vely and productive
valleys whose irrigated orchards and gardens make a regular paradise,
that the farming classes should be poor and ignorant, without ambition
or education and be satisfied to live in comfortless, tumble-down huts
without furniture or any of the improvements that make life worth
living. But such is the case. Here where there are millions of coffee
trees, fields of sugar cane and orchards of oranges, lemons and all
kinds of tropical fruit, where the farmer could be happiest, he is
about the most miserable creature that could be found. In his miserable
home he has no lamp or candle, no books or papers of any sort.

While Venezuela is rich in mines and forests, grain and livestock,
coffee and rubber, dyes and medicines, gold and copper, lead and coal,
to say nothing of tropical fruits and vegetables, she has another
product that makes her known the world around. This is asphalt, or
mineral pitch as it is sometimes called. This makes the smoothest street
paving of any material known. It is also used extensively for calking
vessels, making waterproof roofs, lining cold storage plants, making
varnishes as well as shoe blacking as well as in a hundred other ways.

At the mouth of the Orinoco river is the Island of Trinidad upon which
is the famous pitch lake. This is the most noted deposit of asphalt
known. This lake is a mile and a half across and looks, from a distance,
like a pond surrounded with trees. Nearing it, however, one soon
discovers that it contains anything but water.

This material is of a dark green color and at the border is hard and
strong enough to bear quite a heavy weight, but near the center it is
almost like a boiling mass. The asphalt is dug from the edges of the
lake, loaded on carts, hauled to the port and from there shipped to
nearly every country on the globe. Two hundred thousand tons per year
have been taken from the lake and yet there is no hole to be seen. Negro
workmen dig it to the depth of a couple of feet and in a week or so the
hole is level with the top again.

The government of Trinidad has leased the asphalt lake to an American
company and the income amounts to nearly a quarter of a million dollars
per year. Nobody knows how deep the asphalt bed is for borings have been
made a hundred feet or more deep and there was no bottom. The heat is
intense all around this lake.

About fifty miles from the coast in Venezuela there is another asphalt
lake and the material in i