GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NOETHEAST COAST 131 



equally hardy mosses, but, in the main, the ledges seem as 

 bare of vegetation as if the sea had retreated from them 

 only yesterday. 



The bed-rocks of the Labrador are old-mountain rocks, 

 toughened in the early days when they lay in the heart of 

 the mountain-chain. They are giving pause to the greedy, 

 unending assault of the ocean wave, which is finding 

 on the present shore, as it found on the higher ones, 

 that, while glacial boulders are playthings, the bed-rock 

 offers work, grim, arduous work that must continue 

 many, many thousands of years before the stubborn head- 

 lands will yield to the onset. For this double reason, 

 first, the shortness of the time during which the emergence 

 took place, and, secondly, the sturdy resistance of the solid 

 rock to wave-battering, the newly emerged land bears 

 relatively few strong cliffs or other scenic forms cut by the 

 waves in the living rock. 



Nevertheless, where favourably situated weak bands oc- 

 curred in the formations of the old shores, the waves in- 

 fallibly sought them out and at many points excavated 

 strange caves and long, deep chasms along such seams of 

 softer material. To-day, hundreds of feet above the sea, 

 there may be seen these trenches floored with the tough 

 boulders with which the breakers used to cannonade the 

 coast. As one explores the silent, dark recesses, they seem 

 haunted by unnumbered ghosts of the seas that once tore 

 through the narrow gates and roared destruction to the 

 walls of the ever deepening chasms. 



The finest of these great clefts in the hillsides are gener- 

 ally located on the dikes of trap-rock that transect the 

 schists or granites of the Basement Complex. As a rule, 



