Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/299

Rh almost vertically appear with a lithological character almost identical with our English lias limestone. They are unconformable with the enormous pile of limestone beds, nearly horizontal in strike along the valley, but dipping sharply to the south, which form the huge, shattered, and decussate precipices, rising to the summits of La Scorza or Monte Alburno. These summits shut in the Piano of Savanuola, a singular irregularly oval-shaped, and mountainous table-land, of more than twenty square miles in surface, and, beyond it, I get occasional glimpses of still higher ridges and peaks. The range of Alburno must rise to at least 3,000 feet above the plain between Eboli and the sea, and is now (12th February) covered with snow, for about half the depth down from the top, wherever it can lodge upon its abrupt and precipitous flank.

For about the lowermost third in height on both sides, the valley is covered with smoothed, rounded, and sloping masses of diluvial clays and gravels, with huge angular blocks and boulders dislodged from above scattered here and there.

Noble natural oak forest, clothes much of this down nearly to the valley bottom, as in the days when Virgil wrote his third Georgic:— "'Asper acerha sonaris; quo tota exterrita sylvis Diffugiunt armenta, furit mugitibus æther Concussus sylvæque et sicca ripa Tanagri.'"

Through these and below them, the rain has cut into these clays in a surprising manner, and in many places they seem as if subsiding bodily, from off the steep sides of the hills, and melting into the muddy flood of the Salaris, which, a few miles further eastward, unites its current with that of the Rio Negro or Tanagro, falling in upon its