True, though strange:  but stranger still did it seem to us, when we did at last what the Negroes asked us, and dipped our hands into the liquid pitch, to find that it did not soil the fingers.  The old proverb, that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled, happily does not stand true here, or the place would be intolerably loathsome.  It can be scraped up, moulded into any shape you will; wound in a string (as was done by one of the midshipmen) round a stick, and carried off:  but nothing is left on the hand save clean gray mud and water.  It may be kneaded for an hour before the mud be sufficiently driven out of it to make it sticky.  This very abundance of earthy matter it is which, while it keeps the pitch from soiling, makes it far less valuable than it would be were it pure.

It is easy to understand whence this earthy matter (twenty or thirty per cent) comes.  Throughout the neighbourhood the ground is full, to the depth of hundreds of feet, of coaly and asphaltic matter.  Layers of sandstone or of shale containing this decayed vegetable, alternate with layers which contain none.  And if, as seems probable, the coaly matter is continually changing into asphalt and oil, and then working its way upward through every crack and pore, to escape from the enormous pressure of the superincumbent soil, it must needs carry up with it innumerable particles of the soils through which it passes.

In five minutes we had seen, handled, and smelt enough to satisfy us with this very odd and very nasty vagary of tropic nature; and as we did not wish to become faint and ill, between the sulphuretted hydrogen and the blaze of the sun reflected off the hot black pitch, we hurried on over the water-furrows, and through the sedge-beds to the farther shore—­to find ourselves in a single step out of an Inferno into a Paradiso.

We looked back at the foul place, and agreed that it is well for the human mind that the Pitch Lake was still unknown when Dante wrote that hideous poem of his—­the opprobrium (as I hold) of the Middle Age.  For if such were the dreams of its noblest and purest genius, what must have been the dreams of the ignoble and impure multitude?  But had he seen this lake, how easy, how tempting too, it would have been to him to embody in imagery the surmise of a certain ‘Father,’ and heighten the torments of the lost beings, sinking slowly into that black Bolge beneath the baking rays of the tropic sun, by the sight of the saved, walking where we walked, beneath cool fragrant shade, among the pillars of a temple to which the Parthenon is mean and small.