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When he saw Cyrène's brooch in these felonious hands his blood boiled up and he stamped his foot involuntarily on the rock. Horror! The loose shaly stones gave way with a rush beneath him. Down he slid into the cavern, saved in his descent only by the slope and ledges of the "fault." The astonished bandits fled back with a shout.
A few miles away, a mountain, neither very large nor very high, has met with some sad disaster that cleaved its stony shell, and so, time out of memory, the years have stolen into its being, and winter frosts have sadly cut it up, and all along its rocky ridges, and thickly at its base, lie beds of shaly fragments, as various in form and size as the autumn-leaves that November brings.
It is not at all a solitary road, for hundreds of long, heavy carts, resembling artillery waggons, encumber it, loaded with a gray shaly deposit dug out of the bay: a busy scene of men and women digging in the heavy sand, while the shaggy horses stand by, hanging their heads patiently under the blue-stained sheepskins about their necks.
Some of the varieties are quite black when freshly broken, but all weather into a yellowish-ash coloured, soft, earthy substance, precisely as is the case with the compact shaly rocks of the Peuquenes range. This stratum is of the same general nature with many of the beds near Los Hornos in the Illapel section.
The grass was dry, but high and dense; and buffalo tracks spread in every direction, particularly down the creeks, both to the eastward and westward. We followed a westerly creek in all its windings, in order to detect water in one of its rocky water-holes. The rock was shaly, of a greyish colour, like the clay shale of Newcastle above the layers of the coal, but more indurated.
Now, rivers would not bring down the dead vegetation alone; their usual burden of sediment would also be deposited at their mouths, and thus dead plants, sand, and clay would be mixed up together in one black shaly or sandy mass, a mixture which would be useless for purposes of combustion.
He has been good enough to do so; and in a letter dated September 26th, 1870, he informs me that "Indications of spore-cases are rare, except in certain coarse shaly coals and portions of coals, and in the roofs of the seams. The purer coals certainly consist principally of cubical tissues with some true woody matter, and the spore-cases, &c., are chiefly in the coarse and shaly layers.
At a distance of between only two and three miles the green mudstones and white indurated tuffs are to a great extent replaced by red sandstone and black calcareous shaly rocks, alternating together.
No grass was to be seen, and hardly any trees, except a few stunted silver birch. They walked inland for a mile or more to where the snow began, and then saw, as it were, one vast unwrinkled sheet of snow stretching upwards into a bank of cloud. The ground was all scree of slate and shaly rock. They saw no signs of habitancy, and few tracks of animals.
On the other side were two or three yards of level ground then a short steep preparatory slope then the verge of the precipice. On the slope was Knight, his hat on his head. He was on his hands and knees, trying to climb back to the level ground. The rain had wetted the shaly surface of the incline.
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