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The water below was slaty gray, in response to the gray sky above: there seemed no life in either. The hearts of the girls sank within them, and all at once they felt tired. In the air was just one sign of life: high above the lake wheeled a large fish-hawk. "Look!" said Alister pointing; "there is the osprey that lives here with his wife! He is just going to catch a fish!"
Recollection of what had passed evolved itself an instant later, and just as they entered the door through which another and sadder burden had been carried but a few instants before her eyes caught sight of the south-western sky, and, without heeding, saw white sunlight shining in shaft-like lines from a rift in a slaty cloud.
§ V. The true gable, as it is the simplest and most natural, so I esteem it the grandest of roofs; whether rising in ridgy darkness, like a grey slope of slaty mountains, over the precipitous walls of the northern cathedrals, or stretched in burning breadth above the white and square-set groups of the southern architecture.
Further on, the path, striking over broken divides and long tracts of stony ground, became rough riding: it was bordered by the usual monotonous, melancholy hills of reddish and greenish trap, whose slaty and schist-like edges in places stood upright. On the summit of the last Col appeared the ruins of an outwork, a large square and a central heap of boulder-stones.
It doesn't matter in the least when it was, only I may as well say when, any more than it does that everybody who knew my father, including Doctor Chowne of Ripplemouth, said he must be mad to go and buy, at the sale of Squire Allworth's estate, a wild chasm of a place, all slaty rock and limestone crag and rift and hollow, with a patch of scraggy oak-trees here, some furze and heath there, and barely enough grass to feed half a dozen sheep, and that, even if it was cheap, because no one else would buy it, he was throwing good money away.
Wherever these slaty feldspathic rocks abound, greenstone seems common; at the C. of Quillota a bed of well-crystallised greenstone lay conformably in the midst of the feldspathic slate, with the upper and lower junctions passing insensibly into it.
In the basal parts of the series, and especially towards the flanks of the range, mud, since converted into a feldspathic slaty rock, and sometimes into greenstone, was occasionally deposited between the beds of erupted matter: with this exception the uniformity of the porphyritic rocks is very remarkable.
Nor should it be forgotten that, as a general rule, the less crystalline rocks do really occur in the upper, and the more crystalline in the lower part of each metamorphic series. Definition of slaty Cleavage and Joints. Supposed Causes of these Structures. Crystalline Theory of Cleavage. Mechanical Theory of Cleavage. Condensation and Elongation of slate Rocks by lateral Pressure.
Yet I asked myself if I was not depending too much on this change in the rock. Might I not myself be mistaken? Were we really crossing the layers of rock which overlie the granite foundation? The name given by Sir Roderick Murchison to a vast series of fossiliferous strata, which lies between the non-fossiliferous slaty schists below and the old red sandstone above.
Many fragments of red, gray, and purple basalt and porphyry were met with along the beach; talcose rock and slate, syenite, hornblend, quartz, both compact and slaty, with chalcedony, were found in pieces and large pebbles.
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