So, whether by bridging, leaping, or wading, we arrived at last at the little islands, and found them covered with a thick, low scrub; deep sedge, and among them Pinguins, like huge pine-apples without the apple; gray wild Pines—­parasites on Matapalos, which of course have established themselves, like robbers and vagrants as they are, everywhere; a true Holly, with box-like leaves; and a rare Cocoa-plum, {152} very like the holly in habit, which seems to be all but confined to these little patches of red earth, afloat on the pitch.  Out of the scrub, when we were there, flew off two or three night-jars, very like our English species, save that they had white in the wings; and on the second visit, one of the midshipmen, true to the English boy’s birds’-nesting instinct, found one of their eggs, white-spotted, in a grass nest.

Passing these little islands, which are said (I know not how truly) to change their places and number, we came to the very fountains of Styx, to that part of the lake where the asphalt is still oozing up.

As the wind set toward us, we soon became aware of an evil smell—­ petroleum and sulphuretted hydrogen at once—­which gave some of us a headache.  The pitch here is yellow and white with sulphur foam; so are the water-channels; and out of both water and pitch innumerable bubbles of gas arise, loathsome to the smell.  We became aware also that the pitch was soft under our feet.  We left the impression of our boots; and if we had stood still awhile, we should soon have been ankle-deep.  No doubt there are spots where, if a man stayed long enough, he would be slowly and horribly engulfed.  ‘But,’ as Mr. Manross says truly, ’in no place is it possible to form those bowl-like depressions round the observer described by former travellers.’  What we did see is, that the fresh pitch oozes out at the lines of least resistance, namely, in the channels between the older and more hardened masses, usually at the upper ends of them; so that one may stand on pitch comparatively hard, and put one’s hand into pitch quite liquid, which is flowing softly out, like some ugly fungoid growth, such as may be seen in old wine-cellars, into the water.  One such pitch-fungus had grown several yards in length in the three weeks between our first and second visit; and on another, some of our party performed exactly the same feat as Mr. Manross—­

’In one of the star-shaped pools of water, some five feet deep, a column of pitch had been forced perpendicularly up from the bottom.  On reaching the surface of the water it had formed a sort of centre table, about four feet in diameter, but without touching the sides of the pool.  The stem was about a foot in diameter.  I leaped out on this table, and found that it not only sustained my weight, but that the elasticity of the stem enabled me to rock it from side to side.  Pieces torn from the edges of this table sank readily, showing that it had been raised by pressure, and not by its buoyancy.’