Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/263

 to which they give the name of the Wilderness, and of which the mountains of Cumberland occupy a great part. As Mr. Fisk was obliged to go to the court of justice, which is held a few miles from thence in the county {210} of Jackson; we deferred crossing the Wilderness for a few days, and I profited by his absence to go and see Roaring River, one of the branches of the Cumberland. This river, from ten to fifteen fathoms broad, received its name from the confused noise that is heard a mile distant, and which is occasioned by falls of water produced by the sudden lapse of its bed, formed by large flat stones contiguous to each other. These falls, from six, eight, to ten feet high, are so near together, that several of them are to be seen within the space of fifty to a hundred fathoms. We observed in the middle of this river, great stones, from five to six feet in diameter, completely round, and of which nobody could form the least idea how they could have been conveyed there.

The right bank of Roaring River rises in some places from eighty to a hundred feet, and surmounted at this height by rocks that jet out fifteen or twenty feet, and which cover again thick beds of ferruginous schiste, situated horizontally. The flakes they consist of are so soft and brittle, that as soon as they are touched, they break off in pieces of a foot long, and fall into a kind of dust, which, in the course of time, imperceptibly undermines the rocks. Upon the flakes of schiste that are least exposed to the air {211} and water, we observed a kind of white efflorescence, extremely thin, and very similar to snow.

There exists again upon the banks of this river, and in other parts of Cumberland, immense caverns, where there are masses of aluminous substances, within so small a degree of the purity necessary to be employed in