The thick sulphureous smoke poured forth from the heaps of cleansed ore, under which the fire was in full activity, and the wind drove it across the road which we must pass.  In smoke, and impregnated with smoke, stood building after building:  three buildings had been strangely thrown, as it were, by one another:  earth and stone-heaps, as if they were unfinished works of defence, extended around.  Scaffolding, and long wooden bridges, had been erected there; large wheels turned round; long and heavy iron chains were in continual motion.

We stood before an immense gulf, called “Stora Stoeten,” (the great mine).  It had formerly three entrances, but they fell in and now there is but one.  This immense sunken gulf now appears like a vast valley:  the many openings below, to the shafts of the mine, look, from above, like the sand-martin’s dark nest-holes in the declivities of the shore:  there were a few wooden huts down there.  Some strangers in miners’ dresses, with their guide, each carrying a lighted fir-torch, appeared at the bottom, and disappeared again in one of the dark holes.  From within the dark wooden houses, in which great water-wheels turned, issued some of the workmen.  They came from the dizzying gulf—­from narrow, deep wells:  they stood in their wooden shoes two and two, on the edge of the tun which, attached to heavy chains, is hoisted up, singing and swinging the tun on all sides:  they came up merry enough.  Habit makes one daring.

They told us that, during the passage upwards, it often happened that one or another, from pure wantonness, stepped quite out of the tun, and sat himself between the loose stones on the projecting piece of rock, whilst they fired and blasted the rock below so that it shook again, and the stones about him thundered down.  Should one expostulate with him on his fool-hardiness, he would answer with the usual witticism here:  “I have never before killed myself.”

One descends into some of the shafts by a sort of machinery, which looks as if they had placed two iron ladders against each other, each having a rocking movement, so that by treading on the ascending-step on the one side and then on the other, which goes upwards, one gradually ascends, and by going on the downward sinking-step one gets by degrees to the bottom.  They said it was very easy, only one must step boldly, so that the foot should not come between and get crushed; and then one must remember that there is no railing or balustrade here, and directly outside these stairs there is the deep abyss into which one may fall headlong.  The deepest shaft has a perpendicular depth of more than a hundred and ninety fathoms, but for this there is no danger, they say, only one must not be dizzy, nor get alarmed.  One of the workmen, who had come up, descended with a lighted pine-branch as a torch:  the flame illumined the dark rocky wall, and by degrees became only a faint streak of light which soon vanished.