If you were to ask him, 'What are those
wonderful rocks over there, shaped like some Titanic organ and glowing
with a kind of violet flame?' he would say, 'Organ be blowed. It's
columnar lithoidite.' I learnt a little from him, but not enough. I
wish we had him here. He could have told us something."
And Mr. Keith, ever avid of fresh things, regretted his lost
opportunities. He was in one of this acquisitive, Corsair moods. He
said:
"I could take geology by the throat just now. It's disgusting, not to
know things!"
His companion, meanwhile, beheld the panorama in all its nightmarish
splendour, as it drifted past him. He saw the bluffs of feathery
pumice, the lava precipices--frozen cataracts of white, black, blood
red, pale grey and sombre brown, smeared over with a vitreous enamel of
obsidian or pierced by oily, writhing dykes that blazed with metallic
scintillations. Anon came some yawning cleft or an assemblage of dizzy
rock-needles, fused into whimsical tints and attitudes, spiky,
distorted, over-toppling; then a bold tufa rampart, immaculate in its
beauty, stainless as a curtain of silk.
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