The upland pastures could
wait, he said. Strange to think that two more showers a year might make
settlers of these vagrants.
It was among these rocks that Philippe Thomas first detected the traces of
those phosphates that have made his name famous. Tissot, in 1878, already
anticipated their discovery.
In point of sheer grandeur, of convulsed stratification and cloven ravine,
of terrorizing features, I have seen gorges far finer than this of Seldja.
Yet it contains one stretch of superlative beauty--a short defile or
canon, I mean, formed of two opposing precipices with a chasm of some
thirty yards between them; they wind and curve, parallel to one another,
with such magisterial accuracy that one would think they had been designed
with mighty compasses from on high, and then carved out, sagaciously, by
some titanic blade.
Here we halted; it was time to turn back. There was an indentation in the
rocks near at hand, fretted away by hungry floods of the past and
overhung, now, with creepers and drooping fernery, concerning which my
Tripolitan companion told me a long and complicated legend.
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