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Updated: June 15, 2025
On issuing thence it dwindled to a mere goat track which ran uphill and downhill, scaling cliffs and dropping into gorges, the shaly soil at every step slipping away from under the feet of men, mules and bullocks, retarding the advance of the two former and almost bringing the latter to a standstill.
Save for my own plight and the marks upon the mud, there was nothing to prove that what I said was true. Six weeks have now elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, grey with shaly rock, and yonder on its flank is the dark cleft which marks the opening of the Blue John Gap. But it is no longer a source of terror.
The farther in you go, the more shaly the black rock seems to get, and in some places we were forced to roof the drift with mine props in order to keep the ceiling up. I was bending over, chopping the end of a plank, when I was violently knocked down. In falling I struck my head against the rough wall, cutting myself badly over the left eye.
But the Matterhorn, after all, is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so.
Some of the layers, or strata, are fifty or sixty feet thick, and some are hardly thicker than paper. On top of each one is a stratum of sandstone or dark-gray shale. This was made by the sand and mud which were brought in by the water. These shaly rocks split easily into sheets and show beautiful fossil impressions of ferns.
The reader has no doubt often handled a piece of hard clay when fresh from the quarry, and has remembered how that, when he has been breaking it up, in order, perhaps, to excavate a partially-hidden fossil, it has readily split up in thin flakes or layers of shaly substance. This exhibits, on a small scale, the chief peculiarity of the coal shales.
Some of the fossils which I collected were found a good way down the western slope of the main ridge, and hence must originally have been covered up by a great thickness of the black shaly rock, independently of the now denuded, thick, overlying masses of red sandstone.
Beneath the black slates above described of the Llandeilo formation, Graptolites are still found in great variety and abundance, and the characteristic genera of shells and trilobites of the Lower Silurian rocks are still traceable downward, in Shropshire, Cumberland, and North and South Wales, through a vast depth of shaly beds, in some districts interstratified with trappean formations of contemporaneous origin; these consist of tuffs and lavas, the tuffs being formed of such materials as are ejected from craters and deposited immediately on the bed of the ocean, or washed into it from the land.
Catherine, and the fringing ranges of Mayumba-land, a blue line of heights based upon gently rising banks, ruddy and white, probably of shaly clay.
After searching for half an hour, they found a spot where a wall of shaly rock barred their way. At one spot some of this had fallen in, forming a sort of shallow cave, some three feet deep. "This is not a bad beginning, Roger, but we must try and make it a great deal more snug." They first cut down some young fir poles, and placed them so as to form a sort of penthouse against the wall.
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