Salt Cathedral

Beneath the mountain, the miners carved halls that were never meant to hold prayer— only the slow extraction of white crystal from walls older than any spoken language.

But someone set a candle in a niche, and the salt caught the light and multiplied it, throwing cathedrals of amber and rose across the vaulted dark, and the miners stopped their hammering to look.

Now the tourists descend in iron cages, photograph the chandeliers of brine, the bas-reliefs licked smooth by centuries of breath. They do not think about the hands that first struck open these rooms.

I have been both the miner and the tourist— hollowing out some deep interior vein, then returning years later, astonished to find it luminous, wondering who could have made such a thing.

The salt remembers every cut. It holds the shape of what was taken and calls it architecture.