A Tramp's Wallet Part 16

"But I was determined to be revenged. When my time was expired, I sallied forth with my mind fully made up as to what I was to do. I knew the hour when my brother, in pursuance of his duties, usually entered the magistrate's office, and, attired as I was-look at me! just as I am now-in this old coat, the souvenir of the 'Indigent,' and these free-and-easy slippers, I waited at the great entrance of the Magistracy, to pay my respects to my brother, the Rath.

"I saw him coming; and, as soon as he reached the foot of the flight of stone steps, I marched forward, gave him a mock salute, and exclaimed, in a loud voice,

"'Good morning, brother!'

"'What is the meaning of this?' demanded he.

"'Look here, brother!' said I, 'look at this coat, and these shoes.'

"'Remove this fellow!' exclaimed he to the police, who were standing at his heels.

"I knew what would be the result, but had determined to have the play out. So I drew off my slipper, and, thrusting my hand right through the hole at the toe, I made a bit of play with my fingers, and shouted in his ear:

"'Look at this, brother. Are you not ashamed to see me? Look here!

Look at this kripple-gespiel (puppet show)! Look!'

"Of course I was laid hold of; and here I am for another two months, for insulting a city functionary."

This story was received with a glee only equalled by the gusto with which it was related. The last expression, "kripple-gespiel," was peculiarly his own.

Before leaving Vienna, about a month after my release, I had determined to see the Bruhl, a wild, wooded, and mountainous district, at a short distance from the city. We had spent a delightful day among its thick pine woods, and on its towering heights, and in the evening made our way to the small town of Modling, where we intended to take the railway to Vienna. But there was a grand fete in the pleasure grounds close to the town, accompanied by a magnificent display of fireworks. This whiled away the time, and it was already dark, as we at length bent our steps towards the railway station.

Suddenly a voice that I knew too well, struck upon my ear.

"Pity the poor blind!" it exclaimed.

I turned, and behold! there was my one-eyed jail acquaintance, planted against a brick wall, a stout staff, at least six feet long, in his hand, and his apparently sightless eyes turned up to the sky.

"Pity the poor blind!"

In the greatest fear lest, even in his present blind condition, he might recognise, and claim me as an acquaintance, I hurried from the spot with all the speed of which I was capable, and, thank Heaven, never set eyes upon him again.

CHAPTER XXI.

A WALK THROUGH A MOUNTAIN.

I lately took a walk through the substance of a mountain, entering at the top, and coming out at the bottom, after a two or three mile journey underground. Perhaps the story of this trip is worth narrating. The mountain was part of an extensive property belonging to the Emperor of Austria, in his character of salt merchant, and contained the famous salt mine of Hallein.

The whole salt district of Upper Austria, called the Salzkammergut, forms part of a range of rocks that extends from Halle in the Tyrol, pa.s.ses through Reichenthal in Bavaria, and continues by way of Hallein in Salzburg, to end at Ausse in Styria. The Austrian part of the range is now included in what is called the district of Salzburg, and that district abounds, as might be expected, in salt springs, hot and cold, which form in fact the baths of Gastein, Ischl, and some other places.

The names of Salzburg (Saltborough), the capital, and of the Salzack (Saltbrook), on the left bank of which that pleasant city stands, indicate clearly enough the character of the surrounding country.

Hallein is a small town eight miles to the south-east of Salzburg, and it was to the mine of Hallein, as before said, that I paid my visit.

On the way thither, we, a party of three foot-travellers, pa.s.sed through much delightful rock and water scenery. From Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, we got through Wells and Laimbach to the river Traun, and trudged afoot beside its winding waters till we reached the point of its junction with the Traunsee, or Lake of Traun. At Gmunden, we stopped to look over the Imperial Salt Warehouses. The Emperor of Austria, as most people know, is the only dealer in salt and tobacco with whom his subjects are allowed to trade. His salt warehouses, therefore, must needs be extensive. They are situated at Gmunden to the left of the landing-place, from which a little steamer plies across the lake; and they are so built as to afford every facility for the unloading of boats that bring salt barrels from the mine by the highway of the Traun. The warehouses consisted simply of a large number of sheds piled with the salt in barrels, a few offices, and a low but s.p.a.cious hall, filled, in a confused way, with dusty models. There were models of river-boats and salt moulds, mining tools, and tram ways, hydraulic models of all kinds, miniature furnaces, wooden troughs, and seething pans. We looked through these until the bell from the adjacent pier warned us, at five o'clock in the evening, to go on board the steamer that was quite ready to puff and splash its way across the beautiful green lake. We went under the shadow of the black and lofty Traunstien, and among pine-covered rocks, of which the reflections were mingled in the water with a ruddy glow, that streamed across a low sh.o.r.e from some fires towards which we were steering.

The glow proceeded from the fires of the Imperial Saltern, erected at Ebensee. We paid a short visit to the works, which have been erected at great cost; and display all the most recent improvements in the art of getting the best marketable salt from saline water. We found that the water, heavily impregnated, is conducted from the distant mines by wooden troughs into the drying pan. The pan is a large shallow vessel of metal, supported by small piles of brick, and a low brick wall about three feet high, extending round two-thirds of its circ.u.mference; leaving one-third, as the mouth of the furnace, open to the air. Among the brick columns, and within the wall, the fire flashed and curled under the seething pan.

Ascending next into the house over the great pan, and looking down upon the surface and its contents through sliding doors upon the floors, we saw the white salt crusting like a coat of snow over the boiling water, and being raked, as it is formed, by workmen stationed at each of the trap doors. As the water evaporated, the salt was stirred and turned from rake to rake; and finally, when quite dry, raked into the neighbourhood of a long-handled spade, with which one workman was shovelling among the dried salt, and filling a long row of wooden moulds, placed ready to his hand. These moulds are sugar-loaf shaped, and perforated at the bottom like a sugar mould, in order that any remaining moisture may drain out of them. The moulds will be placed finally in a heated room before the salt will be considered dry enough for storeage as a manufactured article.

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 b.u.t.ter. 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 Durrnberg, 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 Durrnberg 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 Durrnberg, 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 t.i.tles 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 pa.s.sage. 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing 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 Konigsrolle. 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 mine which we were then descending.

Konhauser-return-shaft is, I think, however, about the meaning of that compound word.

So far we had felt nothing like real cold, although I had been promised a wintry atmosphere. Possibly with a miner's dress over my ordinary clothing, and with plenty of exercise, there was enough to counteract the effects of the chill air. But our eyes began to ache at the uncertain light, and we all straggled irregularly along the smooth cut shaft level for another sixty feet, and so reached the Konhauser-rolle, the fourth slide we had encountered in our progress.

That cheered us up a little, as it shot us down another one hundred and eight feet perpendicular depth to the Soolererzeugungswerk-Konhauser-surely a place nearer than ever to the magic regions of Abracadabra. If not Aladdin's garden, something wonderful ought surely by this time to have been reached. I was alive to any sight or sound, and was excited by the earnest whispering of my fellow adventurers, and the careful directions as to our progress given by the guides and light-bearers.

With eager rapidity we flitted among the black shadows of the cavern, till we reached a winding flight of giant steps. We mounted them with desperate excitement, and at the summit halted, for we felt that there was s.p.a.ce before our faces, and had been told that those stairs led to a mid mountain lake, nine hundred and sixty feet below the mountain's top; two hundred and forty feet above its base. Presently, through the darkness, we perceived at an apparently interminable distance a few dots of light, that shed no l.u.s.tre, and could help us in no way to pierce the pitchy gloom of the great cavern. The lights were not interminably distant, for they were upon the other sh.o.r.e, and this gnome lake is but a mere drop of water in the mountain ma.s.s, its length being three hundred and thirty, and its breadth one hundred and sixty feet.

Our guides lighted more candles, and we began to see their rays reflected from the water; we could hear too the dull splas.h.i.+ng of the boat, which we could not see, as old Charon slowly ferried to our sh.o.r.e. More lights were used; they flashed and flickered from the opposite ferry station, and we began to have an indistinct sense of a spangled dome, and of an undulating surface of thick, black water, through which the coming boat loomed darkly. More candles were lighted on both sides of the Konhauser lake, a very Styx, defying all the illuminating force of candles; dead and dark in its dim cave, even the limits of which all our lights did not serve to define. The boat reached the place of embarcation, and we, wandering ghosts, half walked and were half carried into its broad clumsy hulk, and took each his allotted seat in ghostly silence. There was something really terrible in it all; in the slow funereal pace at which we floated across the subterranean lake; in the dead quiet among us, only interrupted by the slow plunge of the oar into the sickly waters. In spite of all the lights that had been kindled we were still in a thick vapour of darkness, and could form but a dreamy notion of the beauty and the grandeur of the crystal dome within which we men from the upper earth were hidden from our fellows. The lights were flared aloft as we crept sluggishly across the lake, and now and then were flashed back from a hanging stalact.i.te, but that was all. The misty darkness about us brought to the fancy at the same time fearful images, and none of us were sorry when we reached the other sh.o.r.e in safety. There a rich glow of light awaited us, and there we were told a famous tale about the last Arch-ducal visit to these salt mines, where some thousands of lighted tapers glittered and flashed about him, and exhibited the vaulted roof and spangled lake in all their beauty. As we were not Archdukes, we had our Hades lighted only by a pound of short sixteens.

We left the lake behind us, and then, traversing a further distance of seventy feet along the Wehrschachtricht, arrived at the mouth of the Konhauser Stiege. Another rapid descent of forty-five feet at an angle of fifty degrees, and we reached Rupertschachtricht, a long cavern of the extent of five hundred and sixty feet, through which we toiled with a growing sense of weariness. We had now come to the top of the last and longest "slide" in the whole Durrnberg. It is called the Wolfdietrichberg-rolle, and is four hundred and sixty-eight feet long, carrying us two hundred and forty feet lower down into the mountain. We went down this "slide" with the alacrity of school-boys, one after another keeping the pot boiling, and all regulating our movements with great circ.u.mspection, for we knew that we had far to go and we could never see more than a few yards before us.

Having gained the ground beneath in safety, our attention was drawn to a fresh water well or spring, sunk in this spot at great cost by order of the Archduke, and blessed among miners. Amid all the stone and salt and brine, a gush of pure fresh water at our feet was very welcome to us all.

The well was sunk, however, to get water that was necessary for the mining operations. We did not see any of those operations underground, for they are not exhibited; the show-trip underground is only among the ventilating shafts and galleries. Through the dark openings by which we had pa.s.sed, we should have found our way (had we been permitted) to the miners. I have seen them working in the Tyrol, and their labours are extremely simple. Some of the rock-salt is quarried in transparent crystals, which undergo only the process of crus.h.i.+ng before they are sent into the market as an article of commerce. Very little of this grain salt is seen in England, but on the continent it may be found in some of the first hotels, and on the table of most families. It is cheaper than the loaf salt, and is known in Germany under the t.i.tle of _salzkorn_, and in France, as _selle de cuisine_. In order to obtain a finer grained and better salt, it is necessary that the original salt-crystals should be dissolved, and for this purpose parallel galleries are run into the rock, and there is dug in each of them a d.y.k.e or cistern. These d.y.k.es are then flushed with water, which is allowed to remain in them undisturbed for the s.p.a.ce of from five to twelve months, according to the richness of the soil; and, being then thoroughly saturated with the salt that it has taken up, the brine is drawn off through wooden pipes from Hallein over hill and dale into the evaporating pans.

We had traversed the last level, and had reached what is generally called the end of the salt-mine; but we were still a long way distant from the pure air and the suns.h.i.+ne. We had travelled through seven galleries of an aggregate length of nearly two miles; we had floated across an earthy piece of water; had followed one another down six slides, and had penetrated to the depth of twelve hundred feet into the substance of the mountain limestone, gypsum, and marl. Having done all this, there we were, in the very heart of the Durrnberg, left by our guides, and intrusted to the care of two lank lads with haggard faces. We stood together in a s.p.a.cious cavern, poorly lighted by our candles; there was a line of tram-rail running through the middle of it, and we soon saw the carriage that was to take us out of the mountain emerging from a dark nook in the distance. It was a truck with seats upon it, economically arranged after the fas.h.i.+on of an Irish jaunting car. The two lads were to be our horses, and our way lay through a black hollow in one side of the cavern, into which the tram-rail ran.

We took our seats, instructed to sit perfectly still, and to restrain our legs and arms from any straggling. There was no room to spare in the shaft we were about to traverse. Our car was run on to the tram-line, and the two lads, with a sickly smile, and a broad hint at their expected gratuity, began to pull, and promised us a rapid journey. In another minute we were whirring down an incline with a rush and a rattle, through the subterranean pa.s.sage tunnelled into the solid limestone which runs to the outer edge of the Durrnberg. The length of this tunnel is considerably more than an English mile.

The reverberation and the want of light were nothing, but we were disagreeably sensible of a cloud of fine stone dust, and knew well that we should come out not only stone deaf, but as white as millers.

Clinging to our seats with a cowardly instinct, down we went through a hurricane of sound and dust. At length we were sensible of a diminution in our speed, and the confusion of noises so far ceased, that we could hear the panting of our biped cattle. Then, straight before us, s.h.i.+ning in the centre of the pitchy darkness, there was a bright blue star suddenly apparent. One of the poor lads in the whisper of exhaustion, and between his broken pantings for breath, told us that they always know when they have got half way by the blue star, for that is the daylight s.h.i.+ning in.

A little necessary rest, and we were off again, the blue star before us growing gradually paler, and expanding and still growing whiter, till with an uncontrollable dash, and a concussion, we are thrown within a few feet of the broad incomparable daylight. With how much contempt of candles did I look up at the noonday sun! The two lads, streaming with perspiration, who had dragged us down the long incline, were made happy by the payment we all gladly offered for their services. Then, as we pa.s.sed out of the mouth of the shaft, by a rude chamber cut out of the rock, we were induced to pause and purchase from a family of miners who reside there a little box of salt crystals, as a memento of our visit.

Truly we must have been among the gnomes, for when I had reached the inn I spread the brilliant crystals I had brought home with me on my bedroom window sill, and there they sparkled in the sun and twinkled rainbows, changing and s.h.i.+fting their bright colours as though there were a living imp at work within. But when I got up next morning and looked for my crystals, in the place where each had stood, I found only a little slop of brine. That fact may, I have no doubt, be accounted for by the philosophers; but I prefer to think that it was something wondrous strange, and that I fared marvellously like people of whom I had read in German tales, how they received gifts from the good people who live in the bowels of the earth, and what became of them. I have had my experiences, and I do not choose to be sure whether those tales are altogether founded upon fancy.

CHAPTER XXII.