The brine that pours with an equable flow into the seething pan at Ebensee, is brought by wooden troughs from the salt mine at Hallein, a distance of thirty miles in a direct line. It comes by way of mountains and along a portion of the valley of the Traun, through which we continued our journey the same evening from Ebensee, until the darkness compelled us to rest for the night at a small inn on a hill side. The next day we went through Ischl and Wolfgang, and spent three hours of afternoon in climbing up the Scharfberg, which is more than a thousand feet higher than Snowdon, to see the sunset and the sunrise. There was sleeping accommodation on the top: so there is on the top of Snowdon. On the Scharfberg we had a hay-litter in a wooden shed, and ate goat’s cheese and bread and butter. We saw neither sunset nor sunrise, but had a night of wind and rain, and came down in the morning through white mist within a rugged gully ploughed up by the rain, to get a wholesome breakfast at St. Gilgen on the lake. More I need not say about the journey than that, on the fifth day after leaving Ebensee, having rested a little in the very beautiful city of Salzburg, we marched into the town of Hallein, at the foot of the Dürrnberg, the famous salt mountain, called Tumal by old chroniclers,
and known for a salt mountain seven hundred and thirty years ago.
After a night’s rest in the town, we were astir by five o’clock in the morning, and went forward on our visit to the mines. In the case of the Dürrnberg salt mine, as I have already said, the miner enters at the top and comes out at the bottom. Our first business, therefore, was to walk up the mountain, the approach to which is by a long slope of about four English miles.
We met few miners by the way, and noticed in them few peculiarities of manners or costume. The national dress about these regions is a sort of cross between the Swiss Alpine costume and a common peasant dress of the lowlands. We saw indications of the sugar-loafed hat; jackets were worn almost by all, with knee-breeches and coloured leggings. The clothing was always neat and sound, and the clothed bodies looked reasonably healthy, except that they had all remarkably pale faces. The miners did not seem bodily to suffer from their occupation.
As we approached the summit of the Dürrnberg, the dry brownish limestone showed its bare front to the morning sun. We entered the offices, partly contained in the rock, and applied for admission into the dominion of the gnomes. Our arrival was quite in the nick of time, for we had not to be kept waiting, as we happened to complete the party of twelve, without which the guides do not start. It was a Tower of London business; and, as at the Tower, the demand upon our purses was not very heavy. One gulden-schein—about tenpence—is the regulated fee. Our full titles having been duly put down in the register, each of us was furnished with a miner’s costume, and, so habited, off we set.
We started from a point that is called the Obersteinberghauptstollen; our guides only having candles, one in advance, the other in the rear.
We were sensible of a pleasant coldness in the air when we had gone a little way into the sloping tunnel. The tunnel was lofty, wide, and dry. Having walked downwards on a gentle decline for a distance of nearly three thousand feet through the half gloom and among the echoes, we arrived at the mouth of the first shaft, named Freudenberg. The method of descent is called the “Rolle.” It is both simple and efficacious. Down the steep slope of the shaft, and at an angle, in this case, of forty-one and a half degrees, runs a smooth railway consisting of two pieces of timber, each of about the
thickness of a scaffold pole; they are twelve inches apart, and run together down the shaft like two sides of a thick ladder without the intervening rounds. Following the directions and example of the foremost guide, we sat astride, one behind the other, on this wooden tramway, and slid very comfortably to the bottom. The shaft itself was only of the width necessary to allow room for our passage. In this way we descended to the next chamber in the mountain, at a depth of a hundred and forty feet (perpendicular) from the top of the long slide.
We then stood in a low-roofed chamber, small enough to be lighted throughout by the dusky glare of our two candles. The walls and roof sparkled with brown and purple colours, showing the unworked stratum of rock-salt. We stood then at the head of the Untersteinberghauptstulm, and after a glance back at the narrow slit in the solid limestone through which we had just descended, we pursued our way along a narrow gallery of irregular level for a further distance of six hundred and sixty feet. A second shaft there opened us a passage into the deeper regions of the mine. With a boyish pleasure we all seated ourselves again upon a “Rolle”—this time upon the Johann-Jacob-berg-rolle, which is laid at an angle of forty-five and a half degrees—and away we slipped to the next level, which is at the perpendicular depth of another couple of hundred feet.
We alighted in another chamber where our candles made the same half gloom, with their ruddy glare into the darkness, and where there was the same sombre glittering upon the walls and ceiling. We pursued our track along a devious cutting, haunted by confused and giant shadows, suddenly passing black cavernous sideways that startled us as we came upon them, and I began to expect mummies, for I thought myself for one minute within an old Egyptian catacomb. After traversing a further distance of two thousand seven hundred feet we halted at the top of the third slide, the Königsrolle. That shot us fifty-four feet deeper into the heart of the mountain. We had become quite expert at our exercise, and had left off considering, amid all these descents and traverses, what might be our real position in the bowels of the earth. Perhaps we might get down to Aladdin’s garden and find trees loaded with emerald and ruby fruits. It was quite possible, for there was something very cabalistic, very strong of enchantment in the word Konhauserankehrschachtricht, the name given to the portion of the