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I was intruding on an assembly of locals who come to the mine once a week for their breathing treatments. It's said the air gives relief to many respiratory ailments, as well as arthritis, and some other promblems the keeper could not communicate, or rather, that I could not understand. Even standing on the other side of the heavy wooden door to the mine entrance, the icy breaths from its saline belly pressed against me.
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I decended a gently sloping tunnel for a mile, maybe more, stopping to peer into caverns black enough to swallow you entirely, for a minute i would not exist, in such darkness that my rods and cones spewed a phosphorescent trail i could and could not see. |
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Sections of abandoned track slowly become dust beneath dust. When a rat sends bouncing echoes past you, your foot gets caught between two iron bars and you slide against the salt wall, slimy and blotted. |
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Ladders leading up and up to lofts held only by planks aging a century. Dim lanterns cast shadows like the strobe lights of eternity - blinking and time imperceptible but the sway of movement flushes you with vertigo at depths sweat worms from the outside in. Bizzare machines with edges once sharp rounded, beams once magnificent industry now sculptures in a cigar cellar ashtray. The salt has formed a sand in the room next to the miner's Orthodox altar, where children play. |
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Then I came to the real mine. Over a period of over 13 decades, they mined 13 stories down, somehow building a walkway allong the top, that hangs with nothing underneath, no ground for 130 over feet down, only beams, wooden beams, stuck into the earth and covered in thin planks. The walk across was excruciating - i never took my hand away from the sheer wall, kept my legs going somehow while wrestling with the sensation that I was already falling. Once across the chasm, a small sign warns that only 5 people are to cross the walkway at once. |
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After crossing, I climbed down 13 flights of zigzag staircases, the entire structure shook with only a few people descending. At the wide base there is a table with benches where a man reads from a newspaper and his grandchildren peer down into an abyss barely fensed off. I thought of what happens when the generator fails. Every sound echoes madly, deeply, travelling down though the gaping caves and never coming back up. |
Icicles and salt daggers blend imperceptibly against the soot colored surround. |
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The only way out is a dizzying ascent up. |
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