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Never-failing mountain streams, deep canons and dark forests wait to be visited and explored, while curiosities in animal and vegetable life abound. Not far off is a place here perfect geodes of chalcedony are found. Mining and ranching are the leading industries of the country and a visit to some neighboring mine or cattle ranch is not without interest to the novice.
I've seen 'em, dead, dull-lookin' round stones that'll crack open, chock full o' red garnits as an egg is o' meat." "Geodes!" cried Dakie Thayne. Jim Holden turned round and looked at him as if he thought he had got hold of some new-fashioned expletive, possibly a pretty hard one. They came down, now, on the other side of the Cliff, and struck the ford.
Here all was calcite crystal heavily massed in various forms, and a harmony of blue and brown, with half a dozen round, unbroken, perfect geodes hanging from the ceiling like oriole nests.
What have we got to do with the beautiful? We've done with the beautiful for ever. I feel as if I never wanted to see anything beautiful again. And you'll have to spend your time collecting geodes to send back for the miserable trash. I hate those old sea-weeds. You left everything we owned to perish in that fire, and brought away only that case of sea-weeds.
No caves have been discovered in the Bad Lands, unless that name be applied to some of the geodes which are really grottoes, they being of sufficient size for a man to stand in.
The space between the two series of small stones is filled in with a sheet of melted granite, some twenty-four inches wide, resting on calcareous tufa. The whole mass is completely vitrified, and regular geodes or nodules lined with crystals and draped with pendent drops of melted rock have been produced.
These slabs are composed of crystals of uniform size and of a pale green tint. But the geodes show some striking combinations of both crystals and colors with an exterior formed like box work, composed of a very heavy dark material said to be a mixture of barium, calcium and iron.
A crystal to be worth preserving should be about an inch in diameter, and as transparent as is attainable. They occur in clear wine-yellow-colored crystals, from a quarter to half an inch in length; they occur in the chlorite in geodes of variable sizes, but generally two and a half inches in diameter, and which, when carefully broken in half, showed beautiful grottoes of these crystals.
The beauty of vegetation denied those desolate buttes and ridges is atoned for by a marvelous abundance of most wonderful crystals of aragonite, calcite, barite and satin spar; each to itself, or two or more combined in beautiful geodes or else arranged in great flat slabs crystallized on both sides of a thin sheet of lime.
We picked up some fine specimens of cornelian, and saw a vast number of geodes of every size, from one inch in diameter to fifteen. "It was Sunday. Have you ever experienced the singular and pleasing associations connected with a sabbath passed in the wilderness? I have often enjoyed these feelings, but never felt them with such force as on this day. It was calm and sultry.
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