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Updated: June 5, 2025
At six o'clock a little breeze sprang up, and when we came on deck at breakfast time, the schooner was skimming at the rate of five knots an hour over the level lanes of water, which lie between the silver-grey ridges of gneiss and mica slate that hem in the Nordland shore. The distance from Hammerfest to Alten is about forty miles, along a zigzag chain of fiords.
The surface, though level, is very uneven, being worn into hollows, and presenting ridges and hillocks of blown sand and gravel, with small black tufts of rhododendron. Enormous boulders of gneiss and granite were scattered over the surface; one of the ordinary size, which I measured, was seventy feet in girth, and fifteen feet above the ground, into which it had partly sunk.
A narrow path winding under high rocks of porphyritic gneiss brought me to the cascade called the Saut de la Saule, where the river, divided into two branches by a vast block, leaps fifteen or twenty feet into a deep basin to whirl and boil with fury, then dashes onward down the stony channel, to leap again into the air and fall into another basin.
The contortions of gneiss were similarly analogous, it was suggested, to those of the various forms of silica. Ruskin did not adopt the theory, but put it by for examination in contrast with the usual explanation of these phenomena, as the simple mechanical thrust of the contracting surface of the earth.
That they exist below at no great depth we can not doubt, for at some points, as in the Valorsine, near Mont Blanc, granite and granitic veins are observable, piercing through talcose gneiss, which passes insensibly upward into secondary strata.
It must be observed that all these phenomena of coloration have hitherto appeared in the torrid zone only, in rivers that have periodical overflowings, of which the habitual temperature is from twenty-four to twenty-eight centesimal degrees, and which flow, not over gritstone or calcareous rocks, but over granite, gneiss, and hornblende rocks.
Her method of forming coal, geysers and hot sulphur-springs, and the jewels, and the atols and coral reefs; the metamorphic rocks of sedimentary origin, like gneiss, the plutonic and volcanic rocks, rocks of fusion, and the unstratified masses which constitute the basis of the crust; and harvests, the burning flame of flowers, and the passage from the vegetable to the animal: I do not know them, but they are of her, and they are like me, molten in the same furnace of her fiery heart.
As at Chilolé hill, we have igneous rocks, apparently trap, capped with masses of beautiful white dolomite. We still ascend in altitude as we go westwards, and come upon long tracts of gneiss with hornblende. The gneiss is often striated, all the striae looking one way sometimes north and south, and at other times east and west.
Twice a year the judge and Lawyer Grayson rode down to court and crossed the old track of Sherman and his raiders, and coming back would tell of levelled fences and burned barns. For thirteen years they had gone down, and the barns and fences yet lay as Sherman left them, as unchanged as the gneiss rocks about them. On this day, however, they had a new subject to discuss.
5-Mica Granite Gneiss Country Rock near Caribou Ridge. In the hand specimen the rock has the same appearance as No. 4, if anything, it is somewhat more compact. The principal minerals are, plagioclase, biotite and microcline, with smaller quantities of quartz, iron oxide, pyroxene and garnet. The feldspar is decomposed with the resulting formation of epidote, which is quite prominent.
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