Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 21, 2025
I leaped up on the rock; my uncle lightly followed, while our hunter remained at his post, like a man too wise ever to be astonished. We walked upon granite mingled with siliceous tufa. The soil shivers and shakes under our feet, like the sides of an overheated boiler filled with steam struggling to get loose. We come in sight of a small central basin, out of which the geyser springs.
Pliny remarks that the Scipios had the singular custom of burying instead of burning their dead; and this is confirmed by the discovery of these sarcophagi. I found the mausoleum to consist of a series of chambers and approaches to them, excavated in the solid tufa rock, not unlike the labyrinthine recesses of the catacombs.
There is abundant evidence of the existence and extent of this vast lake in the longitudes indicated, and stretching from 17 Deg. to 21 Deg. south latitude. The whole of this space is paved with a bed of tufa, more or less soft, according as it is covered with soil, or left exposed to atmospheric influences.
Now after having brought together all the usages of the word aedes in its application to the temple of Praeneste, it seems that Delbrueck has very small foundation for his argument which assumes as settled the exact meaning and location of the aedes Fortunae. From the temple itself we turn now to a brief discussion of a space on the tufa wall which helps to face the cave on the west.
If nature first scooped out this nook level with the sea, and then filled it up to a depth of two hundred to three hundred feet with volcanic tufa, forming a precipice of that height along the shore, I can understand how the present state of things came about. This plain is not all level, however.
It was a gloomy place, that mine, and opened out into strange cavernous places, eaten away by water, or by strange crackings and subsidences of the earth, in the far distant ages when the boiling springs of the volcanic regions were depositing the beds of tufa, here of immense thickness, springs which are still in evidence, but no longer to pour out waters that scald, but of a gentle lukewarm or tepid temperature, which go on depositing their suspended stone to this day, though in a feeble, sluggish manner.
The south wall of this last-mentioned temple, built of huge square blocks of tufa, to which the marble plan of Rome was fastened by metal hooks, may still be seen in the church; and it is interesting as being the last pagan temple which remained in use in Rome. Here was the last struggle of paganism with the unbelief which itself inspired. The gods of the Pantheon had lost all significance.
There is the Enchanted Mesa, with its sister mesa of Acoma islands of rock, sheer precipice of yellow tufa for hundreds of feet amid the Desert sand, light shimmering like a stage curtain, herds exaggerated in huge, grotesque mirage against the lavender light, and Indian riders, brightly clad and picturesque as Arabs, scouring across the plain; all this reachable two hours' drive from a main railroad.
Neither the arenaria or sand quarries, nor those for the building stone were ever employed for excavation to make catacombs, whereas the granular tufa has been so largely excavated for this purpose that if the galleries were continued in one line, it has been reckoned that they would stretch the entire length of the Italian peninsula.
Of the white earth abounding on every side, which has given to the place the old name of Campi Leucogæi, and is the result of the metamorphosis of the trachytic tufa by the chemical action of the gases that rise up through the fumaroles, a very fine variety of porcelain known to collectors as Capo di Monti used to be made on the hill behind Naples, and it has been supposed that the china clays of Cornwall and other places have been produced from the felspars of the granites in a similar way.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking