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Updated: June 8, 2025
The material of the houses and defences are rough stones, the granites and sandstones of the hills, cemented, like the ancient Galla cities, with clay. The only large building is the Jami or Cathedral, a long barn of poverty-stricken appearance, with broken-down gates, and two white-washed minarets of truncated conoid shape.
I may here mention that I heard of great beds of gypsum in the Cordillera. The only novel point in this formation, is the presence of innumerable thin layers of rock-salt, alternating with the laminated and hard, but sometimes earthy, yellowish, or bright red and ferruginous sandstones. The thickest layer of salt was only two inches, and it thinned out at both ends.
After a time the shales and sandstones which had been piled above this stuff, which was to form coal for the future, were again elevated to form a land surface; upon this another forest sprang up, and by its decay produced another mass of vegetable matter fit to form coal.
I wonder whether the rocks or the trees were there first? there is evidence both ways, for in one place you will see a rock on the top of a tree, the tree creeping out from underneath it, and in another place you will see a tree on the top of a rock, clasping it with a network of roots and getting its nourishment, goodness knows how, for these are by no means tender, digestible sandstones, but uncommon hard gneiss and quartz which has no idea of breaking up into friable small stuff, and which only takes on a high polish when it is vigorously sanded and canvassed by the Ogowe.
Northward of Santa Fe, M. d'Orbigny met with ferruginous sandstones, marly rocks, and other beds, which he considers as a distinct and lower formation; but the evidence that they are not parts of the same with an altered mineralogical character, does not appear to me quite satisfactory.
Below the Millstone Grit is a continuation of similar sandstones and shales called by Professor Phillips the Yoredale series, from Yoredale, in Yorkshire, where they attain a thickness of from 800 to 1000 feet.
Like the Dalmatian Archipelago, it once formed part of the mainland, probably separated by the process that raised the maritime range. The rolling sandy plateau and the dwarf Wadys are strewed with trap and quartz, neither of which could have been generated by the new sandstones and the yellow corallines.
Humility at the grave extended even to the material of the gravestone. At Aberdeen, the Granite City, few of the last-century gravestones are of any better material than the soft sandstones which must have been imported from Elgin or the south. The rule of initials was almost universal.
Now, limestones are not formed in the same way in which we have seen that sandstones and shales are formed. The last two mentioned owe their origin to their deposition as sediment in seas, estuaries or lakes, but the masses of limestone which are found in the various geological formations owe their origin to causes other than that of sedimentary deposition.
Remains of Labyrinthodont reptiles have also been met with in the same slate near Durham. The inferior sandstones which lie beneath the marl-slate consist of sandstone and sand, separating the Magnesian Limestone from the coal, in Yorkshire and Durham. In some instances, red marl and gypsum have been found associated with these beds.
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