er his shoes. The
pitch in the gutter-bank is in its native place, and as it spues
slowly out of the soil into the ditch in odd wreaths and lumps, we
could watch, in little, the process which has produced the whole
deposit--probably the whole lake itself.

A bullock-cart, laden with pitch, came jolting down past us; and we
observed that the lumps, when the fracture is fresh, have all a
drawn-out look; that the very air-bubbles in them, which are often
very numerous, are all drawn out likewise, long and oval, like the
air-bubbles in some ductile lavas.

On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow Cassia
and white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like
creepers, Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple, or yellow
flowers. On the right were negro huts and gardens, fewer and fewer
as we went on--all rich with fruit-trees, especially with oranges,
hung with fruit of every hue; and beneath them, of course, the pine-
apples of La Brea. Everywhere along the road grew, seemingly wild
here, that pretty low tree, the Cashew, with rounded yellow-veined
leaves and little green flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red-
striped pear, from which hangs, at the larger and lower end, a
kidney-shaped bean, which bold folk eat when roasted: but woe to
those who try it when raw, for the acrid oil blisters the lips; and
even while the beans are roasting, the fumes of the oil will blister
the cook's face if she holds it too near the fire.

As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and
thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became
more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more
rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An
Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet-flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the
tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high.
{148a} We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or
basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in
each leaf, and were really Melastomas, though dwarfed into a far
meaner habit than that of the noble forms we saw at Chaguanas, and
again on the other side of the lake. On the right, too, in a
hollow, was a whole wood of Groo-groo palms, gray stemmed, gray
leaved; and here and there a patch of white or black Roseau rose
gracefully eight or ten feet high among the reeds.

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole