A slab of sandstone laid on another of the same kind at an angle of 17 degrees and left in the open air was found to creep down the slope at the rate of a little more than a millimeter a month. Explain why it did so. RAIN. The most efficient agent in the carriage of waste to the streams is the rain. It moves particles of soil by the force of the blows of the falling drops, and washes them down all slopes to within reach of permanent streams. On surfaces unprotected by vegetation, as on plowed fields and in arid regions, the rain wears furrows and gullies both in the mantle of waste and in exposures of unaltered rock (Fig. 17). At the foot of a hill we may find that the soil has accumulated by creep and wash to the depth of several feet; while where the hillside is steepest the soil may be exceedingly thin, or quite absent, because removed about as fast as formed. Against the walls of an abbey built on a slope in Wales seven hundred years ago, the creeping waste has gathered on the uphill side to a depth of seven feet. The slow-flowing sheet of waste is often dammed by fences and walls, whose uphill side gathers waste in a few years so as to show a distinctly higher surface than the downhill side, especially in plowed fields where the movement is least checked by vegetation. TALUS. At the foot of cliffs there is usually to be found a slope of rock fragments which clearly have fallen from above. Such a heap of waste is known as talus. The amount of talus in any place depends both on the rate of its formation and the rate of its removal. Talus forms rapidly in climates where mechanical disintegration is most effective, where rocks are readily broken into blocks because closely jointed and thinly bedded rather than massive, and where they are firm enough to be detached in fragments of some size instead of in fine grains. Talus is removed slowly where it decays slowly, either because of the climate or the resistance of the rock. It may be rapidly removed by a stream flowing along its base. In a moist climate a soluble rock, such as massive limestone, may form talus little if any faster than the talus weathers away. A loose-textured sandstone breaks down into incoherent sand grains, which in dry climates, where unprotected by vegetation, may be blown away as fast as they fall, leaving the cliff bare to the base. Cliffs of such slow-decaying rocks as quartzite and granite when closely jointed accumulate talus in large amounts. Talus slopes may be so steep as to reach THE ANGLE OF REPOSE, i.e. the steepest angle at which the material will lie. This angle varies with different materials, being greater with coarse and angular fragments than with fine rounded grains. Sooner or later a talus reaches that equilibrium where the amount removed from its surface just equals that supplied from the cliff above. As the talus is removed and weathers away its slope retreats together with the retreat of the cliff, as seen in Figure 9.