For two days the assistant purser was continually bathed in perspiration from his necessary walks into the city and looking after his goods on the wharf. But by that time the cargo was out and his work in the port was practically over, for there is very little freight to carry from Trinidad to New York.
“I have to go out to La Brea this afternoon to see the superintendent of the pitch lake,” Mr. Clark said on the third day. “It’s a nuisance, in this heat, and I wish I could leave it to you. But I have had some dealings with him, and the company charged me particularly to close a contract with him this trip if I can. So I suppose I must go myself.”
“The superintendent of the pitch lake!” Kit exclaimed. “I have read something about the great pitch lake in Trinidad; but what does it have a superintendent for?”
“Because it is a very valuable piece of property,” the purser answered. “It belongs to the government, you know, and they keep a superintendent to look after it and sell the pitch. It goes all over the world; a great many of the streets in New York and other American cities are paved with it. They call it pitch here, but when it is boiled down and ready for use we call it asphalt. We are negotiating with the superintendent to send a freight ship down to carry away two or three cargoes, and it will be a profitable job if I can close the contract with him.”
“It must be a very curious sight—a lake of pitch,” Kit suggested.
“I believe it is hard enough on the surface to walk over,” the purser replied; “but I have never seen it. You can go along with me if you like. It is only twenty or thirty miles down the coast. The train leaves at three o’clock, and we can be back by a little after dark.”
Kit was glad to avail himself of this permission, and at three o’clock they took the train for La Brea. The railway ran through a country that was given up largely to the cultivation of sugarcane; and at the stations they passed they saw a great many men who were neither whites nor negroes, in a curious costume of white stuff so arranged that it covered one leg to below the knee, but left the other leg almost bare.
“They are coolies,” Mr. Clark said, seeing that Kit was interested in these brown, slender people. “They bring a great many of them here from India to work on the plantations. They have to work so many years to pay for their passage, and after that they are free. But they’re a queer lot. When a man is badly treated by his master he doesn’t complain, but goes out and sticks a knife into himself, and they find his body lying in the cane-fields.”
In a little over an hour the train set them down at La Brea, and they found the pitch works not far from the station, on the edge of the wonderful black lake. But the superintendent’s house, they learned, was across one corner of the lake, about half a mile away; and they immediately set out for it.
They were both a little cautious about walking over the pitch at first, particularly where the path led over breaks between the beds of pitch, and they had to feel their way across narrow planks for bridges. The moving of the pitch beneath their feet did not tend, either, to give them confidence.