Читать книгу Arctic Searching Expedition (Sir John Richardson) - comprehensive & illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition) онлайн

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At breakfast-time we crossed the Carp Portage, where there is a shelving cascade over granite rocks. The grey sucking carp (Catastomus hudsonius) was busy spawning in the eddies, and our voyagers killed several with poles. Two miles above the portage there are some steeply rounded sandy knolls clothed with spruce trees, being the second or high bank of the river, which is elevated above all floods of the present epoch. In some places granite rocks show through sand, heaped round their base. The frequent occurrence of accumulations of sand in this granite and gneiss district, near the water-sheds of contiguous river systems, has been already noticed. In the course of the forenoon we passed the Birch lightening-place (Demi-charge du bouleau), where a slaty sienite or greenstone occurs, the beds being inclined to the east-north-east at an angle of 45°; and an hour afterwards we crossed the Birch Portage, five hundred and forty paces long. The rocks there are porphyritic granite, portions of which are in thin beds, and are therefore to be entitled gneiss.