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Updated: June 8, 2025
The mind shrinks from the contemplation of a subject that carries it back to a period of time so very remote; for if the rock, syenite, always possessed its present solidity and hardness, the action of the water alone might require millions of years to produce such a result!
It is rumored again that a survey is soon to be made through the heaviest portion of the Black Canon of the Gunnison. For a long distance the walls of syenite rise to the stupendous height of 3,000 feet, and for 1,800 feet the walls of the canon are arched not many feet from the bed of the river.
From this point we followed the bank of the Nile over a difficult route, down steep ravines and up precipitous crags, by a winding path along the foot of the range of syenite hills that hemmed in the river on the west bank. Several considerable waterfalls added to the grandeur of the pass, through which for many miles the angry Nile chafed and roared like a lion in its confined den.
There is very little true granite in New England, what is taken for it commonly being syenite, a rock indeed that differs from granite only in the substitution of hornblend for mica. The so-called Quincy granite is a finer sort of syenite, and the White Mountains are composed of syenite capped with granite.
The ground rose into grander waves hills cropped out here and there great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes.
Near the Pacific, the mountain-ranges are generally formed of syenite or granite, and or of an allied euritic porphyry; in the low country, besides these granitic rocks and greenstone, and much gneiss, there are, especially northward of Valparaiso, some considerable districts of true clay-slate with quartz veins, passing into a feldspathic and porphyritic slate; there is also some grauwacke and quartzose and jaspery rocks, the latter occasionally assuming the character of the basis of claystone porphyry: trap-dikes are numerous.
There are important soapstone quarries in the Gudbransdal and the Trondhjem basin; green colored slate in the Valders and at Vossevangen; and granite, syenite, and porphyry in many parts of the country. Measured by population and national wealth, the commerce of Norway is relatively important, due in a large measure to her enormous merchant marine and the efficiency of her hardy seamen.
You say the stone can be pointed out. It is a matter of surprise to me that the stones used in many places in your old walls about churchyards and old buildings are so varied in character: there are, for instance, red and grey granite, syenite, the older sandstones, but all of the older geological formations.
The commander himself succeeded in landing, though with great difficulty, on one of these islands, where he collected some specimens of the syenite of which the soil is composed, and a small quantity of red snow, in every respect similar to that found by explorers in the Arctic regions. Of far greater interest, however, was the survey made in 1830 by the whaler John Biscoe.
Waiting, usually a hard task for the busy architect, became a pleasure in this spot; for the rays streaming lavishly in all directions from the diadem of the sovereign sun flooded with dazzling radiance the thousands of white marble statues on the temples and colonnades, and were reflected from the surfaces of the polished granite of the obelisks and the equally smooth walls of the white, yellow, and green marble, the syenite, and the brown, speckled porphyry of sanctuaries and palaces.
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