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Updated: June 13, 2025
I. Primary Plutonic rocks. II. Secondary Plutonic rocks. III. Tertiary Plutonic rocks. IV. Post-tertiary Plutonic rocks. 1. Primary fossiliferous or Palaeozoic strata. 2. Secondary or Mesozoic strata. 3. Tertiary or Cainozoic strata. 4. Post-tertiary strata. The oldest Plutonic rock, No. I, has been upheaved at successive periods until it has become exposed to view in a mountain-chain.
The largest lake found on it is 4200 feet above the level of the sea, and is connected with the Salt Lake of Utah. The mean elevation of the plain is about 6000 feet above the sea. A mountain-chain runs across it, and through it flows the large Colorado River, amidst gorges of the most picturesque magnificence.
In Bengal, where the monsoon is regular, and the alluvial soil moist, these things are almost as unknown as in England: but the arid plains of Hindustan, basking at the feet of the vastest mountain-chain in the world, become a perfect desert, at least once in every quarter of a century.
The inscriptions show that even a wider tract was in process of time absorbed by the conquerors; and if we are to draw a line between the country actually taken into Assyria, and that which was merely conquered and held in subjection, we can select no better boundary than the Euphrates westward, and northward the snowy mountain-chain known to the ancients as Mons Niphates.
Recurring to the evidence by which it was shown that some at least of the parallel ridges, which together compose the Cordillera, were successively and slowly upthrown at widely different periods; and that the whole range certainly once, and almost certainly twice, subsided some thousand feet, and being then brought up by a slow movement in mass, again, during the old tertiary formations, subsided several hundred feet, and again was brought up to its present level by a slow and often interrupted movement; we see how opposed is this complicated history of changes slowly effected, to the views of those geologists who believe that this great mountain-chain was formed in late times by a single blow.
They have steep rugged sides, apparently clothed with short herbage, but here and there exposing bare white patches. Their total length is about forty miles. In the Tear, towards the interior, they are succeeded by other ranges of hills communicating with the central mountain-chain of Guiana, which divides Brazil from Cayenne.
At six o'clock this morning we came in sight of the Red Sea. The mountain-chain of Mokattam can be discerned some time previously. Some way from Suez we came upon a well of bad, brackish water. Notwithstanding all drawbacks, the supply was eagerly hailed.
Battle on the Muthul Beyond the utterly barren mountain-range, over which lay the route of the Romans into the interior, a plain of eighteen miles in breadth extended as far as the river Muthul, which ran parallel to the mountain-chain. The plain was destitute of water and of trees except in the immediate vicinity of the river, and was only intersected by a hill-ridge covered with low brushwood.
From the point of juncture the suspended mass extends itself out horizontally in the air over cities built on the ridges, sides, and foot of the parent mountain-chain, and far beyond the extreme bounds of these cities, for miles over and parallel with the sea, at a height which from the lower cities makes the superincumbent mass rarely distinguishable from the illuminated clouds above.
When in that country I wondered how any mountain-chain could supply such masses and not have been utterly obliterated. We must not now reverse the wonder, and doubt whether all-powerful time can grind down mountains even the gigantic Cordillera into gravel and mud. The appearance of the Andes was different from that which I had expected.
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