So Early In The Day The Gulf Was Filled With A
Thin Blue Haze, Which, Although Destroying The General Effect
Of The View Added To The Apparent Depth At Which The Forest
Was Stretched Out Beneath Our Feet.
These valleys, which so
long presented an insuperable barrier to the attempts of the
most enterprising of the colonists to reach the interior, are
most remarkable.
Great arm-like bays, expanding at their
upper ends, often branch from the main valleys and penetrate
the sandstone platform; on the other hand, the platform
often sends promontories into the valleys, and even
leaves in them great, almost insulated, masses. To descend
into some of these valleys, it is necessary to go round twenty
miles; and into others, the surveyors have only lately
penetrated, and the colonists have not yet been able to drive in
their cattle. But the most remarkable feature in their structure
is, that although several miles wide at their heads, they
generally contract towards their mouths to such a degree
as to become impassable. The Surveyor-General, Sir T.
Mitchell, [4] endeavoured in vain, first walking and then by
crawling between the great fallen fragments of sandstone,
to ascend through the gorge by which the river Grose joins
the Nepean, yet the valley of the Grose in its upper part,
as I saw, forms a magnificent level basin some miles in
width, and is on all sides surrounded by cliffs, the summits
of which are believed to be nowhere less than 3000 feet
above the level of the sea. When cattle are driven into the
valley of the Wolgan by a path (which I descended), partly
natural and partly made by the owner of the land, they cannot
escape; for this valley is in every other part surrounded
by perpendicular cliffs, and eight miles lower down, it
contracts from an average width of half a mile, to a mere
chasm, impassable to man or beast. Sir T. Mitchell states
that the great valley of the Cox river with all its branches,
contracts, where it unites with the Nepean, into a gorge
2200 yards in width, and about 1000 feet in depth. Other
similar cases might have been added.
The first impression, on seeing the correspondence of the
horizontal strata on each side of these valleys and great
amphitheatrical depressions, is that they have been hollowed
out, like other valleys, by the action of water; but when one
reflects on the enormous amount of stone, which on this
view must have been removed through mere gorges or
chasms, one is led to ask whether these spaces may not have
subsided. But considering the form of the irregularly
branching valleys, and of the narrow promontories projecting
into them from the platforms, we are compelled to abandon
this notion. To attribute these hollows to the present alluvial
action would be preposterous; nor does the drainage
from the summit-level always fall, as I remarked near the
Weatherboard, into the head of these valleys, but into one
side of their bay-like recesses.
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