DESCRIPTIVE GEOLOGY : SLATE ZONE, 



M» 



Those familiar with mountains will be able to form a correct idea of 

 the gorge from this description, and it will also indicate some of the 



peculiar difficulties of travel in this rugged country. The accel- 

 erating influence of gravity down 200 feet of such slopes becomes a 

 practical reality when one sees a mule-load (and perhaps the mule 

 too) of one's kit spinning and bounding to the bottom. The village of 



Mohar occupies a gentle slope before the final steep descent on the 

 right bank, and Sirbunnuh is perched on a jutting platform of gravel 

 on the left bank with precipitous sides all round, and having a fort- 

 like aspect. Up stream beyond Sirbunnuh, where the Hertoh river 

 takes a direction N.— S. and then N.N.W. — S.S.E., the great convex 

 slopes of the mountain-side steepen to hardly scaleable precipices 

 at the bottom (all such details of contour and slope are lost in the hill- 

 shading of the map, which here and elsewhere gives an imperfect and 

 even wrong idea altogether), in which the great ribs of rock descend- 

 ing from Bunyan hill shew such a steepening of the angles of dip, 

 so gradual but so sure, that one may well be bewildered by the miles 

 of vertically- bedded limestone exposed to view. Here, and in many 

 other gorges of this description to be subsequently described, I have 

 found much food for reflection as to the internal, deep-seated structure 

 of mountain cores ; for, however low the angle of dip of the strata along 

 the high ridges, even to as great a depth as 1,000 feet, and however 

 bold the flexures so revealed across the steeply-carved mountain 

 spurs, the impression one gets in the profounder gorges is as if all 

 such dips continuously steepen, and all such flexures vanish by the 

 increasing sharpness of their folding, until they become a vertically- 

 packed set of strata, which seem as though they would continue so 

 indefinitely without resolution. 



The lower part of the Hertoh river traverses along the strike of 

 the southern limb of the fold in the Nummulitics, represented by the 

 much broken anticlinal at Mohar. As the river turns gradually to the 

 north, it cuts across the strike more and more, and then two much torn 

 and altered representatives of the Jurassic anticlinals appear, a view 

 of a portion of the more western one being sketched overleaf, fig. 12. 



( 14' ) 



