Chap. XIX.] 
GOLD OF THE URAL MOUNTAINS. 
453 
washed down from the edges of this mountain and carried into the adjacent 
gorges on the east, though the sources whence these metals have been drifted 
into the coarse alluvium have not been detected. 
While the traveller who crosses the Ural in the partial depression followed 
by the highroad to Ekaterinburg will scarcely be aware that he has passed 
over any dominant ridge, the geologist who explores the mountains from the 
south along their line of bearing soon perceives that, to the north, their crests 
are marked by lofty and usually snowy summits, as in the annexed drawing. 
To the south, the central mass near Zlata-ust consists of altered sandstone and 
quartzites, forming sharp peaks, that separate Europe from Asia *. 
View from the Summit of the Katchkanar, North Ural. 
(From ' Eussia-in-Europe,' vol. i. p. 392.) 
The snowy mountains seen in the distance to the north, are the much loftier peaks 
of Konjakofski Kamen &c. 
Few chains offer more contrasting outlines than are seen upon the European 
and the Asiatic flanks of the Ural. On the former the limestones and other 
stratified rocks are indeed contorted, fractured, and partially changed, as before 
represented (p. 366), whilst in the centre, as on the eastern slopes, the masses 
consist everywhere either of highly altered and crystalline Silurian strata, or of 
the eruptive rocks which pierce them. There only, and particularly where the 
schists are cut by dykes of igneous rocks or traversed by veinstones of quartz, 
has gold been imparted in any quantity to the slaty, talcose, and chloritic strata. 
Though some efforts were made by the earlier Russian miners to extract gold 
from the solid matrix by underground works, such a process was not continued, 
it having been found infinitely more profitable to extract the ore from the broken 
accumulations of ancient drift deposited on the slopes of the hills or lodged in 
the higher valleys wherein small watercourses meander. 
The only work at which subterranean mining in the solid rock is still prac- 
* See the frontispiece of 4 Kussia and the Ural Mountains.' 
