Basalt is a brownish rock of igneous origin. It assumes regular
forms, the arrangement of which is often very surprising. Here nature
had done her work geometrically, with square and compass and plummet.
Everywhere else her art consists alone in throwing down huge masses
together in disorder. You see cones imperfectly formed, irregular
pyramids, with a fantastic disarrangement of lines; but here, as if
to exhibit an example of regularity, though in advance of the very
earliest architects, she has created a severely simple order of
architecture, never surpassed either by the splendours of Babylon or
the wonders of Greece.

I had heard of the Giant's Causeway in Ireland, and Fingal's Cave in
Staffa, one of the Hebrides; but I had never yet seen a basaltic
formation.

At Stapi I beheld this phenomenon in all its beauty.

The wall that confined the fiord, like all the coast of the
peninsula, was composed of a series of vertical columns thirty feet
high. These straight shafts, of fair proportions, supported an
architrave of horizontal slabs, the overhanging portion of which
formed a semi-arch over the sea. At. intervals, under this natural
shelter, there spread out vaulted entrances in beautiful curves, into
which the waves came dashing with foam and spray. A few shafts of
basalt, torn from their hold by the fury of tempests, lay along the
soil like remains of an ancient temple, in ruins for ever fresh, and
over which centuries passed without leaving a trace of age upon them.

This was our last stage upon the earth. Hans had exhibited great
intelligence, and it gave me some little comfort to think then that