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If we except the valley of the Nepean, the banks of the South Creek, the Pennant Hills near Parramatta, and a few other places, the general soil of the county of Cumberland, is of the poorest description. It is superficial in most places, resting either upon a cold clay, or upon sandstone; and is, as I have already remarked, a ferruginous compound of the finest dust.

Whenever rock was visible it was either sandstone in thin layers, dipping south, or a pebbly conglomerate. Sometimes there was a little coralline limestone, but no volcanic rocks.

The basaltic country has now suddenly changed to slate, limestone, sandstone, and a hard white stone.

At this position the slope of the valley towards the river was exceedingly gradual upon the west bank, until within a hundred and fifty yards of the Atbara, when the ground rapidly fell, and terminated in an abrupt cliff of white sandstone. The miserable little village of modern Sofi comprised about thirty straw huts, but the situation was worthy of a more important settlement.

Great armlike bays, expanding at their upper ends, often branch from the main valleys and penetrate the sandstone platform; on the other hand, the platform often sends promontories into the valleys, and even leaves in them great, almost insulated, masses.

One store-building had a patchy galvanized iron cornice; the building beside it was crowned with battlements and pyramids of brick capped with blocks of red sandstone. She escaped from Main Street, fled home. She wouldn't have cared, she insisted, if the people had been comely.

Still keeping to the heights, now of red sandstone, Marius again came on the barbarians at Les Milles, four miles to the south of Aix. He had observed all their movements, and had seen that the Ambrons had detached themselves from the Teutons at Aix, so as to make a descent on Marseilles.

Within was a large room with fairly smooth walls and ceiling of Silurian rock and sandstone. The cave as it now appeared would hardly have been recognized by its aboriginal frequenters. It had been converted into a place of civil abode or resort, retaining only enough of its pristine wildness for romantic effect. Ernie Hunter had done his work well.

It is about 8 feet thick and composed of a soft, very friable, purple-gray sandstone. Above it lies a greenish-white bed a few inches thick, followed by a stratum of a pronounced white, about 12 feet thick. This heavy stratum is composed of calcareous clay, and the green bed of a calcareous clay with a mixture of sand.

Even at Nineveh itself, and at Calah or Nimrud, though the hills were further removed, stone was, in reality, plentiful. The cliffs a little above Koyunjik are composed of a "hard sandstone," and a part of the moat of the town is carried through "compact silicious conglomerate."