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We turned westward towards the sea-coast. Two miles from 
Waiuku we passed the small Maori village Tauwhare. Thence 
the road rises gradually to the height of the hills forming, 6 to 
700 feet high, the coast-range. The higher the traveller ascends, 
the more his passage is obstructed by quicksand, till on the top 
he finds himself in a perfect desert of sand. I was not a little 
surprised to find, that the conical summits of the hills ascending 
steeply, sometimes at an angle of 45 degrees, and ending in sharp 
points , which here and there are seen to spring up from the ridge, 
and which had attracted my attention already from the distance 
consist of nothing but quicksand piled up by the wind. Nor was 
it less interesting to me to observe , how the sand is not only drifted 
together in loose heaps, which are subject to continual movement 
and change of form, but that, for considerable distances, the quick- 
sand has, under the sole influence of atmospheric currents, depo- 
sited itself in regular strata almost in the same manner, as the 
drift-sand of creeks and rivers. According to the respective course 
of the wind and the surface of deposition, those strata assume dif- 
ferent directions, and there are sections to be seen, where there 
Section of strata of Sandstone, Port Jackson, South-Head, 
formed by quicksand. Sydney-sandstone with cross stratification. 
are quicksand-banks with a double stratification. They reminded 
me vividly of the cross stratification, such as the ancient palaeozoic 
sandstone-banks at the Heads of Port Jackson near Sydney present 
them, the larger strata of which are composed of a number of 
minor layers placed obliquely to the general planes of strati- 
fication. While through the influence of rain and the atmospheric 
agents in general, a gradual decomposition of the magnetic iron, 
contained in the sand, into brown iron-ore (hydrated oxide of iron) 
