XVII 
SALT-LAKE IN CL A TER 
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 2 gth .—-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 
2 D 
