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In the bright moonlight plainly were to be descried the brush of the foothills, the timber, the fissures, the cañons, the granites, and the everlasting snows. Almost we thought to make out a thread of a waterfall high up where the clouds would be if the night had not been clear. "We got off the trail somewhere," hazarded the Tenderfoot. "Well, we're on a road, anyway," I pointed out.
Somewhere west of them, hazardously near, must lie the rocks of Admiralty Island; eastward were the still more pitiless glacial sandstones and granites of the coast, with that deadly finger of sea-washed reef between, along the lip of which they must creep to Juneau. And Juneau could not be far ahead. He leaned over the rail, puffing at the stub of his cigar. He was eager for his work.
A mineralogical error gave celebrity to Esmeralda. The granites of Duida and Maraguaca contain in open veins fine rock-crystals, some of them of great transparency, others coloured by chlorite or blended with actonite; these were mistaken for diamonds and emeralds.
"Well, you only love half of it, the Southern half." "I love my whole country!" cried Vivia, all aflame. "I love these purple, rust-stained granites here, the great savannas there, the pine forests, the sea-like prairies, every river rolling down its rocky bed, every inch of its beautiful, glorious soil, all its proud, free people. I love my whole country!" "Only you hate some of its parasites.
From these and other peculiarities it has been inferred that the granites have been formed at considerable depths in the earth, and have cooled and crystallised slowly under great pressure, where the contained gases could not expand. The volcanic rocks, on the contrary, although they also have risen up from below, have cooled from a melted state more rapidly upon or near the surface.
The granites within which we are immured and in such terrible company shut out everything save the point of an old neighbouring minaret which shows now against the blue of the sky: a humble graft of Islam which grew here amongst the ruins some centuries ago, when the ruins themselves had already subsisted for three thousand years a little mosque built on a mass of debris, which it new protects with its inviolability.
And geologists are now able to state with tolerable confidence that, however old many of the granites may be, yet a large amount of the fire-built rocks are no older than the water-built rocks which lie over them. So by many geologists the names of Primary, Transition, and Secondary Formations are pretty well given up. But if they really do lie under, how can they possibly be of the same age?
These andesitic rocks form mountain masses of a white colour, which, in their general outline and appearance in their joints in their occasionally including dark-coloured, angular fragments, apparently of some pre-existing rock and in the great dikes branching from them into the superincumbent strata, manifest a close and striking resemblance to masses of common granite and syenite: I never, however, saw in these andesitic rocks, those granitic veins of segregation which are so common in true granites.
These veins, two or three inches thick, are distinguished by a fine-grained quartz-granite crossing a coarse-grained granite almost porphyritic, and abounding in fine crystals of red feldspar. I sought in vain, in the Cordillera of Baraguan, for hornblende, and those steatitic masses that characterise several granites of the Higher Alps in Switzerland.
The granite is cut in its turn by long horizontal dykes of the hardest quadrangular basalt, occasionally pudding'd with banded lumps of red jasper and oxydulated iron: from afar they look like water-lines, and in places they form walls, regular as if built. The rounded forms result from the granites flaking off in curved lamina, like onion-coats.
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