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 space 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 lustre, 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 shore, and this gnome lake is but a mere drop of water in the mountain mass, 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 splashing of the boat, which we could not see, as old Charon slowly ferried to our shore. 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 stalactite, 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 shore 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.