206 
THE PITCH LAKE. 
[Nature and Art, December 1, 1866. 
it. This sulphureo-pitchy scent is perceived at a 
distance inland of six to eight miles from its source ; 
and seaward, as already stated, it has been noticed 
six miles from land. The road runs in a pretty 
straight line from the coast till within a short 
distance of the end, when it takes an abrupt turn, 
and brings one out directly on to the shores of the 
lake. Here, as on either side of the road for the 
whole way, the number and luxuriant growth of 
the trees are very remarkable. Nearly all the 
tropical plants are represented, and, as if not to 
allow the animal kingdom to be unfavourably con- 
trasted with the vegetable, numbers of the most 
beautiful butterflies it is possible to see, and of the 
most gorgeously-dressed humming-birds, flutter and 
dirt about in the sunlight, or ply in and out among 
the branches of the trees. 
In a circular basin eighty feet above the level of 
the sea, and about a mile and a half in circum- 
ference, the lake of asphalte is contained. The 
appearance it presents, as one comes suddenly 
upon it from the road, is very striking. There are 
scarcely the same conditions as are essential to the 
existence of a lake of water. Banks are wanting, 
the road goes straight on, rather rising than de- 
scending, until it merges itself in the body of 
pitch which forms the surface of the lake ; and 
there is another feature which will be noticed 
presently, that at first sight seems incompatible 
with the idea of a collection of fluid matter. Again, 
except at a certain season of the year, the wet 
season, there is nothing in the condition of the 
surface of the lake to give rise to the notion that 
it is in any essential point different from the pitch 
road over which the traveller has been walking, or 
the pitchy beach on which he landed. There is, to 
be sure, a sudden absence of that thick vegetation 
which has been so observable elsewhere ; and a second 
glance will show that for a considerable distance the 
trees and plants seem to have been cleared away 
arbitrarily within a circumscribed compass, small 
clumps of trees, earth, and shrubs, being left as a 
sort of outlying remnant, and dotting the black 
surface at frequent intervals with beautiful little 
islands, like emeralds in a setting of jet. But for 
nine months out of the twelve, the visitor may 
walk off the road into the open, and be unaware 
that he has really come to the lake until he has 
advanced some little distance upon it ; for the 
surface is at the edges quite firm and resonant to 
the tread, and the asphalte, even further in, is, com- 
paratively speaking, hard. Gradually it becomes 
softer and softer, and the visitor is sensible that he 
has lighted upon a sort of bituminous quicksand. 
When the unstable ground draws, ipso facto , 
attention to itself, and the eye recognises some- 
thing of design and order in the uniform level of 
it, and sees how the district is enclosed by a natural 
boundary, then the visitor perceives how that he 
is walking on what is really a great reservoir of 
pitch. He learns that during the months of July, 
August, and September, the whole of the pitch 
within that natural boundary is in a liquid and 
heated state, rendering it quite impossible for a 
man to walk upon.it. Fountains of boiling pitch, 
mingled with argillaceous earth, and sometimes 
with water, throw their murky contents to a height 
of thirty feet into the aii\ The whole basin is in a 
simmer, and perfectly liquid to a depth of two or 
three inches, while below that the pitch is so soft 
as to yield to the weight even of slight sticks, 
which sink in and are lost. In those parts where 
the upheavings are most violent, the pitch is, of 
course, in a yet more liquid state, though the 
depth to which it is so cannot, for obvious reasons, 
be ascertained. 
In the cooler months of the year, however, it is 
quite possible to traverse almost the whole of the 
lake, avoiding parts which are soft at all seasons, 
and which give evidence enough of their presence 
to warn the explorer against falling into them. 
When this is possible the pitch at the edges of the 
lake is cool and hard, and as safe to stand still 
upon as the pitch road ; but the farther one goes 
from the edge, the less firm does his footing become. 
If he stand still in such places, his feet will leave 
their prints, and an oily substance will ooze up, 
pressed out of the asphalte which the foot trod 
down, and which will, in the course of a few 
minutes, recover its former level, extinguishing the 
print, and making a uniform surface as before. It 
is not safe, therefore, to stand still for more than a 
minute on such yielding footing. Experiments as 
to the time necessary to engulph any object may be 
made with poles, logs, or anything else than living- 
beings, and the shortness of the time required, 
even in the coed seasons, is astonishing enough. 
Much depends, of course, upon the weight of the 
object, but a stout pole, six feet high, such as 
might be used to walk with, will disappear when 
planted in the asphalte, in the course of a quarter 
of an hour. A story is told of a man-of-war’s 
crew being sent up from their ship, which was 
lying off La Brea, to fill casks with the pitch, which 
was to be sent to England. The casks were landed 
and rolled up on to the lake ; the seamen began 
cutting out the pitch and filling the casks, Avhcn 
all hands were recalled by signal in order to chase 
some suspicious-looking craft at sea. When they 
returned to the lake to finish their task, they found 
that their casks and implements had vanished, 
swallowed up by the treacherous and greedy 
asphalte, which “ left not a wrack behind.” The 
people cut the asphalte out in blocks with axes and 
spades, and such is the closing up power of it, that 
though they may scoop out enough on one day to 
load a ship, the next morning there will not be any 
trace of the removal, the surface will have resumed 
its smoothness, and the quantity abstracted will 
have been filled up from beneath. 
At all times there are some, but in the cool 
times there is an infinite number of small islets, 
richly clothed with shrubs and small trees, dotted 
here and there about the lake. Few of them ai’e 
more than thirty feet round, and they are mostly 
circular in form. These, too, are liable to sudden 
and complete catastrophes. That which was yes- 
terday a flourishing oasis in the black Sahara — the 
