It was here, as in other places, hard, but did not
scintillate with steel, and was divided, by lines of a still harder
iron-tinged stone, into squares and parallelograms of various sizes. From
one of these intersecting lines, Mr. Bass took a small lump of this
ferruginous stone, that seemed to have bubbled up, and to have hardened
in the form of an ill-shaped bunch of small grapes. Some of the
neighbouring cliffs, for several yards, were formed into basaltic
columns.
In walking across one of the steep heads between two small bays, he met
with a large deep hole in the ground, that appeared to have been
occasioned by the falling-in of the earth which had formerly occupied its
space. Its extent was about twenty-two yards by seventeen; its depth
perhaps sixty feet. The sides were not excavated, but rather smooth and
perpendicular. They were rocks of the same yellow tinge as those of the
shore. A little surf that washed up within it showed a communication with
the river, by a narrow subterraneous passage of some ten or sixteen feet
in height, and, according to the distance of the hole from the edge of
the cliff, about thirty-five yards in length.
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