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,
"Through what varieties of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes must we pass!"
I have since stood upon the top of the Pyramids, and admired the daring genius and the industry of man, and at the same time smiled at his feebleness when, from the mighty pile, I saw in the dark ranges of mountains, the sandy desert, the rich valley of the Nile and the river of Egypt, the hand of the world's great Architect; but I never felt man's feebleness more than here; for all these immense excavations, the work of more than six hundred years, were but as the work of ants by the roadside. The whole of the immense mass above me, and around and below, to an unknown extent, was of salt; a wonderful phenomenon in the natural history of the globe. All the different strata have been carefully examined by scientific men. The uppermost bed at the surface is sand; the second clay occasionally mixed with sand and gravel, and containing petrifactions of marine bodies; the third is calcareous stone; and from these circumstances it has been conjectured that this spot was formerly covered by the sea, and that the salt is a gradual deposite formed by the evaporation of its waters. I was disappointed in some of the particulars which had fastened themselves upon my imagination. I had heard and read glowing accounts of the brilliancy and luminous splendour of the passages and chambers, compared by some to the lustre of precious stones; but the salt is of a dark gray colour, almost black, and although sometimes glittering when the light was thrown upon it, I do not believe it could ever be lighted up to shine with any extraordinary or dazzling brightness. Early travellers, too, had reported that these mines contained several villages inhabited by colonies of miners, who lived constantly below, and that many were born and died there, who never saw the light of day; but all this is entirely untrue. The miners descend every morning and return every night, and live in the village above. None of them ever sleep below. There are, however, two horses which were foaled in the mines, and have never been on the surface of the earth. I looked at these horses with great interest. They were growing old before their time; other horses had perhaps gone down and told them stories of a world above which they would never know.