GEOLOGY AND SCENERY OF NORTHEAST COAST 1351 
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, 
