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There was also a good deal of green-stone and gneiss, and some of the spires of these that shot up to a considerable height were particularly striking and picturesque objects. But the great sight of the day's excursion was that which unexpectedly greeted their eyes on rounding a cape towards which they had been walking for several hours.
ACTINOLITE SCHIST is a slaty foliated rock, composed chiefly of actinolite, an emerald-green mineral, allied to hornblende, with some admixture of garnet, mica, and quartz. MICA-SCHIST or MICACEOUS SCHIST is, next to gneiss, one of the most abundant rocks of the metamorphic series. It is slaty, essentially composed of mica and quartz, the mica sometimes appearing to constitute the whole mass.
In the course of my journey I found only the springs of Cumangillas hotter than the thermal waters of Las Trincheras: they are situated on the south of Porto Cabello. The former issue from a granite with large grains, very regularly stratified; the latter from a rock of gneiss.
Following the same ridge, after a few miles of ascent over much broken gneiss rock, the Ghorkas led me aside to the top of a knoll, 9,300 feet high, covered with stunted bushes, and commanding a splendid view to the west, of the broad, low, well cultivated valley of the Tambur, and the extensive town of Dunkotah on its banks, about twenty-five miles off; the capital of this part of Nepal, and famous for its manufactory of paper from the bark of the Daphne.
"It may then interest you to know that the crest of the Alleghany Mountains, composed of granite, gneiss, and slates, is the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. You must not suppose that these mountains are everywhere as low as here; far down south-west, in North Carolina, there are summits more than six thousand feet high.
At the Garden the elevation is three thousand eight hundred and seventy-six feet, so we are looking down four thousand two hundred and five feet, over three-fourths of a mile. Immediately below us, to the right, we see the rugged gorge of gneiss in which flows Pipe Creek. A small break from Angel Plateau will be observed, where Garden Creek curves to enter Pipe Creek.
These were known as the Colombiere, the Grosse Tete, Tas de Pois, and the Marmotiers; each with its retinue of sunken reefs and needles of granitic gneiss lying low in menace. Happy the sailor caught in a storm and making for the shelter the little curves in the island afford, who escapes a twist of the current, a sweep of the tide, and the impaling fingers of the submarine palisades.
From Mon Lepcha we proceeded north-west towards Jongri, along a very open rounded bare mountain, covered with enormous boulders of gneiss, of which the subjacent rock is also composed. The soil is a thick clay full of angular stones, everywhere scooped out into little depressions which are the dry beds of pools, and are often strewed with a thin layer of pebbles.
I repeatedly ascended the north flank of Tukcham along a watercourse, by the side of which were immense slips of rocks and snow-beds; the mountain-side being excessively steep. Some of the masses of gneiss thus brought down were dangerously poised on slopes of soft shingle, and daily moved a little downwards.
Tertiary deposits also appear in a less elevated position on the flanks of the Eastern Alps; but in the Central or Swiss Alps, the Palaeozoic and older Mesozoic formations disappear, and the Cretaceous, Oolitic, Liassic, and at some points even the Eocene strata, graduate insensibly into metamorphic rocks, consisting of granular limestone, talc-schist, talcose- gneiss, micaceous schist, and other varieties.
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