United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And these prodigious slabs of gneiss now lay amidst schistous marl and calcareous rock. Farther down in the valley was a small village of which the houses were dwarfed by a gloomy strong hold, apparently of the fifteenth century, whose four high and massive towers, occupying the angles of a small quadrilateral, gave it the appearance of a vast donjon.
The clouds had gather'd above them, High in the middle air huge purple pillowy masses, While in the west beyond was the last pale tint of the twilight. Green as the stream in the glen, whose pure and chrysolite waters Flow o'er a schistous bed, and serene as the age of the righteous.
As I toiled up the side of the valley in the direction of Millau, I noticed the Rocher de Caylus, a large reddish and somewhat fantastically shaped block of oolitic rock, perched on the hill above the vineyards. Here the lower formation was schistous, the upper calcareous.
The first village I came to was Coupiac, lying in a deep hollow, from the bottom of which rose a rugged mass of schistous rock, with houses all about it, under the protecting shadow of a strong castle with high round towers in good preservation.
"Yes," answered the young miner. "Well! have you not found the hole which connects New Aberfoyle with the Dochart pit?" "No," replied Harry, whose impatient hands met with nothing but a solid wall. The old overman stepped forward, and himself felt the schistous rock. A cry escaped him.
The architect sported with the laws of symmetry, and revelled in the fanciful. The nave is much wider at one end than the other. The great sundial over the door, bearing the date 1636, is scarcely less useful now than when it was placed there. The castle is a strange pile, all the more picturesque by its incongruity. It stands upon a mass of schistous rock about fifty feet above the river.
The figures, besides being outlined by the dots, were decorated all over with the same pigment in dotted transverse belts. Tracing a gallery round to windward, it brought me to a commodious cave, or recess, overhung by a portion of the schistous sufficiently large to shelter twenty natives, whose recent fire places appeared on the projecting area of the cave.
The pillars sustaining the vaulted roofs, whose curves allowed of every style, the massive walls between the passages, the naves themselves in this layer of secondary formation, were composed of sandstone and schistous rocks. But tightly packed between these useless strata ran valuable veins of coal, as if the black blood of this strange mine had circulated through their tangled network.
This was Ambialet, so called from the extraordinary loop which the Tarn forms here in consequence of the mass of schistous rock which obstructs its direct channel.
In the schistous formations, which we must here assume as in great measure the residua of vegetable creations, that have sunk back into the universal life, and in the later predominant calcareous masses, which are the caput mortuum of animalized existence, we ascend from the laws of attraction and repulsion, as united in gravity, to magnetism, electricity, and constructive power, till we arrive at the point representative of a new and far higher intensity.
Word Of The Day