They ploughed up a gravel-walk like musket-balls, and passed
through glass-windows, making round holes, but not cracking them.
Having finished our dinner of hail-stricken meat, we crossed the
Sierra Tapalguen; a low range of hills, a few hundred feet in
height, which commences at Cape Corrientes. The rock in this part
is pure quartz; farther eastward I understand it is granitic. The
hills are of a remarkable form; they consist of flat patches of
table-land, surrounded by low perpendicular cliffs, like the
outliers of a sedimentary deposit. The hill which I ascended was
very small, not above a couple of hundred yards in diameter; but I
saw others larger. One which goes by the name of the "Corral," is
said to be two or three miles in diameter, and encompassed by
perpendicular cliffs between thirty and forty feet high, excepting
at one spot, where the entrance lies. Falconer gives a curious
account of the Indians driving troops of wild horses into it, and
then by guarding the entrance keeping them secure. (6/5. Falconer's
"Patagonia" page 70.) I have never heard of any other instance of
table-land in a formation of quartz, and which, in the hill I
examined, had neither cleavage nor stratification.
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