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The escarpment is caused by a fault, the great block of the upper side being lifted several thousand feet above the valley region. Through the fissure lavas poured out, and in many places the escarpment is concealed by sheets of lava. The canyons in these lava beds are often of great interest.
Further south from the high table of the Velay you can see the steep backward escarpment of the Cevennes, inky blue, desperately blue, blue like nothing else on earth except the mountains in those painters of North Italy, of the parts north and east of Venice, the name of whose school escapes me or, rather, I never knew it.
But I am not yet inside the fort, and the delayed ascent of the third and last escarpment is now made. It is steeper than either. The first was a surface to walk up, the second to stagger up, the third can only be ascended on the hands and toes.
From many of these smaller apertures small streams of water trickled down the escarpment, and the walls above others was blackened as by smoke. Where the water ran the wall was eroded to a depth of from a few inches to as much as a foot, suggesting that some of the tiny streams had been trickling downward to the green carpet of vegetation below for ages.
The overhanging crag, her summit rent by an inferno of shell fire, her inaccessible escarpment lit by the lurid glow of scrub fires, and the fantastic smoke clouds eerily revealed by the searchlight, made altogether a wild night battle scene of weird glory.
The circumference of this rock amounts to about a mile. It is cut round perpendicularly to a height of 130 feet and thirty feet below the top of the moat by which it is surrounded, which cutting is equally perpendicular, so that the whole height of the escarpment is 160 feet, and the rock, consequently, inaccessible.
So the rock-formed leaves of these books of geology have the escarpment edges turned southward, while each book itself dips northward, and the crest of each plateau book is the summit of a line of cliffs. These cliffs of erosion have been described as running from east to west, but they diverge from that course in many ways.
Thus, the loam which fills to a great depth the wide valley of the Saone, which is bounded on the west side by an escarpment of Inferior Oolite, and by the chain of the Jura on the east, is very like the loess found in the continuation of the same great basin after the junction of the Rhone, by which a large supply of Alpine mud has been added and intermixed.
From this point I can look off to the west, up side canyons of the Colorado, and see the edge of a great plateau, from which streams run down into the Colorado, and deep gulches in the escarpment which faces us, continued by canyons, ragged and flaring and set with cliffs and towering crags, down to the river.
This great headland, in shape something like a clenched fist, stands between the two branches of the Rother, the river which flows into the sea at Rye, and which was once navigable by ships so far up as Small Hythe just under the southern escarpment of the headland upon which Tenterden stands.
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