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Updated: June 7, 2025
These plains are swamps at times, and they are flanked by ridges of denudation some 200 or 300 feet above them, and covered with trees. The ridges are generally hardened sandstone, marked with madrepores, and masses of brown haematite. It is very hot, and we become very tired. There is no system in the Arab marches.
But the rarer forms of Actinias, Star-fishes, Sepioles, Madrepores, Annelidae, and Zoophytes, of a thousand shapes, live on the bottom, in deep water, and must be captured there. For this purpose we must dredge from a boat, under sail. The naturalist's dredge is an improved oyster-dredge, with each of the two long sides of the mouth made into a scraping lip of iron.
On reaching Gonye, Mokwala, the head man, having presented me with a tusk, I gave it to Pitsane, as he was eagerly collecting ivory for the Loanda market. The rocks of Gonye are reddish gray sandstone, nearly horizontal, and perforated by madrepores, the holes showing the course of the insect in different directions.
The edge of the reef is formed of great shapeless masses of branching Madrepores, which chiefly consist of two species, apparently M. corymbosa and pocillifera, mingled with a few other kinds of coral. These masses are separated from each other by the most irregular gullies and cavities, into which the lead sinks many feet.
In the first group, the tubipores, were gorgones arranged like a fan, soft sponges of Syria, ises of the Moluccas, pennatules, an admirable virgularia of the Norwegian seas, variegated unbellulairae, alcyonariae, a whole series of madrepores, which my master Milne Edwards has so cleverly classified, amongst which I remarked some wonderful flabellinae oculinae of the Island of Bourbon, the "Neptune's car" of the Antilles, superb varieties of corals in short, every species of those curious polypi of which entire islands are formed, which will one day become continents.
But, to keep the place clean and sweet, the crabs picked up all the scraps off the floor and ate them like so many monkeys; while the rocks were covered with ten thousand sea anemones, and corals and madrepores, who scavenged the water all day long, and kept it nice and pure.
You have seen the room in the British Museum full of corals, madrepores, brain-stones, corallines, and sea-ferns? Oh yes. Then fancy all those alive. Not as they are now, white stone: but covered in jelly; and out of every pore a little polype, like a flower, peeping out. Fancy them of every gaudy colour you choose.
But the Coral wall continues its steady progress; for here the lighter kinds set in, the Madrepores, the Millepores, and a great variety of Sea-Fans and Corallines, and the reef is crowned at last with a many-colored shrubbery of low feathery growth.
On the western declivity of the hill of Cabo Blanco, the gneiss is covered with a formation of sandstone, or conglomerate, extremely recent. This sandstone combines angular fragments of gneiss, quartz, and chlorite, magnetical sand, madrepores, and petrified bivalve shells. Is this formation of the same date as that of Punta Araya and Cumana?
You ascend, you descend, you seem to go out of the building, you seem to return, twisting about a cornice to follow the curves of a bell-tower, and walking through thick walls in tortuous passages that might be compared to the capillary tubes of madrepores, or to the roads made by insects in the barks of trees.
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