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Updated: September 21, 2025
Tufa may be found used in many existing monuments of ancient Rome, such as the drains of the middle and southern basin of the left bank, the channels and arches of the Marcia and Anio Vetus, the Servian walls, the temples of Fortuna Virilis, of Hercules Magnus Custos, the Rostra, the embankment of the Tiber, etc.
Others, like the Fox and the Rodents, dig out dwellings in the earth; even to-day there are regions where Man does not act otherwise, preparing himself a lodging by excavations in the chalk or the tufa.
The road which led up to it was called the Rio Blanca white river an appropriate name, as it was broad and deeply worn into the soft rock of which the ridge consisted. When we reached the crest, we found the ridge extending as a flat plain of light, buff-colored tufa, with many trails worn deeply into it, and giving out, under the bright sunshine, a frightful reflection of light and heat.
For not only is it built of Roman rubble or brick, the work of the Saxons, the Normans, and of us their successors, but it boasts also an arch of tufa, has an Early English vaulted chancel of two stories, and a Norman font upon which are carved scenes from the life of St Dunstan, to say nothing of a thirteenth-century tower.
At one of these river sources, you see the tufa in course of formation in the river bed; in the other, the reverse process takes place, the tufa there being dissolved. Both sites are poetic and lovely in the extreme.
But in spring-time the oleander can but display long greyish leaves and pods of snowy fluff, which is blown hither and thither like thistle-down on the air; and it is only in flaming summer that these regions are brightened by St Joseph’s flower, or by the still more gorgeous masses of the mesembryanthemum, which clambers on all sides over the lava rock and hangs in crimson festoons from tufa cliffs, making impossibly splendid splashes of colour in the landscape.
It is here the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heart of Navajo Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands 600, 1,000, 1,500 feet above the plains of yellow tufa and white gypsum rock, sides as sheer as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki villages.
This was as true of its plain, as of its mounds; and of its mounds, as of its plain. But the crater was composed of materials very different from the base of the Reef. The former was of tufa, so far as it was rock at all; while the latter was, in the main, pure lava. Nevertheless, something like a soil began to form even on the Reef, purely by the accessions caused though its use by man.
No visitor stands breathless as in the great hall of Karnak or in the once dreadful Coliseum at Rome, or dreams with sensuous delight as before the Jasmine Court at Agra. "The weirdness of the scene possesses us as a haunted chamber might. We have before us the narrow lanes, paved with tufa, in which Roman wagon wheels have worn deep ruts.
Unfortunately, this is not so in my case: you might as well try to dig a knife into a block of tufa. Other stratagems become necessary. Here are two which were successful: I recommend them to future Tarantula-hunters. I insert into the burrow, as far down as I can, a stalk with a fleshy spikelet, which the Spider can bite into. I move and turn and twist my bait.
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