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The ore, when dug, was transported, most probably on horses' backs, to the adjacent districts for the convenience of fuel. For it was easier to carry the mineral to the wood then exclusively used for smelting' than to bring the wood to the mineral. Hence the numerous heaps of scoriae found in the neighbourhood of Leeds, at Middleton, Whitkirk, and Horsforth all within the borough.
That the mine was worked for gold seems quite probable, inasmuch as a lump of mineral containing a considerable quantity of the precious metal was picked up near the entrance some years ago. Besides the scoriae, I found upon the hillside much broken pottery, and from the shape of several fragments it was easy to restore the form of earthenware pots which were probably used for smelting purposes.
Beyond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out, ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs and grass.
Along these immense fissures in the earth's rock-crust there appear, in place of small scoriae cones, great volcanoes, built up through the ages by a series of powerful eruptions, and only ceasing to spout fire themselves when the portion of the great crack upon which they lie is closed.
I scarcely hesitate to affirm that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters. These consist either of lava and scoriae, or of finely-stratified, sandstone-like tuff.
This area of tufa cones, dark and grey basalt, clinkers, scoriae, fine ash, and ferruginous basalt, is something gigantic.
A block weighing 200 tons is said to have been thrown nine miles by Cotopaxi; masses of rock weighing as much as twenty tons to have been ejected by Mount Ararat in 1840; and stones to have been hurled to a distance of thirty-six miles in other cases. The solid matter thrown out by volcanoes consists of lapilli, scoriae, dust and bombs.
There might be fissures, and even some outflows of molten rock; but without imprisoned gases, and especially without water and water-vapour producing explosive outbursts, could any such amount of scoriae and ashes be produced as were necessary for the building up of the vast volcanic cones, craters, and craterlets we see upon the moon's surface.
The friendship of Jonathan for David comes like a breath of pure air in the midst of the heavy-laden atmosphere of hate and mad fury, or like some clear fountain sparkling up among the sulphurous slag and barren scoriae of a volcano.
While I was myself on this peak on January 25, 1854, I saw the wind, though it was not stormy weather, removing sand and dust derived from the decomposing scoriae. There had been frost in the night, and some ice was still seen in the crevices of the rock.
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