The Salt Mines

[bevin]

I stumbled across this while researching something -

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1850Wieliczka.html

Just an brief extract...

Quote:

I cannot follow, step by step, our journey of two hours through the labyrinths of this wonderful mine. It is a bewildering maze of galleries, grand halls, staircases, and vaulted chambers, where one soon loses all sensc of distance or direction, and drifts along blindly in the wake of his conductor. Everything was solid salt except where great piers of hewn logs had been built up to support some threatening roof, or vast chasm, left in quarrying, had been bridged across. As we descended to lower regions, the air became more dry and agreeable, and the saline wall more pure and brilliant. One hall, 108 feet in height, resembled a Greek theater, the traces of blocks taken out in regular layers representing the seats for the spectators. Out of this single hall 1,000,000 hundredweight of salt had been taken, or enough to supply the 40,000,000 inhabitants of Austria for one year.

[Amelia]

I liked this part...

Quote:

When we had reached the upper galleries, we decided to ascend to daylight by means of the windlass. The Prussian party went first, and the ladies were not a little alarmed at finding themselves seated in rope slings, only supported by a band under the arms. All five swung together in a heap; the ladies screamed and would have loosened themselves, but that moment the windlass began to move, and up they went, dangling, towards the little star of daylight, two hundred feet above. Under them hung one of the boys, to steady the whirling mass, and the little scamp amused himself; by swinging his lamp, cracking his heels together, and rattling his stick along the sides of the shaft. When our turn came, I found, in spite of myself, that such pastime was not calculated to steady my nerves. The sound of the stick was very much like that of snapping ropes, and my brain swam a little at finding my feet dangling over what seemed a bottomless abyss of darkness.