Page:Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857.djvu/443

Rh with it: a very few weeks with heavy rain, will carry tens of thousands of tons of clay and gravel down into the Calore.

Higher up the gorge than the Photog. view extends, and upon the east flank of the gorge, this slope becomes very precipitous, and consists of bare cretaceous limestone, standing up in aiguilles and isolated weathered masses, some of great magnitude, and here (as well as from some points on the rocky counterscarps of the town colline), ponderous falls of rock have taken place. The massive fragments with newly-broken and glittering white surfaces encumbering the slope, or, after having traced their descending paths in lines of torn rock and furrowed detritus, block up the bed of the torrent below, which brawls between the immense fragments and beneath them. Most of them have been detached from the outcropped ends of the ill-discernible vertical strata, separating at joints, &c., and are mere cases of loss of equilibrium by the shock; but one most remarkable case I observed, in which an enormous mass of solid rock that had stood up as a sort of blunt aiguille from the steep face of the slope, not quite vertical, but rather overhanging, (about 15° by the eye,) to the downward side, had been broken clean off at its base, and again breaking into three massive pieces, had slid down the rocky slope, and now occupied a place about 150 feet below, having crossed and wholly torn away the mule-path in their progress. The appearance of these masses, as they must have been prior to their fall, may be gathered from Sketch No. 211, and the way in which the fragments lay from Sketch No. 212.

The aiguille, by measurements of the three principal fragments, must have stood about 70 feet high above its base when entire, and the three masses, when roughly