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At several places, the water of springs or underground streams gushed forth, in natural rock-basins, or from under projecting ledges. At one spot, there was a dainty basin of limestone into which a pretty veil of spring water fell gracefully. We crossed and recrossed the stream many times.
No great elevation is attained nothing above 160 feet; the grandeur of the coasts, which certainly does not equal that of North Cornwall, consists in their rugged wildness and the fantastic weathering of their crags. Contorted formations, logans and rock-basins, reveal the decomposition of softer measures that has been proceeding for ages.
"We've got hold and can't let go, and Raoul has hold and can't let go. He can't get away, and we're liable to starve to death holding him." "If the rain came, the rock-basins would fill," said Mauriri. It was their first twenty-four hours without water. "Big Brother, to-night you and I will get water. It is the work of strong men."
In those glacier meadows that take the places of shallow lakes which have been fed by feeble streams, glacier mud and fine vegetable humus enter largely into the composition of the soil; and on account of the shallowness of this soil, and the seamless, water-tight, undrained condition of the rock-basins, they are usually wet, and therefore occupied by tall grasses and sedges, whose coarse appearance offers a striking contrast to that of the delicate lawn-making kind described above.
And here and there, even at half-tide level, deep rock-basins, shaded from the sun and always full of water, keep up in a higher zone the vegetation of a lower one, and afford in nature an analogy to those deep "barrancos" which split the high table-land of Mexico, down whose awful cliffs, swept by cool sea-breezes, the traveller looks from among the plants and animals of the temperate zone, and sees far below, dim through their everlasting vapour-bath of rank hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colours of a tropic forest.
The water was rushing rapidly down the glen; we found several fine rock-basins one in particular was nine or ten feet deep, the pellucid element descending into it from a small cascade of the rocks above; this was the largest sheet of water per se I had yet discovered upon this expedition.
As some of these rock-basins are 500, others more than 2000 feet deep, having their bottoms in some cases 500, in others 1000 feet below the level of the sea, and having areas from 20 to 50 miles in length and from 4 to 12 in breadth, we may well be startled at the boldness of this hypothesis. The following are the facts and train of reasoning which induced M. de Mortillet to embrace these views.
No profane unfriendly eye should be near, the sun must be bright, the air soft, the green transparent sea should ripple smoothly over the rocks, as I see it below me now, welling rhythmically into rock-basins and plashing out with a charge of bubbling air and a delicious murmur of satisfied physiological relief.
A large proportion of the smaller lakes are dammed up by barriers of unstratified drift, having the exact character of the moraines of glaciers, and are termed by geologists "morainic," but some of them are true rock-basins, and would hold water even if all the loose drift now resting on their margins were removed.
I was not ignorant of the fact that there was an excellent chance of the water being unhealthful, possibly poisoned, what with the tertiary deposits of copper ores in the rock-basins; but the thought awakened hope rather than fear. There is a choice even in death. But when I had pulled Harry up and descended myself I soon found that there was no danger or chance.
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