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Updated: June 9, 2025
Scrope supposes, to a high degree of fluidity, were able to extend to great distances in extensive sheets, and were afterwards covered by repeated and widely-spread flows of basalt; so that the trachyte towards the margin of the volcanic area becomes less conspicuous than the basalt by which it is more or less concealed from view, or overlapped.
What manner of an island king was he who ruled the builders of the great terraced platforms of stone, the carvers of the huge blocks of lava, the hewers-out with rudest tools of the Sphinx-like images of trachyte, whose square, massive, and disdainful faces have for unnumbered centuries gazed upwards and outwards over the rolling, sailless swell of the mid-Pacific?
The man told us that the "worked stones," as he called them, were on the side of the plain we had crossed. Before going to look at them, we went down to the river to see the waterfall. Just opposite the house the Juigalpa river, which comes flowing down over a flat bed of trachyte, leaps down a deep narrow chasm that it has cut in the hard rock.
Built upon a small hill from blocks of trachyte, it consists of twelve terraces rising one above another, and connected by staircases. The uppermost terrace, fifteen metres in diameter, has a dome. Each gallery is surrounded by a wall adorned with niches in handsome settings, each containing a life-sized Buddha, with legs crossed, soles turned downward.
Everything possible had been done to convert that tongue of land, that refractory stretch of trachyte, into a garden. Paths were blasted through the rock; those few scarred olives, the aboriginals, had been supplanted by whatever flowers and shade-giving trees could be induced, with assiduous waterings, to strike roots into the arid soil. It was still rather a transparent place.
This trachyte forms a cliff-bounded, horizontal, narrow strip on the steep southern side of the valley, at the height of four or five hundred feet above the river-bed; judging from an apparently corresponding line of cliff on the northern side, the valley must once have been filled up to this height by a field of lava.
In the southern parts, as near Csik Szereda, the trachyte encloses large masses, sometimes forming even small hillocks, of that variety of which millstones are made, having quartz crystals disseminated through it, and in general indurated by silicious matter in so fine a state of division that the parts are nearly invisible.
Humboldt, also, has described little cavities, which he compares to the tails of comets, behind sphaerulites in laminated obsidian rocks from Mexico, and Mr. Scrope has described other cavities behind fragments embedded in his laminated trachyte, and which he supposes to have been produced during the movement of the mass.
The latter substance seems to be the result of a kind of sublimation which took place at the moment of the formation of the trachyte.... Distinct craters are only seen at the southern extremity of the chain. One of the finest observed by Dr Boné was to the south of Tusnad. It was of great size and well characterised, surrounded by pretty steep and lofty hills composed of trachyte.
Presently the quartz made way for long lines and broad patches of a yellow-white, heat-altered clay, often revetted with iron, and passably aping the nobler rock: from one reef I picked up what appeared to be trachyte, white like that of Shaghab.
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