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The geological formation of the rocks offers an infinite variety of granites; and the long chains of mountains might keep a hundred of Cuviers busy for life. The limestone caves of Jubblepore are a true ossuary of antediluvian India; they are full of skeletons of monstrous animals, now disappeared for ever.
Our contemporary desecrators have up till now respected the infinite desuetude of the place, and, for the tourists who begin to haunt it, no one yet has dared to build a hotel. Slowly the sun descends; and behind us the granites of the town-mummy seem to burn more and more.
I could not climb this steep rock, but I believe the white spot to be a large nodule of quartz, formed by the union of several of those veins so common in granites passing into gneiss. Opposite Keri, or the Rock of the Moon, on the twin mountain Ouivitari, which is an islet in the midst of the cataracts, the Indians point out with mysterious awe a similar white spot.
Thus where a region is underlain by sedimentary rocks, as is the drift-covered area from the Hudson River to the Missouri, the drift contains not only fragments of limestone, sandstone, and shale of local derivation, but also pebbles of many igneous and metamorphic rocks, such as granites, gneisses, schists, dike rocks, quartzites, and the quartz of mineral veins, whose nearest source is the Archean area of Canada and the states of our northern border.
I observed pretty constantly, in putting the bulb of the thermometer in contact with the ledges of bare rocks, that the laxas negras are hotter during the day than the reddish-white granites at a distance from the river; but the latter cool during the night less rapidly than the former.
Every particle of moisture had long since evaporated; even chemical combinations had been dissolved by the alternations of heat and cold known only on earth to the chemist in his laboratory. Only the hardest rocks, such as granites and basalts, remained.
The granite of these countries, by its structure, its mixture of hornblende, and other geological features alike important, appears to me to belong to a more recent formation, perhaps posterior to the gneiss, and analogous to the stanniferous granites, the hyalomictes, and the pegmatites.
Wherever the river has cut its way through the sandstones, marbles and granites of the Kaibab Mountains, beautiful and awe-inspiring pictures are seen, while above there are domes and peaks, some of red sandstone and some of snowy whiteness. Cataract Cañon alone is forty-one miles long, and has seventy-five cataracts and rapids, of which fifty-seven are within a space of nineteen miles.
Contents in Cost per Million Gallons. The above table will give some idea of the enormous expense entailed by the opening up of the interior. In addition to these, wells and bores were put down, many of which failed to strike water. Ever-thoughtful Nature has provided, on the surface of the "granites," small reservoirs which, after rain, may, in some cases, hold many hundred gallons of water.
I may also give for example the African Brechia, which is a pudding-stone of the same nature. This stone is composed of granites or porphyries, serpentines and schisti, extremely indurated and perfectly consolidated.
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