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Updated: May 20, 2025
Considering the many shells strewed over the terraces A, B, and C, and a few miles southward on the calcareous plain, which is continuously united with the upper step-like plain F, there cannot, I apprehend, be any doubt, that these six terraces have been formed by the action of the sea; and that their five escarpments mark so many periods of comparative rest in the elevatory movement, during which the sea wore into the land.
"There," said my Roman escort, as we forded the Tiber near Torglano, "the haze is lifting: behold august Perugia," I looked out over the misty plain, and saw the spiked ridge of a hill, serried with towers and belfries as a port with ships' masts; then the grey stone walls and escarpments warm in the sun; finally a mouth to the city, which seemed to engulph both the white road and the citizens walking to and fro upon it like flies.
I well remember my first view of the wide sweep of sea, which lay like a blue carpet edged with white, and the high escarpments of rock that were in deep purple shade, except where the afternoon sun turned them into the brightest greens and umbers.
The sun, a liquid red globe, had just touched its under side to the pink cliffs of Utah, and fired a crimson flood of light over the wonderful mountains, plateaus, escarpments, mesas, domes and turrets or the gorge. The rim wall of Powell's Plateau was a thin streak of fire; the timber above like grass of gold; and the long slopes below shaded from bright to dark.
But far the greater part of the plateau is good sound desert, rocky, sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes and dust, dissected in some places into a labyrinth of stream-channel chasms like cracks in a dry clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of glaciers blackened with lava flows, dotted with volcanoes and beautiful buttes, and lined with long continuous escarpments a vast bed of sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still nearly as level as when first laid down after being heaved into the sky a mile or two high.
It snuggled in the heart of a wild tangle of hills all turreted and battlemented with ledge and pinnacle of rock, from which ran huge escarpments clothed with spruce and pine, scarred and gashed on every hand with slides and deep-worn watercourses, down which tumultuous streams rioted their foamy way.
Terrace above terrace of shattered wall; escarpments which had been displaced as if by the explosion of some incredible mine; ramparts which were here high and regular, and there gaping in mighty fissures, or suddenly altogether lacking; long sweeps of stairway, winding dizzily upwards, only to close in an impossible leap: there was no end to the fantastic outlines and the suggestions of destruction.
Here the northern boundary of the Plateau Province is found, for mesas and high table-lands are found on either side of the river. On the east side of the Green, mesas and plateaus have irregular escarpments with points extending into the valleys, and between these points canyons come down that head in the highlands. Everywhere the escarpments are fringed with outlying buttes.
At present there is no source whence this immense accumulation of sand could proceed; but if, as I believe, the upper escarpments once formed the shores of an estuary, in that case the sandstone formation of the river Negro would have afforded an inexhaustible supply of sand, which would naturally have accumulated on the northern shore, as on every part of the coast open to the south winds between Bahia Blanca and Buenos Ayres.
I observed similar low sloping fringes on several parts of the coast, both northward of Valparaiso and near Coquimbo; but at this latter place, from the change in form which the coast has undergone since the old escarpments were worn, it may be doubted whether the sea, acting for any length of time at its present level, would eat into the land; for it now rather tends to throw up great masses of sand.
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