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Updated: June 20, 2025
At one place we found some rounded boulders from six to eight inches in diameter, which were partly hollow, and broken open were found to contain most beautiful crystals of quartz, clear as purest ice. The inside was certainly very pretty, and it was a mystery how it came there. I have since learned that such stones are found at many points, and that they are called geodes.
The material worked was evidently the pink-coloured and silver-scaled micaceous schist; but there was also a whitish quartz, rich in geodes and veinlets of dark-brown and black dust. Another sign of superior labour is shown by the quartz-crushing implements.
The crystals are very sharp and of all sizes, ranging from half an inch to three and a half inches in length, the larger sizes being conspicuously abundant. The entire region is an enormously large, perfectly formed, and undamaged geode. In reality, the whole cave is a great cluster of connected geodes, and a similar work probably does not exist, but if it does, has never been discovered.
It is here where the minerals are found in this crumbly chlorite, and generally in geodes that is, the faces of the minerals all point inward, formerly a spherical mass rough and uncouth on the outside, and from half an inch to nearly a foot in diameter. These are valuable finds, and well worth digging for.
It is said that these decomposed rocks abound with gems of various kinds, often in a fractured state, owing, as some have supposed, to the collapse of geodes, and that they contain gold and diamonds.
Not the least curious part of this outcrop is the black thread of iron silicate which, broken in places, subtends it to the east: some specimens have geodes yielding brown powder, and venal cavities lined with botryoidal quartz of amethystine tinge. In other parts of the same hills we found, running along the "Mara," single and double lines of this material, which looked uncommonly like slag.
CONCRETIONS. Ground water seeping through the pores of rocks may gather minerals disseminated throughout them into nodular masses called concretions. Thus silica disseminated through limestone is gathered into nodules of flint. While geodes grow from the outside inwards, concretions grow outwards from the center. Nor are they formed in already existing cavities as are geodes.
Numerous facts, as in the case of geodes, and of cavities in silicified wood, in primary rocks, and in veins, show that crystallisation is much favoured by space.
The mouth of the northern gorge was blocked by a vein of finely crystallized carbonate of lime, containing geodes and bunches. The taste is astringent, probably from the alumina; and it is based upon outcrops of a sandy calcaire apparently fit for hydraulic cement.
They say he hates trouble; but he took her all round the top of the mountain, hammering stones for her to find a geode." "That's the newest dodge," said Mrs. Thoresby, with a little sarcastic laugh. "Girls of that sort are always looking for geodes." After this, Mrs. Thoresby had always a little well-bred venom for Leslie Goldthwaite.
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