392 
THE KATCHKANAR MOUNTAIN. 
merry song of birds. The dull, wet and marshy woodlands were now exchanged 
for sunshine, rocks and gorgeous vegetation. At length, then, we had found out a 
true mountain in the Ural, and leaving our horses at the first buttress which rises 
above the forest, we ascended the impending crags. Accustomed as we have been 
to the wildest features of the western Highlands of Scotland and the Alps, we are 
unacquainted with any scene presenting a finer foreground of abruptly broken rocks 
and never certainly had we looked over so grand and solitary a trackless forest as 
that which lay around us, and from which some straggling distant peaks (those on 
the north only being still capped with snow) reared their solitary heads. The 
accompanying sketch, slight as it is, may convey some idea of these primaeval 
forests and the desolate rocks which they envelope. 
A great portion of the rock around the Katchkanar, particularly near its base, 
consists of white and green felspathic greenstone, both coarse and fine-grained. 
The chief summits, however, have a peculiar aspect. In scrambling over their 
daik surfaces, the crystals of augite so stand out from the felspathic mass, that in 
external aspect they reminded us of the crags of Coruisk in the Isle of Skye, where 
the hypersthene rocks' pass into greenstone. The upper masses of the Katchkanar, 
though unquestionably of igneous origin, are regularly stratified (see coloured section, 
PI. II. fig. 5). They occur, in fact, in distinct beds, which are as symmetrically tra- 
versed by joints as those of any sedimentary formation. The Katchkanar may be 
compared in its rugged form, as well as in its general geological relations, to the 
picturesque Welsh mountain of Cader Idris, which being of about the same altitude, 
is also for the most part composed of stratified igneous rocks (greenstones), por- 
phyries, &c,, which rise up through metamorphic and palaeozoic strata, whilst the 
neighbourhood exhibits syenites and other rocks, like those of the Ural, intruding 
through slates which are now known to be of Lower Silurian age 1 * * * * * * 8 . The prominent 
summits consist of a series of rugged, broken masses bare of all vegetation, which 
1 Pallas s description of the Katchkanar, which is neither geological nor detailed (vol. ii. p. 267), is 
chiefly remarkable for the account of the powerful magnets procured from this rock. Adolph Erman 
determined its altitude to be 460 toises, or nearly 3000 English feet, and fixed its longitude. Gustaf Rose, 
who did not visit it, simply describes three specimens sent to him as coarse-grained magnetic iron, gra- 
nular iron ore and augite, and coarse-grained augite sprinkled with iron ore. It is the metallic lustre 
of some of the crystals which gives to this augitic rock the aspect of the hypersthene of the Western 
Highlands and of Radnorshire. (See Silurian System, p. 318.) 
See an excellent account of the structure of Cader Idris by Mr. A. Aikin, Transactions of the Geo- 
logical Society, vol. ii. p. 273. 
