hill: geology of JAMAICA. 19 



The Mountains of the Interior, — These comprise the Bhie Mountain 

 Ridge, which dominates the topography of the eastern third of the 

 island, and certain peculiar isolated summits to the west of the Blue 

 Mountains proper, such as Jerusalem Mountain, Westmoreland, and 

 the Clarendon (Bull Head) Mountains of Clarendon Parish. The 

 isolated groups occur as limited iuliers, surrounded and overlooked by 

 hills of the limestone plateau. 



The Blue Mountains form a sinuous divide with many bifurcating 

 branches. They extend one third the length of the island, from near 

 the eastern point towards Port Maria, and have a trend of north of west, 

 parallel to the truncated northeast coast of the island. In general^ this 

 ridge marks the boundary between the eastern parishes of the north 

 side (Portland and St. Mary) and those of the south (St. Thomas, St. 

 Andrew, and St. Catherine). It presents a serrated crest line with 

 radiating laterals whose summits culminate near the centre of the ridge 

 in the Blue Mountain Peaks (alt. 7,360 feet).-^ West of these peaks the 

 altitudes gradually decrease until they become lower than those of the 

 surrounding limestone hills beneath which the mountain structure was 

 buried in ancient times. Everywhere the ridge and numerous laterals 

 which project from it at right angles present the profile of an inverted 

 letter V, thus A. Its configuration is singularly free from benches, 

 mesa tops, or vertical escarpments, the last seldom occurring except as 

 the bluffs immediately adjacent to the present stream beds. 



Imagination pictures no more exquisite scenery than that which 

 attends the ascent of Blue Mountain Peak. With increasing altitude 

 panorama after panorama of tropical landscape unfolds in rapid succes- 

 sion. At Gordontown, nine miles north of Kingston, where the interior 

 margin of the Liguanea Plain meets the mountain front, the ascent 

 through the red-colored cliffs of the Hope River Canyon begins, which 

 here, at an altitude of 900 feet, debouches into the gravel plain through 

 a boca. A thousand feet above, the white buildings of Newcastle Bar- 

 racks look like doves upon a housetop, yet we climb so far above 

 them that they seem like toy houses below. At 2,000 feet the Plain 

 of Liguanea with its city and villages and the shipping of Kingston 

 Harbor, grow smaller and smaller, and finally appear like a diminutive 

 plaza below us. Sometimes our path clings to the side of steep de- 

 clivities, with an apparently endless slope above and a bottomless chasm 

 below. Again, it follows a knife edge from which we can see beyond, 

 on both sides of the island, the waters of the Caribbean, so distant and 



1 Altitudes given in this report are mostly from the Jamaican surveys. 



