TERTIARY SANDSTONES, CLAYS, &C. 63 



The whole series presents a great consecutive accumulation, the 

 lower portion marked by greater hardness of the sandstones; their being, 

 in certain zones, much veined with calcareous spar, and possessing a 

 predominance of purple or red colours. Calcareous bands among the sand- 

 stones and clays, though seldom approaching to limestone in their 

 nature, are not uncommon. As the series ascends, the red tint is limited 

 to the clays and pseudo-conglomeratic concretionary beds, the sandstones 

 having more of a bluish or greenish-gray colour, and still higher the 

 clays become pink, drab, or orange, with occasional dark-gray layers. 

 Here the sandstones become very soft, often of a shining whitish-gray 

 colour within, or where crumbled down; and they contain strings of 

 small pebbles. The latter increase in size and quantity till they become 

 thick incoherent conglomerates or boulder beds sometimes cemented by 

 carbonate of lime. The travelled boulders include a variety of igneous 

 and schistose or crystalline rocks, believed to have been derived from the 

 interior of the Himalayan region. From their great hardness and 

 smooth forms these pebbles and boulders have in many cases long out- 

 lived the beds in which they were laid down, and now thickly strew the 

 ground, over large spaces, in which no boulder beds to furnish them 

 could be found. The parent beds, however, may be seen in situ on both 

 banks of the Indus near Makud and at the crags of Kaffir Kot in the 

 Waziri country.* 



The divisions between the groups are most indefinite, one passing 

 into another gradually, yet approximate horizons may be so far identified 

 in a general way that one can recognise to what part of the series any 



* This place occurs in forbidden ground beyond the frontier. Not to lose a chance of 

 acquiring information, a trusty messenger was requested to be sent by the Nawab's people 

 from Bahadur Khel, for specimens of the rocks forming the crag. Accordingly nine men, 

 fully armed, left British India for the cliffs, and returned with some of the well worn blocks 

 of purple quartzite, yellowish quartz rock, &c, so common in the upper conglomerates, which, 

 they declared, they had extracted from the cliff-faces. Seen with a field-glass from one 

 of the nearest points within the " red line," a distance of about twelve miles, the crags 

 presented nearly horizontal lines of stratification, which may have been marked by the 

 contained blocks or their cavities.— See below. 



( 167 ) 



