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.
III.
I looked ahead as far as I could, and located our fellow voyagers, now here, now there,—white dots on the strangest landscape I had ever seen. I sat down on a barrel of pitch under the welcome shade of a rough shed in the power-house, and had my first glimpse of the great lake.
Why it has been called a “lake,” I fail to discover; it was probably named thus by the English. In that case, the matter is explained; it is called a lake because it is not a lake at all. The Englishman never seems to understand that the object to be named ought to bear some slight relation to its appellative. He decides upon a name, and the unfortunate victim has to fit himself, herself, itself, into its new form as best he can. If this curious deposit had been called the “Pitch Bed,” there might have been some reason in the naming; some, possibly not all, but some of the existing physical conditions would have been suggested to the mind, and the traveller might thus have been able to form an approximate idea of the phenomenon before seeing it.
Instead of a lake, you see a vast, flat, fairly smooth, black surface of pitch, with only here and there small pools of water,—in places, yellowish; in places, clear,—intersecting the black surface in all directions. Sometimes they enlarge, and, uniting, cover the surface quite a distance, and in the centre several feet deep; and again the intersecting, stream-like pools shrink to mere threads, but, as I said, the general aspect of the Pitch Lake is a flat, solid, black surface, covered occasionally with water, the water being only in the crevices between great masses of pitch that have pushed up from beneath.
