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On some smooth basaltic rocks on the coast of St. Jago, I found an exceedingly thin layer of brown calcareous matter, which under a lens presented a miniature likeness of the crenulated and polished fronds of Ascension; in this case a basis was not afforded by any projecting extraneous particles.
This lava is of a pale grey colour, fusing into a black enamel; its fracture is rather earthy and concretionary; it contains olivine in small grains. The central parts of the mass are compact, or at most crenulated with a few minute cavities, and are often columnar.
The tower is quadrangular, and is at least one hundred feet high; it has on its summit four little turrets, one at each corner, between each of which are three spirelets, the middlemost of the three the highest. The nave of the church is to the east; it is of two stories, both crenulated at the top. I wished to see the interior of the church, but found the gate locked.
The winding road was closely planted with trees for a large portion of its course, and the stately front of the western entrance, with its massive stone portico and crenulated cornice, burst unexpectedly upon them.
The inequalities of the primary support affect the outline of every successive layer, in the same manner as may often be seen in bezoar-stones, when an object like a nail forms the centre of aggregation. The crenulated edges, however, of the frond appear to be due to the corroding power of the surf on its own deposit, alternating with fresh depositions.
That of the left, the largest, is the Tour d'Argent, that of the middle, the Tour Bonchet, and the third, the Tour de César or the Tour de l'Horloge. This last is the only one which has preserved its mediæval crenulated battlements aloft.
We have now left the Troglodytes behind us. Each division is fortified after a fashion, with walls now crumbling, and with round crenulated towers. One large tower, some fifty feet high, has stood, they say, four hundred years. I asked, What was the use of these fortifications? and was naïvely told they were for the purposes of shamatah, "war," or rather "rows."
The phonolite is of a greenish-grey colour, and is full of minute acicular crystals of feldspar; in most parts it has a conchoidal fracture, and is sonorous, yet it is crenulated with minute air-cavities. In a S.W. direction from Lot, there are some other remarkable columnar pinnacles, but of a less regular shape, namely, Lot's Wife, and the Asses' Ears, composed of allied kinds of rock.
The spiral striae that cross its whorls are grouped in pairs; their interstices are raised, and more or less finely crenulated; as they pass out on the expanded and wing-like varices they diverge, and the lobe-like projections that scallop the margins of the wings are separated from each other by each pair of diverging striae.
Availing themselves of spurs of the old table land which were almost entirely cut off by the gorges tributary to the river, they ran their earth walls with infinite toil in a tortuous, crenulated line along the margins of the declivities. Where the latter was sharp and precepitous the earth walls were left lighter.
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