XVII SALT- LAKE IN CRATER 401 



which is cultivated with sweet potatoes and bananas. It will 

 not easily be imagined how pleasant the sight of black mud 

 was to us, after having been so long accustomed to the parched 

 soil of Peru and Northern Chile. The inhabitants, although 

 complaining of poverty, obtain, without much trouble, the 

 means of subsistence. In the woods there are many wild 

 pigs and goats ; but the staple article of animal food is supplied 

 by the tortoises. Their numbers have of course been greatly 

 reduced in this island, but the people yet count on two days' 

 hunting giving them food for the rest of the week. It is said 

 that formerly single vessels have taken away as many as seven 

 hundred, and that the ship's company of a frigate some years 

 since brought down in one day two hundred tortoises to the 

 beach. 



September 2gth. — We doubled the south-west extremity of 

 Albemarle Island, and the next day were nearly becalmed 

 between it and Narborough Island. Both are covered with 

 immense deluges of black naked lava, which have flowed either 

 over the rims of the great caldrons, like pitch over the rim 

 of a pot in which it has been boiled, or have burst forth from 

 smaller orifices on the flanks ; in their descent they have 

 spread over miles of the sea-coast. On both of these islands 

 eruptions are known to have taken place ; and in Albemarle 

 we saw a small jet of smoke curling from the summit of one 

 of the great craters. In the evening we anchored in Bank's 

 Cove, in Albemarle Island. The next morning I went out 

 walking. To the south of the broken tuff-crater, in which the 

 Beagle was anchored, there was another beautifully symmetrical 

 one of an elliptic form ; its longer axis was a little less than 

 a mile, and its depth about 500 feet. At its bottom there 

 was a shallow lake, in the middle of which a tiny crater formed 

 an islet. The day was overpoweringly hot, and the lake 

 looked clear and blue : I hurried down the cindery slope, and 

 choked with dust eagerly tasted the water — but, to my sorrow, 

 I found it salt as brine. 



The rocks on the coast abounded with great black lizards, 

 between three and four feet long ; and on the hills an ugly 

 yellowish-brown species was equally common. We saw many 

 of this latter kind, some clumsily running out of our way, and 

 others shuffling into their burrows. I shall presently describe 



