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Show IX A SALT MINE. A ilittcriir Underground City Pillars Pil-lars of Crystal. Going down into a salt mine is taking a glimpse of wonderful things, according to a " London News correspondent, who writes: "Light a few candles," was the order passed as we were leaving Wins-ford Wins-ford ; and I am under the impression that the hole, and that the "few candles" will just give us light enough for the space of some three or four yards. But we shall see. We step into our iron bucket. The door thereof is closed upon us. The steel ropes are made fast. The signal is given. There is a hesitating, trembling motion, and we dive swiftly into Plutonian night. Straight, sheer through a funnel 330 feet deep, and 3 feet G inches across, the rim of our bucket now and again grinding, scraping, bumping, screeching against the narrow walls. 'After-the first few seconds have passed, one cannot tell, from one's sensations merely, whether one is going up or down, or is suspended at rest. There is only the trembling of the invisible steel ropes and the scraping sound on the walls. In a minute more we touch the floor, of the under world with the lightness of a feather. In the name of all the faries and gobblins, and gnomes, and spirits of the earth, what have we there? O, Master Robert, "a few candles." The city of Dis illumi nated this is what meets my astonished gaze. Open spaces, endless streets, tumping tump-ing and winding off in all directions, and outlined in spots of light, and in the farthest distance an ornamental group of lights, as if on a wall, or on - some vast supporting pillar. . It is as if one looks from some point of vantage upon the lights of a town in a. dark night, without moon or stars ; not a town with empty space over it, but a town under a horizontal hori-zontal ceiling thirty-five feet above the pavement. On this level pavement the massed bands of the British army play Strauss' music and the whole of the London Lon-don West End spin round on "light fantastic fan-tastic toe." The first feeling of surprise over I examine my surroundings in leisurely leis-urely detail. At some distance in front of us looms a dark mass with a horizon- tal line of lights half way up it. The three of us Mr. Verdin, the guide and j mvself approach it, each carrying a lighted candle across the floor, which ap-! pears to be as level as the floor of a drawing draw-ing room, and which is covered with a thin carpet of salt fine as powder and dry as tinder. Wherever the light falls upon it, the dark objects glitters as if it were encrusted with rubies and diamonds. It turns out to be a huge pillar, extending from floor to ceiling. Each of its four Bides measures 12 yards; it is 33 feet high, and it is nothing but amass of crystals. crys-tals. At every twenty-five yards, north, south, east, west, stands one of these gigantic gi-gantic columns all of them, like this one, masses 01 many-iinieu eait uryaiaio, and with the diamond flash darting over their sides. The plan of this wonderful colonnade is now obvious. The miners have been cutting their way, all these many generations, through the solid rock salt, horizontally, clearing a smooth floor below their feet; leaving a smooth celling over their heads, and, at the already named distance, those enormous pilasters whose function is to prevent the roof-that roof-that is, the 330 feet of the earth's crust from falling in. The ceiling is too high to respond very liberally to the flicker of our candle lights ; but in a hundred spots it twinkles like stars peering through the clouds of night. They look as though they had the strength of doom, those pillars, pil-lars, and were destined to last to . the crack thereof. |