes when winter ties up the otherwise inexhaustible water power. ANOTHER PLACE OUR The mowing-machine blade between Schaan and Vaduz edged a spinningmill roof. The Triesen smokestack rises above the looms of an allied weaving mill equipped with the latest apparatus for humidifying the atmosphere-a seemingly superfluous device on the rainy day I was there. The raw cotton comes from America. The cloth is sold in Budapest. The 300 weavers come from the valley towns and down from the Triesenberg. A SKETCH MAP OF LIECHTENSTEIN devoted to hay, corn, and grain, with orchards here and there, stately poplars marking some roads and vineyards on the gentler slopes. At the place where it curls up to cliff and mountain meadow, a road, split into a Y by the Schellenberg, unites the valley towns from Ruggell and Schaanwald to Klein Mels. Schaan, with 1,400 inhabitants, is at the focus of the three branches and the short international road to Buchs. Its chief landmark is a sharp-spired church whose architect borrowed inspiration from the needles of rock above it. To the right the mowing-machine blade of a saw-tooth factory roof cuts the green of pine and beech. Farther south is the capital, with the old château, founded on These two major dots on the landscape indicate most of the country's industrial life. The flour and sawmills, for the most part, are homely affairs which add unobtrusiveness to genuine service. South of Triesen there is little evidence of man's works. At Balzers a large memorial church and a rock mass surmounted by Burg Gutenberg, never captured, but now used as a hotel, are dwarfed by the Mittagspitze and the Falknis, and are almost lost in the broadened plain whence a the foot of the Swiss Fläscherberg, which balances the Schellenberg, is Klein Mels. The small cluster of homes is merged into a green plain cut by a white road leading to the Klein Mels-Trübbach bridge, one of the four covered wooden structures which furnish communication with Switzerland across the man-tamed Rhine. To the left, or north of us, the arms of the Y confine a wide triangle of level, marshy land, with three small groups of houses spaced across its farther edge. Above them rises the Schellenberg, a low, rolling hill dwarfed by flanking mountains. Above Schaan towers a wild rock face, scarred and torn by time's shrapnel. Closing in the southern. end of the landscape is the Falknis group, almost as rugged. Between the 7,000-foot Kühgratspitze and 8,420-foot Falknis the country's backbone dips to a scant 5,000 A BUDDING MEMBER OF THE UNOFFICIAL SECRET SERVICE So neighborly a place is the Principality of Liechtenstein, with its 11,000 people, that official bulletins are mere gossip sheets, and a chummy youngster can learn more about a casual visitor than the metropolitan police of larger places do from a printed questionnaire. feet, so that one can look across this saddle to the Naafkopf, whose 8.441 feet, shared with Austria and Switzerland, marks the highest of a dozen or so more-than-milehigh peaks in this pygmy Principality. At the sag in the ridge the cross-country road saves a few feet of height by means of a short tunnel joining the populous Triesenberg with the deserted slopes of the Samina Valley. In summer one walks through this dripping tube from the hush of hayfields to the sound of grazing cattle swaying melodious bells. The Samina Valley, narrow, thickly wooded for the most part, and lightened at its bottom by a silver-green, impetuous river, cannot be seen from the Swiss slope where we stand, but as we include in our view the heights beyond it, we can safely be said to command the entire country in one glance. RIVALS MONACO FOR INCLUSIVE VIEW Probably no other state except Monaco has been seen in its entirety by so many people. Neither Andorra nor San Marino is so advantageously placed. Every visitor to the Swiss society resorts of Davos and St. Moritz could look the length of the Principality from Sargans before his train turns south away from Liechtenstein. The traveler to the Lake of Constance |