“There are about two hundred mines in all, with five hundred and forty pits: in all the mines together there are some four thousand eight hundred hands, men and boys. This mine occupies nine hundred of them.”
“And your pay?”
“One dollar a week is a good wage with us.”
One dollar is about three shillings of English money! This seems small pay, even in cheap Saxony.
“But,” we pursue our inquiries, “you have no short time, and are pensioned?—at least, so says our Fahrschein.”
“We are paid our wages during sickness, and are never out of work. When we can no longer use the pick, nor climb these staircases, we can retire upon our pension of eight silver groschens a week.”
Tenpence! Magnificent independence! This is digging for silver with a vengeance.
But we are faint with fatigue; and, bidding adieu to the two miners, we gladly agree to our guide’s suggestion of ascending to the happy daylight. Our way is still the same; although we mount by another shaft, most appropriately named Himmelfahrt—the path of heaven; but we clamber up the same steep steps; feel our way along the same slimy walls, and occasionally drive our hats over our eyes against the same low, dripping roof. With scarcely a dry thread about us; our hair matted and dripping; beads of perspiration streaming down our faces, we reach the top at last; and thank Heaven, that after two hours’ absence deep down among those terrible “diggins,” we are permitted once more to feel the bracing air, and to look upon the glorious light of day.
Our labours, however are not over. Distant rather more than an English mile from Himmelsfürst are the extensive amalgamation works, the smelting furnaces and refining ovens. Painfully fatigued
as we are, we cannot resist the temptation of paying them a brief visit. The road is dusty and desolate; nor are the works themselves either striking or attractive. An irregular mass of sheds, brick buildings, and tall chimneys, present themselves. As we approach them we come upon a “sludge hole”—the bed of a stream running from the dredging and jigging works; where, by the agency of water, the ore is relieved of its earthy and other waste matter, and the stream of water—allowed to run off in separate channels—deposits, as it flows, the smaller particles washed away in the first process. These are all carefully collected, and the veriest atom of silver or lead extracted. It is only the coarser ores that undergo this process; the richer deposits being pulverised and smelted with white or charred wood and fluxes, without the application of water, and refined by amalgamation with quicksilver. The two metals are afterwards separated by distilling off the latter.