United States or Uganda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"No?" the woman said with a meaning that made the pagan shiver. Momus laid goad about his camel. The way continually ascended toward the east; the soil was no longer sandy, but rocky; no longer given up to desolate gardens, but black with groves of cedars and highland shrubs. They swung off a plateau that would have ended in a cliff, down a shaly sheep-path into a wady.
At last, one day a narrow ledge of brittle, shaly rock came in view, covered with a coating of thick, heavy yellow mud, of which Old Platte gathered a panful and betook himself down to the river-side.
We tied up the horses on that dizzy height, and stole, Nimrod with a carbine, I with the rifle, along a treacherous, shaly bank which ended, twenty feet below, in the steep rocky bluffs that formed the face of the cliff.
Where the waste brought in is more than the waves can easily distribute, as off the mouths of turbid rivers which drain highlands near the sea, deposits are little winnowed, and are laid in rapidly alternating, shaly sandstones and sandy shales.
One of them finally fetches a clumsy wooden ladle, three times broader than an egg, which, of course is worse than nothing. I now traverse a mountainous country with a remarkably clear atmosphere. The mountains are of a light creamcolored shaly composition; wherever a living stream of water is found, there also is a village, with clusters of trees.
At the present site of the Falls the edge of the cataract is formed by a stratum of hard limestone reaching to a depth of about eighty feet; and by the action of the spray the softer shaly strata below have been hollowed out so as to form this cave. It is about one hundred feet wide, one hundred and sixty feet high, and about one hundred feet across.
People who live at the Niagara Falls, and I agree with them in observations extending over a period since 1826, believe that these Falls have receded considerably; and, although I do not enter into the mathematical analysis of modern geologists respecting them, as to their constant retrocession, believing that earthquake split open the present channel, yet I have no doubt that the level of Lake Erie is considerably affected by the diminution of the yielding shaly rocks of their foundation.
Basal conglomerates and coarse sandstones which must have been laid near shore are succeeded by shaly sandstones, sandy shales, and shales.
Furthermore, we note that the shaly layer is not only lacking in lime, but commonly contains no trace of animals such as might have dwelt on the bottom. The fossils it bears are usually of species which swam in the overlying water and came to the bottom after death.
Quartz, dense and milky, also in quartz of nearly every colour and appearance, saccharoidal, crystalline, nay, even in clear glass-like six-sided prismatic crystals, and associated with silver, copper, lead, arsenic, iron as sulphide, oxide, carbonate, and tungstate, antimony, bismuth, nickel, zinc, lead, and other metals in one form or another; in slate, quartzite, mica schist, granite, diorite, porphyry, felsite, calcite, dolomite, common carbonate of iron, siliceous sinter from a hot spring, as at Mount Morgan; as alluvial gold in drifts formed of almost all these materials; and once, perhaps the most curious matrix of all, a small piece of apparently alluvial gold, naturally imbedded in a shaly piece of coal.
Word Of The Day