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Updated: May 12, 2025
After parting from Pecan Creek, with their faces set westward, they had a journey before them anything but easy or pleasant. On the contrary, one of the most difficult and irksome. For it lay across a sterile tract the great gypsum bed of North-western Texas, on which abut the bluffs of the Llano Estacado.
As the gypsum often immediately covers the sandstone of Calabozo, which appeared to me, on the spot, to be identical with our red sandstone, I am uncertain of the age of its formation. The secondary rocks of the Llanos of Cumana, Barcelona and Caracas occupy a space of more than 5000 square leagues.
The white pumiceous mudstone, with its abundant gypsum, belongs to the same general epoch with the underlying fossiliferous mass, as may be inferred from the shells included in the intercalated layers at Nuevo Gulf, S. Julian, and S. Cruz.
One very large one, at whose western extremity we now were, runs most of the way across the top of the Peninsula, and is believed to have been the famous Serbonian Bog of the Classics. In places its surface gleams white with salt crystals, covering a mass of hard irregular lumps said to be formed of gypsum, which makes walking almost impossible.
This action of the killingias, paspalums and cenchri, which form the turf, is everywhere the same; but where the rock is ready to pierce the earth this varies according as it rests on red sandstone, or on compact limestone and gypsum; it varies according as periodical inundations accumulate mud on the lower grounds or as the shock of the waters carries away from the small elevations the little soil that has covered them.
One fine month of August, not a breath of wind had been blowing for a week or two, so that the mill-sails had not made a single turn; not a load of gypsum had been brought during the time, and Oliver was quite out of alabaster; though, as it happened, he much wanted a good supply, for a particular reason.
We are in the habit of imagining that our insight into the geology of the Eocene period is more than usually perfect, and we are certainly acquainted with an almost unbroken succession of assemblages of shells passing one into the other from the era of the Thanet sands to that of the Bembridge beds or Paris gypsum.
As the Munthdeeguns passed their totem-marked trees, or images, which would be those of the boys in their charge for each guardian was a relation of the same totem as his charge they would perform some magical feat, such as producing gubberahs, charcoal, gypsum, and so on, uttering as they did so a little chant about that totem. The boy's eyes are closed all this time and his head bent down.
The beds of gypsum, together with the red alternating sandstones and conglomerates, present so perfect and curious a resemblance with those seen in our former section in the basin-valley of Yeso, that I cannot doubt the identity of the two formations: I may add, that a little westward of the P. del Inca, a mass of gypsum passed into a fine-grained, hard, brown sandstone, which contained some layers of black, calcareous, compact, shaly rock, precisely like that seen in such vast masses on the Peuquenes range.
Limited patches of it are also exposed in each of the caves, generally carrying small quantities of selenite, which is crystallized gypsum, or in other words, crystallized sulphate of lime.
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