On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow cassia and white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like creepers, Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple or yellow flowers.  On the right were negro huts and gardens, fewer and fewer as we went on,—­all rich with fruit trees, especially with oranges, hung with fruit of every hue; and beneath them, of course, the pine-apples of La Brea.  Everywhere along the road grew, seemingly wild here, that pretty low tree, Cashew, with rounded yellow-veined leaves and little green flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red-striped pear, from which hangs, at the larger and lower end, a kidney-shaped bean, which bold folk eat when roasted; but woe to those who try it when raw; for the acrid oil blisters the lips, and even while the beans are roasting the fumes of the oil will blister the cook’s face if she holds it too near the fire.

As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen.  An Ipomoea or two, and a scarlet flowered dwarf Heliconia, kept up the tropic type, as does a stiff brittle fern about two feet high.  We picked the weeds, which looked like English mint or basil, and found that most of them had three longitudinal nerves in each leaf, and were really Melastomas, though dwarfed into a far meaner habit than that of the noble forms we saw at Chaguanas, and again on the other side of the lake.  On the right, too, in a hollow, was a whole wood of Groogroo palms, gray stemmed, gray leaved, and here and there a patch of white or black Roseau rose gracefully eight or ten feet high among the reeds.

The plateau of pitch now widened out, and the whole ground looked like an asphalt pavement, half overgrown with marsh-loving weeds, whose roots feed in the sloppy water which overlies the pitch.  But, as yet, there was no sign of the lake.  The incline, though gentle, shuts off the view of what is beyond.  This last lip of the lake has surely overflowed, and is overflowing still, though very slowly.  Its furrows all curve downward; and it is, in fact, as one of our party said, “a black glacier.”  The pitch, expanding under the burning sun of day, must needs expand most toward the line of least resistance—­that is, downhill; and when it contracts again under the coolness of night, it contracts, surely, from the same cause, more downhill than uphill; and so each particle never returns to the spot whence it started, but rather drags the particles above it downward toward itself.  At least, so it seemed to us.  Thus may be explained the common mistake which is noticed by Messrs. Wall and Sawkins in their admirable description of the lake.