ts are pitch, and, on the only street in the town as Stuart
passed, he saw a black child, sitting on a black boulder of pitch, and
playing with a black doll made of pitch.

Taking a negro boy as a guide, Stuart started for the famous deposit of
asphalt, about one mile inland. The countryside leading thither was not
absolutely barren, but it was scrawny and dismal. A coarse sand
alternated with chunks of black asphalt. A few trees managed to find a
foothold here and there, and there was sparse vegetation in patches.

There was nothing exciting, nothing momentous in the approach to the
lake. Nor was there anything startling in the sight of the lake itself.

Although previously warned, Stuart could not repress an exclamation of
disappointed surprise at his first view of this famous lake, the
greatest deposit of natural asphalt in the world.

A circular depression, so slight that it was hard for the boy to realize
that it was a depression at all, had, toward its center, a smaller flat,
115 acres in extent. There were no flames, no sulphurous steam, no
smoke, no bubbling whirls of viscid matter, nothing exciting whatever.
The stretch before him resembled nothing so much as mud-flat with the
tide out. The dried-up bed of a large park pond, with a small island or
two of green shrubbery, and some very scrawny palms around the edge
would exactly represent the famous Pitch Lake of Trinidad.

Arriving at the edge, Stuart stepped on the lake with the utmost
precaution, for he had read that the lake was both warm and liquid. Both
were true. But the warmth was only slight, and the liquidity was so
dense that, when a piece of pitch was taken out, it took several hours
for the slow-moving mass to fill up the hole.

"The sensation that walking upon this substance gave," writes Treves,
"was no other than that of treading upon the flank of some immense
beast, some Titanic mammoth lying prostrate in a swamp. The surface was
black, it was dry and minutely wrinkled like an elephant's skin, it was
blood-warm, it was soft and yielded to the tread precisely as one would
suppose that an acre of solid flesh would yield. The general impression
was heightened by certain surface creases, where the hide seemed to be
turned in as in the folds behind an elephant's ears. These skin furrows
were filled with water, as if the collapsed animal was perspiring.

"The heat of the air was great, the light was almost blinding, while the
shimmer upon the ba