At last we surmounted the last rise, and before us lay the famous lake—­not at the bottom of a depression, as we expected, but at the top of a rise, whence the ground slopes away from it on two sides, and rises from it very slightly on the two others.  The black pool glared and glittered in the sun.  A group of islands, some twenty yards wide, were scattered about the middle of it.  Beyond it rose a noble forest of Moriche fan-palms; {149} and to the right of them high wood with giant Mombins and undergrowth of Cocorite—­a paradise on the other side of the Stygian pool.

We walked, with some misgivings, on to the asphalt, and found it perfectly hard.  In a few yards we were stopped by a channel of clear water, with tiny fish and water-beetles in it; and, looking round, saw that the whole lake was intersected with channels, so unlike anything which can be seen elsewhere, that it is not easy to describe them.

Conceive a crowd of mushrooms, of all shapes, from ten to fifty feet across, close together side by side, their tops being kept at exactly the same level, their rounded rims squeezed tight against each other; then conceive water poured on them so as to fill the parting seams, and in the wet season, during which we visited it, to overflow the tops somewhat.  Thus would each mushroom represent, tolerably well, one of the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each from a separate centre, while the parting seams would be of much the same shape as those in the asphalt, broad and shallow atop, and rolling downward in a smooth curve, till they are at bottom mere cracks, from two to ten feet deep.  Whether these cracks actually close up below, and the two contiguous masses of pitch become one, cannot be seen.  As far as the eye goes down, they are two, though pressed close to each other.  Messrs. Wall and Sawkins explain the odd fact clearly and simply.  The oil, they say, which the asphalt contains when it rises first, evaporates in the sun, of course most on the outside of the heap, leaving a tough coat of asphalt, which has, generally, no power to unite with the corresponding coat of the next mass.  Meanwhile, Mr. Manross, an American gentleman, who has written a very clever and interesting account of the lake, {150} seems to have been so far deceived by the curved and squeezed edges of these masses, that he attributes to each of them a revolving motion, and supposes that the material is continually passing from the centre to the edges, when it ‘rolls under,’ and rises again in the middle.  Certainly the strange stuff looks, at the first glance, as if it were behaving in this way; and certainly, also, his theory would explain the appearance of sticks and logs in the pitch.  But Messrs. Wall and Sawkins say that they observed no such motion; nor did we:  and I agree with them, that it is not very obvious to what force, or what influence, it could be attributable.  We must, therefore,