II.
Up the hill laboured the little procession of red-faced adventurers, in all conditions of negligée. The large lady from Kansas puffed and sweated and mopped her face; the doctor vowed we would die of sunstroke; the mother and her daughter, from Boston, made the ascent as their ancestors had stormed Bunker Hill, with features rigid and teeth set; our neighbour at table, who had been thrice around the world, wondered what on earth we would think of Manila in the summer-time if we called this hot; our jolly, delightful friend from New Haven laughed us all the way up the hill, and said he was suffering with the cold; the German baron, under his green umbrella, passed us with the superb stride acquired from his sturdy ancestors and his military training; down the hill back of us straggled on the rest of the company: the little women, the tall women, the lean ones, the fat ones, urged and supported by long-suffering husbands and brothers and friends who mopped and fanned furiously.
There were hats of all descriptions: white East Indian helmets built of pith and lined with green, deliciously light, cool things; and all conceivable shapes of Puerto Rican hats, of a pretty, fine white palm “straw,” very much like the Panama; and hats from Haïti; and French hats from Martinique; and then there were Puerto Rican sailor hats, one of which I wore with great pride. Our shoes were the heaviest we had, and our clothing the oldest and lightest available.
Thus all marched on in broken file, with very hot faces, and shaded by all manner of outlandish umbrellas, over the hot asphalt to the Pitch Lake.
As our little party plodded along, going so slowly it hardly seemed as if we were making any progress at all, my courage began to wane somewhat, for I remembered most vividly a similar day on the island of Capri, when I had been overcome by the sun, and in consequence of which had suffered many months after. With this in my mind, we stopped at a shanty half-way up the hill, where we saw some bananas growing, tore off part of a leaf, and asked for some water of a negress, who was one of many watching the procession with great amusement. In fairly good English she told me not to wet the head; in fact, by her vociferous rejection of our plan, we were led to believe that it would be dangerous to carry it out at all, so we threw away the leaf, and worked on up the blistering highway to the top of the hill.
There was not a bit of shade in sight. To right and left, rank weeds and cacti grew in wild confusion, and with the exception of a few banana groves, and the huts of negro labourers farther down, there was nothing of a shade-producing nature along the road. The asphalt was so hot to the feet that we broke company, and took to single file in among the weeds on the edge of the road.
As we approached the summit of the hill, a fine breeze gave us new courage, and the sight of the Pitch Works, not far distant, dissolved our fears of the heat into most absorbing interest of the great phenomenon coming into view. An endless train of buckets, which led the way up the long ascent, on a wire rope supported at short intervals by large sheaves on iron pillars, went squeaking along, one row down to the dock, full of great chunks of pitch, and the other back, empty, to be filled and started on its round again.