68 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OS, 



CHAPTER V. 



WE leave behind us the musical sand, and reach the point 

 of the promontory which forms the northern extremity of 

 the Bay of Laig. Wherever the beach has been swept bare, 

 we see it floored with trap-dykes worn down to the level, but 

 in most places accumulations of huge blocks of various com- 

 position cover it up, concealing the nature of the rock be- 

 neath. The long semicircular wall of precipice which, sweep- 

 ing inwards at the bottom of the bay, leaves to the inhabitants 

 between its base and the beach their fertile meniscus of land, 

 here abuts upon the coast. We see its dark forehead many 

 hundred feet overhead, and the grassy platform beneath, now 

 narrowed to a mere talus, sweeping upwards to its base from 

 the shore, steep, broken, lined thick with horizontal path- 

 ways, mottled over with ponderous masses of rock. 



Among the blocks that load the beach, and render our 

 onward progress difficult and laborious, we detect occasional 

 fragments of an amygdaloidal basalt, charged with a white 

 zeolite, consisting of crystals so extremely slender, that the 

 balls, with their light fibrous contents, remind us of cotton 

 apples divested of the seeds. There occur, though more 

 rarely, masses of a hard white sandstone, abounding in vege- 

 table impressions, which, from their sculptured markings, re- 

 call to memory the Sigilaria of the Coal Measures. Here 



