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The upper half of this gypseous formation is mainly formed of the same calcareous clay-shale rock, but without any gypsum, and varying extremely in nature: it passes from a soft, coarse, earthy, ferruginous state, including particles of quartz, into compact claystones with crystallised oxide of iron, into porcellanic layers, alternating with seams of calcareous matter, and into green porcelain-jasper, excessively hard, but easily fusible.
Here we again, for the second time only, met with a rocky formation: it was of a red ferruginous character. Our furthest position on the Flinders was in latitude 17 degrees 51 minutes South in a general South by East 1/2 East direction from the entrance, nearly thirty miles by the distance the boats had traversed. After noon observations, the gig moved down the river.
It is all covered with dense forest, which in many cases is pollarded, from being cut for bark cloth or for hunting purposes. Masuko fruit abounds. From the cisalpinae and gum-copal trees bark cloth is made. We now come to large masses of haematite, which is often ferruginous: there is conglomerate too, many quartz pebbles being intermixed.
Ferruginous, streaked, naked, and cheerless rocks arose around them, and even that snowy beacon, the glowing summit of Vélan, which had so long lain bright and cheering on their path, was now hid entirely from view. Pierre Dumont soon after pointed out a place on the visible summit of the mountain, where a gorge between the neigh boring peaks admitted a view of the heavens beyond.
The ravines and glens were covered with snow, but the sides of the rugged rocks were bare in their eternal hue of ferruginous brown. The little knoll on which the Refuge stood was also nearly naked, the wind having driven the light particles of the snow into the ravine of the path.
They brought no arms, and had never attempted any warlike demonstrations, or to come forward when told to keep back; neither did they follow us. We got over our journey by two o'clock and encamped near the old ground of June 23. Here the bed of the Darling consisted of ferruginous clay with grains of sand. July 28.
When we came to the opposite side of this valley, some pieces of the ferruginous conglomerate, which forms the capping to all other rocks in a large district around and north of this, cropped out, and the oxen bit at them as if surprised by the appearance of stone as much as we were; or it may have contained some mineral of which they stood in need.
Bed 8, a greenish mudstone, with several layers of gypsum. Bed 9, a highly indurated, easily fusible, white tuff, thickly mottled with ferruginous matter, and including some white semi-porcellanic layers, which are interlaced with ferruginous veins. This stone closely resembles some of the commonest varieties in the Uspallata chain.
The great lava sheets thus produced are generally more or less amorphous, vesicular and amygdaloidal, often exhibiting the globular concentric structure, and weathering rapidly to a kind of ferruginous sand or clay under the influence of the atmosphere.
At a little distance inland, I obtained several sections of the bed E, which, though different in appearance from the lower bed F, belongs to the same formation: it consists of a highly ferruginous sandy mass, almost composed, like the lowest bed at Port S. Julian, of fragments of Balanidae; it includes some pebbles, and layers of yellowish-brown mudstone. The embedded shells consist of:
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