DESCENT OF THE SEREBRIANKA. 
383 
facility. The body of water was insufficient for our larger boat, laden with provi- 
sions and baggage, and even in the smaller canoes it was difficult to avoid the rocks ; 
so that after descending for some hours, one of them was upset and the geologists 
were well drenched in the rapid stream 1 . The large boat, often lifted through the 
rapids by our hardy and cheerful boatmen, was at length worn through by the 
rough treatment of the projecting rocks. When within two miles of the mouth ot 
the river we were compelled to abandon the flotilla and endeavour to foice our way 
by night along the edges of the wild, untrodden and virgin forest on the banks of 
the Serebrianka, not reaching the warm and dry huts of the peasants at Ust-Sere- 
briansk until two in the morning. 
Such privations were, however, amply repaid by the knowledge we obtained in 
this long day’s work, of the true structure of the band of country between Sere- 
briansk and the Tchussovaya, through which the river Serebrianka meandeis in a 
deep gorge, for a distance of nearly seventy versts. All the strata around the 
Zavod of Serebriansk had (as we have already remarked) lost their crystalline 
characters, and had passed into palteozoic rocks of ordinary sedimentary charac- 
ters. They are still, however, exceedingly convoluted and much dislocated. Nu- 
merous examples of this condition may be seen around the Zavod, and the annexed 
diagram representing their appearance a few versts below 
it, where they constitute the rocky banks of the Sere- 
brianka, will sufficiently illustrate the flexures and faults 
to which the whole tract has been subjected. 
Thinly fissile schists, often of purple plum colours, roll over and over with 
courses of quartzose and psammitic sandstone, the grauwacke sandstone of authois, 
occasionally highly ferriferous ; and these beds are frequently repeated by countless 
flexures. 
At about forty versts (following the bends of the river) beneath the Zavod ot 
Serebriansk, the grauwacke schists fold under the first limestone we observed , 
and about twenty-six versts from its mouth, we met with other limestones (a little 
above the junction of a brook called Shuroska). The annexed woodcut will suffi- 
ciently explain the relations and succession. The rock here («) is a dark grey, 
hard, impure limestone, subordinate to schist or shale, is much contorted, and 
striking to the north-north-west, contains no determinable fossils. To the west, 
> Our whole party was reunited at Serebriansk, and continued together in the descent of the rivers 
Serebrianka and Tchussovaya, and also in traversing the Ural by the Katchkanar. 
3 d 2 
55 . 
