IV.
It seemed to me that I had never before seen such black pitch or blacker “niggers.” They were a good-humoured lot of men, making no complaint of the heat, although they worked untiringly, bare-footed, in the hot, oozing pitch.
We stopped one fellow, about as black and tattered a figurehead as we could find, and told him we wanted his picture. He was perfectly delighted, and struck a very fetching attitude. After the button had been pressed, we gave him a bit of silver, and then came a howl from a dozen others for a similar opportunity, all posing for us as fancy struck them. Seeing that we were obdurate, the fortunate holder of the silver doubled up with a tremendous laugh, and I can yet see before me his two rows of glistening white teeth and his wreck of a hat and his rag of a shirt, and his bepatched breeches. His laugh so exasperated the others, that one, an elderly gentleman who wore grand side whiskers, shouted out in tones of deepest sarcasm: “Guess I’d git my picture took, too, Sam, if I was such a orangoutang as you is!” It seemed as though they would come to blows, but, had I known the good-humoured blacks better, I should have had no fear, for their battles, fierce as they seem, are only words, and usually end in a laugh.
There are two kinds of pitch: one, pure pitch, dead black, was loaded in the small cars, and the other, of a light brown colour, was carried off in dump-carts, drawn by mules. This black pitch forms the basis of all our asphalt pavements, and such a deposit must be worth millions to the concessionaires.
Now, when did this mighty process begin, and what internal force is at work producing this continual outpouring upon the earth’s surface?
At the farther end of the lake, women and young girls were busy gathering pieces of wood which were thrown up out of the pitch. I do not claim to understand this marvellous phenomenon. I would rather put the question to those of you who have access to the wisdom of libraries, and give you the privilege of bringing some light upon these strange manifestations of God’s unknowable. As I understand it, pitch is obtained from tar, boiled down, and tar is a black, viscous liquid obtained by the distillation of wood and coal, so this residuum which we see is the third step in one of Nature’s great caldrons; a process millions of years in forming, a process still in operation.
Is this wood which is continually coming to the surface of the lake an unused part of that vast primeval forest which was when time did not exist; when chaos was revolving into form? How long has it been wandering, and what force is it which sends it thus unharmed, save for the loss of bark, out again into the light?
Some very strange implements and tools, recognised as South American workmanship of a remote day, have come to the surface of this lake, and one theory for their appearance is, that they have been drawn under the Gulf of Paria, and up through the lake of La Brea by some unseen, but mighty power from the lake of pitch in Venezuela, of which this is supposed by some to be the outlet.
The wood, gathered by the women, is not petrified, but merely impregnated with the pitch, and has all its original qualities as when it first left the parent stem, with, however, the additional affinity for fire which its pitchy bath would naturally give.
We were much entertained by the women and children, who stood knee-deep in the fresh pools at the further end of the lake, doing the washing. The clothes were laid out on the pitch to dry, and the naked babies rolled around on the black stuff quite as much at home as our babies are on the clean nursery floor. The women had on but very little clothing, or none,—and some of the girls and boys, fourteen and fifteen years of age, were entirely nude. One young girl, as we approached, modestly hung a little fluttering rag about her loins, and, thus clothed, was not ashamed.
I have seen more immodesty on the floor of a modern ballroom than ever from the bare bodies of these black women. But terrible as the stories are which one hears of the immorality of the West Indies, I feel that here the evil is less heinous in the coloured races on account of the primitive nature and conditions of a half-savage people. Unfortunately this great and degenerating danger to the white inhabitants is ever present. The pitch lake foreshadows the terrible conditions of the people in Trinidad and Jamaica; the continual welling up of this black mass suggests the doom which awaits these beautiful islands, unless a giant hand is put forth to save them.
The difficulties of this excursion have been much exaggerated. To be sure, we had a long walk, but we also had a good breeze most of the way, and our fellow traveller who, in spite of all warnings, had worn his immaculate white suit, came off without spot or blemish, notwithstanding the old proverb about “keeping away from the pitch.”