1866.] the Western Himalaya and Afyhan Mountains. 125 



•. A band of greenish-grey trachyte with small rounded geodes of chalk- 

 white albite. It weathers somewhat reddish on its outside and wears in 

 rounded masses. It reminds one very much of some of the felstone of Bara- 

 moola. Strike N. 15° W.— S. 15° E. Dip Easterly 40°. But this stratum 

 varies very much along its strike, becoming in places a ferruginous, rotten, 

 augitic amygdaloid ; in others a sandstone made of big rounded grains of 

 quartz, of hornblende and of other volcanic minerals, with a calcareous cement 

 which effervesces powerfully with acids. This sandstone foxuns slabs 1 to 1£ 

 inch thick, and superposed one over the other like bricks in a wall. Again a 

 little further on, it is a fine, very compact, smooth laterite, passing gradually 

 into a more sandy variety containing very minute spangles of white mica 

 hardly visible in the day time, but which shine well by candle light, and also a 

 few small rounded nodules of a pale green senii-lucent mineral. The variations 

 of this bed along the strike seem to indicate a very shallow shelving shore or 

 a pool of water, the bottom of which had been frequently disturbed by the 

 appearance of lavas or other heated matter. The bed is about 15 feet thick 

 at the outcrop. 



xi. Then the slate, blue and compact, comes again, with occasional thin 

 beds of sandstone or dark-stone : a coarse grained highly ferruginous amyg- 

 daloid, a sort of peperino, forms a bed 15 feet thick, and on the top of this, 

 here and there, are patches of grey laterite. The slate and the sandstone 

 alternate repeatedly in beds of more than live feet each, and this goes on for 

 a thickness of about 160 feet. 



xii. A ridge of coarse, brown, slightly micaceous sandstone, in superposed 

 slabs like a built wall, now makes its appearance. It strikes S. W. — N. E. and 

 dips easterly 45°. This strike S. W. — N. E., meeting the strike of the preceding 

 layers x and xi which is N. 15° W. — S. 15° E., leaves an open angle or yawning 

 on the northern flank of the hill, and this is filled up by laminated slate, much 

 broken and of various colours,, a good deal of it being yellow. It is the yielding 

 of this soft slate which has allowed the hard and unyielding sandstone to take 

 a direction to the S. W. instead of to the S. 



The thickness of this sandstone ridge is about 45 feet, and that of the slate, 

 which fills up the gap or yawning on the flank of the hill, about 40 feet. 



xiii. Slate, hard but much cleaved ; about 80 feet. 



xiv. A ridge of very compact and massive baked clay, having a conchoidal 

 fracture and large distant joints. It is yellowish grey in colour, with bands of 

 lighter yellow : one would take it for a light-coloured basalt, if it were not for 

 its trifling hardness, which is about that of slate. It appears to be a clay 

 made up of silty mud, derived from basaltic and other volcanic rocks and 

 baked after formation. Perhaps it would be best named " Massive Laterite." 

 The joints and the surface are covered with a rich brown iridescent oxide 

 of iron or a black crust of the same material. This rock is nearly vertical, 

 and is near a fault of considerable extent which cuts the hill right across > 



16 



