CHAP. 5.] KADAPAH FORMATION.—KISTNAH BEDS. 255 
great thickness of slates, &c., beneath, producing a most picturesquely 
trenched area of elevated land. 
The best sections are exposed about Sreeshalum itself, and a de- 
scription of the rocks here seen will suffice for all. 
ae ee Highest are the coarsish, light colored quartzites, 
grits and sands on which the pagodas are built. These shade down by 
thinner beds into sandy flags and slaty shales of no great thickness, 
some 40 or 60 feet, and. then come other coarse grits and sands, and 
whiter and finer beds in another thin band. 
Subjacent to these generally white quartzite sands, and grandly 
exposed im the course of the river and its tribu- 
Sapa dd taries among the hills west of Sreeshalum, comes 
a thick series of red and purple earthy and sandy slates, with compacter 
beds, and some thick intercalated bands of quartzites, which must be, in 
the Kistnah area, from 600 to 800 feet in thickness. These slates are very 
well displayed in the valley of the Kolumnullah, to the south of Sree- 
shalum, on the pilgrims’ road from the Kurnool district. After ascending 
the ridge of quartzites above Peddacherroo,* one descends over the slates, 
which are here dipping down to the north-east rather irregularly. They are 
red, or sometimes black-brown, sandy, earthy, and occasionally smooth 
-and compact, with numerous thin beds of tesselated and ferruginous 
sandstones. To the left of the road. there is a grand flat-topped hill 
formed of this group of rocks, and scarped all round the summit in 
cliffs of 100-200 feet of the upper quartzites. Near what appears to 
be the bottom of the valley, the ferruginous quartzites and tesselated 
sandstones come to the surface again tolerably flat, and last up to the 
brink of a precipitous-sided gorge which the Kolumnullah has here cut 
into the lower beds, the same as those at the base of the Peddacherroo 
ridge. The stone-built path winds down to the bottom of this ravine, 
* A large tank in the midst of the jungle past which the pilgrims’ road from Kurnool 
runs. There is no village now, only a few huts of Chensullah people, 
a peculiar tribe 
dwelling in a half nomadic style on the Nullamullays. 
ر .7:259( 
