14- KING : COASTAL "REGION OP THE GODAVAR.I DISTRICT. 



or even fibrous and then somewhat silky, though it is never quite a 

 schist, or again tolerably massive. Sometimes the felspar predominates 

 to such an extent that there are seams and even thick beds of what might 

 be called a felspar rock, the murchisonite being then massive and granular. 

 At other times, the rock is more like a granite with the felspar in 

 largish crystalline masses ; but usually when granitoid; it is a coarse 

 granular aggregate of felspar, less quartz, and a little mica. Garnets 

 are very frequently distributed through it, often to such an extent that 

 it may be called a garnetiferous gneiss, as at Bezvada where the rock 

 is often crowded with small crystals of bright red and purple colours 

 which are only wanting in size to render them beautiful and valuable 

 stones. Here also, and in the Augurpali country, there is a good deal of 

 graphite thinly scattered through the rock, giving at times graphite 

 schists or massive graphitic rock with the graphite in minute scales. 



The felspar is generally reddish or a pale salmon colour weathering 

 lighter, but it is frequently of a decided red, even rosy-red, and then, on 

 well worn and smoothed surfaces it has somewhat the look of rhodonite 

 while it has nearly always a fine pearly silvery or bright bronze sheen. 



When weathered, the gneiss often presents, particularly in the Vizaga- 

 patam country, the most startling imitations of ferruginous sandstone, 

 the garnets being so crowded together that there is a difficulty in recog- 

 nising them as separate masses after they are decomposed. Even long 

 before I took up work in this district, and at the time I was re-arranging 

 the specimens in the Madras museum, my attention had been drawn to 

 specimens from Bezwada which were all labelled ' sandstones/ and yet 

 were obviously part and parcel of other fragments from the same quarries 

 which were unweathered garnetiferous gneiss. 



Kamthi sandstones. — The remaining rocks of the floor are brown ferru- 

 ginous, and variegated felspathic sandstones of this group of the lower 

 Gondwana formation, which are strongly developed in the hill country 

 to the east of Chintalpudi whence they stretched away northwards into 

 the eastern portion of the Nizam's dominions bordering the right bank 

 of the Godavari river. 

 ( 208 ) 



