Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/90

 and got safely on board. As to our steering oar it remained across the snag, and was now become a sawyer; working horizontally upon the back of the black and fearful trunk which had so justly thrown us into consternation.

The wind springing up against us, we came to under the second Chicasaw Bluff, and had time to examine and contemplate these romantic cliffs, now doubly interesting after such a monotonous and cheerless prospect of solitary brakes and enswamped forests. This fasçade, or perpendicular section, precisely of the same materials and consistence as that of the Iron banks above, continues, I think, uninterruptedly for near two miles, and is about 150 feet high. The uppermost bed (all of them as nearly horizontal as may be), 12 to 20 feet thick, commencing immediately below the present vegetable loam, consists of a yellowish, homogeneous, now friable, sandy, and argillaceous earth, which is succeeded by a thinner and more ferruginous bed; below occurs a layer or band of pink-red clay, now and then variegated with white specks, and, though constant in its appearance and relative position, no where exceeding 18 inches in thickness; below again occur ferruginous earths and clays more or less sandy, then a bed of a brownish-black colour, and about 18 inches in thickness, which, on examination, I found to be lignite, or wood-coal, containing less bitumen than usual, and so distinctly derived from the vegetable kingdom, exhibiting even the cross grain of the wood, as to remove all doubts of its origin. To the taste it was sensibly acid, and smelt in burning like turf. Beneath this coal, and in connection with it, occurs a friable bed of dark-coloured argillaceous and sandy earth, in which I could very distinctly perceive blackened impressions of leaves of an oak, like