Salted_ A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, With Recipes - Mark Bitterman [39]
Most traditionally harvested rock salts rely on manual labor to carve them from their mountain redoubts, employing the room-and-pillar strategy, whereby rooms supported by salt pillars and connected by tunnels are slowly extended deeper and deeper into salt deposits. Mines in Poland, Austria, and Detroit are famous for their ambitious scale, boasting entire cities underground. Pack animals would be lowered down into the mines and then spend the rest of their lives in underground stables. Elaborately carved chapels were dug directly into the stone to attend to the miners’ spiritual needs in the gloom.
One example of artisan rock salt mining occurs in the Salt Range, a hill system in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The range runs along the northern portion of the province from the Jhelum to the Indus Rivers. Although salt mined here is called Himalayan salt, the range is actually separated from the Himalayas by nearly 200 miles. The mines have been used since their discovery in 326 BCE, and there is evidence to suggest that salt was being mined prior to that.
People had set up small, opencast mines to glean salt from the surface, but it wasn’t until 1872 that the first tunnels were built at ground level to access the salt layers inside the hills. A room-and-pillar mining strategy was implemented to preserve the structure of the mountain; this allowed production to be increased dramatically, and it is still in use today.
In some of the mines, the use of this technique has been taken to another level. The Khewra salt mine, located at the foothills of the Salt Range about 100 miles south of Islamabad, is said to be the second largest salt mine in the world because of its extensive reserves—an estimated 220 million tons. The mine head buildings have nineteen stories, eighteen of which are underground. The salt itself occurs in an irregular domelike structure, varies in color from white to pink to deep red, and is from 97 to 99 percent pure sodium chloride.
The Khewra mine has become a major tourist destination in Pakistan. Deep in its nearly two-mile-long tunnels winding about over seventeen levels, large chambers have been excavated where rock salt artisans have been permitted to carve large and elaborate salt structures. Among them is a 350-foot-tall assembly hall with 300 narrow stairs of salt; a 3,000-square-foot mosque that was constructed over the course of half a century; and a salt bridge known as the Pull Sarat, or bridge of trial. It is twenty-five feet long, with no supporting pillars, spanning a subterranean saline pond. Other items include miniature versions of the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, and two Pakistani landmarks, Chaghi Mountain and Lahore’s Minar-e-Pakistan. Because the salt they are made from is of different purities, the sculptures come in various hues of red, pink, and white.
On the surface, it may seem difficult to categorize a mined salt as “artisan.” Salt deposits are made by nature, so the workmanship involved relates more to the extraction of the salt from the mountain than to the making of salt. But artisan or otherwise, the contrast between a salt mined by traditional methods and one mined industrially can be stark. Most obviously, there is a difference in scale dictated by the availability of investment and technology; the regional economics of salt making;