The next day I visited the celebrated salt-mines at Wielitska. They lie about, twelve miles from Cracow, in the province of Galicia, a part of the kingdom of Poland, which, on the unrighteous partition of that country, fell to the share of Austria. Although at so short a distance, it was necessary to go through all the passport formalities requisite on a departure for a foreign country. I took a fiacre and rode to the different bureaux of the city police, and, having procured the permission of the municipal authorities to leave the little territory of Cracow, rode next to the Austrian consul, who thereupon, and in consideration of one dollar to him in hand paid, was graciously pleased to permit me to enter the dominions of his master the Emperor of Austria. It was also necessary to have an order from the director of the mines to the superintendent; and furnished with this I again mounted my fiacre, rattled through the principal street, and in a few minutes crossed the Vistula. At the end of the bridge an Austrian soldier stopped me for my passport, a douanier examined my carriage for articles subject to duty, and, these functionaries being satisfied, in about two hours from the time at which I began my preparations I was fairly on my way.
Leaving the Vistula, I entered a pretty, undulating, and well-cultivated country, and saw at a distance a high dark line, marking the range of the Carpathian mountains. It was a long time since I had seen anything that looked like a mountain. From the Black Sea the whole of my journey had been over an immense plain, and I hailed the wild range of the Carpathian as I would the spire of a church, as an evidence of the approach to regions of civilization.
In an hour and a half I arrived at the town of Wielitska, containing about three thousand inhabitants, and standing, as it were, on the roof of the immense subterraneous excavations. The houses are built of wood, and the first thing that struck me was the almost entire absence of men in the streets, the whole male population being employed in the mines, and then at work below. I rode to the office of the superintendent, and presented my letter, and was received with great civility of manner but his Polish was perfectly unintelligible. A smutty-faced operative, just out of the mines, accosted me in Latin, and I exchanged a few shots with him, but hauled off on the appearance of a man whom the superintendent had sent for to act as my guide; an old soldier who had served in the campaigns of Napoleon, and, as he said, become an amateur and proficient in fighting and French. He was dressed in miner's costume, fanciful, and embroidered with gold, holding in his hand a steel axe; and, having arrayed me in a long white frock, conducted me to a wooden building covering the shaft which forms the principal entrance to the mine. This shaft is ten feet square, and descends perpendicularly more than two hundred feet into the bowels of the earth. We arranged ourselves in canvass seats, and several of the miners, who were waiting to descend, attached themselves to seats at the end of the ropes, with lamps in their hands, about eight or ten feet below us.
When my feet left the brink of the shaft I felt, for a moment, as if suspended over the portal of a bottomless pit; and as my head descended below the surface, the rope, winding and tapering to a thread, seemed letting me down to the realms of Pluto. But in a few moments we touched bottom. From within a short distance of the surface, the shaft is cut through a solid rock of salt, and from the bottom passages almost innumerable are cut in every direction through the same bed. We were furnished with guides, who went before us bearing torches, and I followed through the whole labyrinth of passages, forming the largest excavations in Europe, peopled with upward of two thousand souls, and giving a complete idea of a subterraneous world. These mines are known to have been worked upward of six hundred years, being mentioned in the Polish annals as early as twelve hundred and thirty-seven, under Boleslaus the Chaste, and then not as a new discovery, but how much earlier they had existed cannot now be ascertained. The tradition is, that a sister of St. Casimir, having lost a gold ring, prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of Cracow, and was advised in a dream that, by digging in such a place, she would find a treasure far greater than that she had lost, and within the place indicated these mines were discovered.
Salt-mines of Wielitska.
There are four different stories or ranges of apartments; the whole length of the excavations is more than six thousand feet, or three quarters of an hour's walk, and the greatest breadth more than two thousand feet; and there are so many turnings and windings that my guide told me, though I hardly think it possible, that the whole length of all the passages cut through this bed of salt amounts to more than three hundred miles. Many of the chambers are of immense size. Some are supported by timber, others by vast pillars of salt; several are without any support in the middle, and of vast dimensions, perhaps eighty feet high, and so long and broad as almost to appear a boundless subterraneous cavern. In one of the largest is a lake covering nearly the whole area. When the King of Saxony visited this place in eighteen hundred and ten, after taking possession of his moiety of the mines as Duke of Warsaw, this portion of them was brilliantly illuminated; and a band of music, floating on the lake, made the roof echo with patriotic airs. We crossed the lake in a flatboat by a rope, the dim light of torches, and the hollow sound of our voices, giving a lively idea of a passage across the Styx; and we had a scene which might have entitled us to a welcome from the prince of the infernals, for our torch-bearers quarrelled, and in a scuffle that came near carrying us all with them, one was tumbled into the lake. Our Charon caught him, and, without stopping to take him in, hurried across, and as soon as we landed beat them both unmercifully.
From this we entered an immense cavern, in which several hundred men were working with pickaxes and hatchets, cutting out large blocks of salt, and trimming them to suit the size of barrels. With their black faces begrimed with dust and smoke, they looked by the light of the scattered torches like the journeymen of Beelzebub, the prince of darkness, preparing for some great blow-up, or like the spirits of the damned condemned to toil without end. My guide called up a party, who disengaged with their pickaxes a large block of salt from its native bed, and in a few minutes cut and trimmed it to fit the barrels in which they are packed. All doubts as to their being creatures of our upper world were removed by the eagerness with which they accepted the money I gave them; and it will be satisfactory to the advocates of that currency to know that paper money passes readily in these lower regions.
There are more than a thousand chambers or halls, most of which have been abandoned and shut up. In one is a collection of fanciful things, such as rings, books, crosses, &c., cut in the rock-salt. Most of the principal chambers had some name printed over them, as the "Archduke," "Carolina," &c. Whenever it was necessary, my guides went ahead and stationed themselves in some conspicuous place, lighting up the dark caverns with the blaze of their torches, and, after allowing me a sufficient time, struck their flambeaux against the wall, and millions of sparks flashed and floated around and filled the chamber. In one place, at the end of a long, dark passage, a door was thrown open, and I was ushered suddenly into a spacious ballroom lighted with torches; and directly in front, at the head of the room, was a transparency with coloured lights, in the centre of which were the words "Excelso hospiti," "To the illustrious guest," which I took to myself, though I believe the greeting was intended for the same royal person for whom the lake chamber was illuminated. Lights were ingeniously arranged around the room, and at the foot, about twenty feet above my head, was a large orchestra. On the occasion referred to a splendid ball was given in this room; the roof echoed with the sound of music; and nobles and princely ladies flirted and coquetted the same as above ground; and it is said that the splendid dresses of a numerous company, and the blaze of light from the chandeliers reflected upon the surface of the rock-salt, produced an effect of inconceivable brilliancy. My chandeliers were worse than Allan M'Aulay's strapping Highlanders with their pine torches, being dirty, ragged, smutty-faced rascals, who threw the light in streaks across the hall. I am always willing to believe fanciful stories; and if my guide had thrown in a handsome young princess as part of the welcome to the "Excelso hospiti," I would have subscribed to anything he said; but, in the absence of a consideration, I refused to tax my imagination up to the point he wished. Perhaps the most interesting chamber of all is the chapel dedicated to that Saint Anthony who brought about the discovery of these mines. It is supposed to be more than four hundred years old. The columns, with their ornamented capitals, the arches, the images of the Saviour, the Virgin and saints, the altar and the pulpit, with all their decorations, and the figures of two priests represented at prayers before the shrine of the patron saint, are all carved out of the rock-salt, and to this day grand mass is regularly celebrated in the chapel once every year.
Following my guide through all the different passages and chambers, and constantly meeting miners and seeing squads of men at work, I descended by regular stairs cut in the salt, but in some places worn away and replaced by wood or stone, to the lowest gallery, which is nearly a thousand feet below the surface of the earth. I was then a rather veteran traveller, but up to this time it had been my business to move quietly on the surface of the earth, or, when infected with the soaring spirit of other travellers, to climb to the top of some lofty tower or loftier cathedral; and I had fulfilled one of the duties of a visiter to the eternal city by perching myself within the great ball of St. Peter's; but here I was far deeper under the earth than I had ever been above it; and at the greatest depth from which the human voice ever rose, I sat down on a lump of salt and soliloquized,