About Noon, When Six Or Seven Miles North Of Aylmer, We Halted
For Rest And Lunch On The Top Of The Long Ridge Of Glacial Dump
That Lies To The East Of Great Fish River.
And now we had a most
complete and spectacular view of the immense open country that we
had come so far to see.
It was spread before us like a huge, minute,
and wonderful chart, and plainly marked with the processes of its
shaping-time.
Imagine a region of low archaean hills, extending one thousand
miles each way, subjected for thousands of years to a continual
succession of glaciers, crushing, grinding, planing, smoothing,
ripping up and smoothing again, carrying off whole ranges of broken
hills, in fragments, to dump them at some other point, grind them
again while there, and then push and hustle them out of that region
into some other a few hundred miles farther; there again to tumble
and grind them together, pack them into the hollows, and dump them
in pyramidal piles on plains and uplands. Imagine this going on
for thousands of years, and we shall have the hills lowered and
polished, the valleys more or less filled with broken rocks.
Now the glacial action is succeeded by a time of flood. For another
age all is below water, dammed by the northern ice, and icebergs
breaking from the parent sheet carry bedded in them countless
boulders, with which they go travelling south on the open waters.
As they melt the boulders are dropped; hill and hollow share equally
in this age-long shower of erratics.
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