Crossword-Solution: QUARTZITE 9 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 27

When you ascend into its midst you find the ground beneath the trees, and in the openings also, nearly naked, and mostly rough on the surface—a succession of crumbling ledges of lava, limestones, slate, and quartzite, coarsely strewn with soil weathered from them.

After tracing a long, rugged ridge of exceedingly hard quartzite, said to be veined here and there with gold, we came to the North Dome, a noble summit rising about a thousand feet above the timberline, its slopes heavily tree-clad all around, but most perfectly on the north.

And because here the snow-fountains lay at a greater height, while the rock, an exceedingly hard quartzite, offered superior resistance to post-glacial agents, the ice-characters are on a larger scale, and are more sharply defined than any we have noticed elsewhere, and it is probably here that the last lingering glacier of the basin was located.

They resembled a carbon formation sometimes found in quartzite, but were many times more brilliant than anything I had ever seen, excepting precious stones.

Who would carve these lumps of quartzite when one could carve good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood.