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No possible action of any flood could thus have modelled the land, either within the valley or along the open coast; and by the formation of such step-like plains or terraces the valley itself has been hollowed out.
Some two or three miles south of the Castle the river breaks across a step-like outcrop of rock, and thus forms that famous ford, across which the Counts of Sagan used in the old days to lead their foraging expeditions over the border. Simon of Sagan, the present Count, inherited in an unmodified degree the more predatory and uncivilized instincts of his forefathers.
The only remarkable thing by virtue of its Renaissance style of architecture was the belfry and clock tower, although some of the old Flemish dwelling houses in the market square, projecting over an ogival Colonnade extending round one end of the square, and covering a sort of footway, were of interest, uplifting their step-like gables as a silent but eloquent protest against a posterity devoid of style, all of them to the right and left falling into line like two wings of stone in order to allow the carved front of the belfry to make a better show, and its pinnacled tower to rise the prouder against the sky.
Geologists formerly would have brought into play the violent action of some overwhelming debacle; but in this case such a supposition would have been quite inadmissible, because, the same step-like plains with existing sea-shells lying on their surface, which front the long line of the Patagonian coast, sweep up on each side of the valley of Santa Cruz.
W. Williams, that the land has been there elevated: on the opposite sides of this great valley, three step-like terraces, composed of an enormous accumulation of rounded pebbles, exactly correspond with each other: the escarpment of each terrace is about fifty feet in height.
The elevatory movement, and the eating-back power of the sea during the periods of rest, have been equable over long lines of coast; for I was astonished to find that the step-like plains stand at nearly corresponding heights at far distant points.
Hence, on this view of a slow and gradual rising of the land, interrupted by periods of rest and denudation, we can understand the pebbles being of about the same size over the entire width of the step-like plains, the occasional thin covering of sandy earth, and the presence of broken, unrolled fragments of those shells, which now live exclusively near the coast.
Then there were the quaint old brasses of a knight or squire and his wife, with a step-like row of children by their side, and all let in the old blue slabs that paved the floor, ever which the worshippers of succeeding generations had passed for hundreds of years since.
The elevatory movement, and the eating-back power of the sea during the periods of rest, have been equable over long lines of coast; for I was astonished to find that the step-like plains stand at nearly corresponding heights at far distant points.
By the side of pebbly waters waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I journeyed my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but lost his wedges for his pains which wedges yet rusted in their holes; on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow pots had been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintstone ever wearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secret pool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth serenely; on, to less broken ground, and by a little ring, where, truly, fairies must have danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated for all was bare; still on, and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly looked down upon me a crescent moon, from morning.
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