The Pitch Lake, like most other things, owes its appearance on the surface to no convulsion or vagary at all, but to a most slow, orderly, and respectable process of nature, by which buried vegetable matter, which would have become peat, and finally brown coal, in a temperate climate, becomes, under the hot tropic soil, asphalt and oil, continually oozing up beneath the pressure of the strata above it.... * * * * * As we neared the shore, we perceived that the beach was black with pitch; and the breeze being off the land, the asphalt smell (not unpleasant) came off to welcome us. We rowed in, and saw in front of a little row of wooden houses a tall mulatto, in blue policeman's dress, gesticulating and shouting to us. He was the ward policeman, and I found him (as I did all the colored police) able and courteous, shrewd and trusty. These police are excellent specimens of what can be made of the negro, or half-negro, if he be but first drilled, and then given a responsibility which calls out his self-respect. He was warning our crew not to run aground on one or other of the pitch reefs, which here take the place of rocks. A large one, a hundred yards off on the left, has been almost all dug away, and carried to New York or to Paris to make asphalt-pavement. [Illustration: THE POLICE STATION.] The boat was run ashore, under his directions, on a spit of sand between the pitch; and when she ceased bumping up and down in the muddy surf, we scrambled out into a world exactly the hue of its inhabitants of every shade, from jet black to copper-brown. The pebbles on the shore were pitch. A tide-pool close by was enclosed in pitch; a four-eyes was swimming about in it, staring up at us; and when we hunted him, tried to escape, not by diving, but by jumping on shore on the pitch, and scrambling off between our legs. While the policeman, after profoundest courtesies, was gone to get a mule-cart to take us up to the lake, and planks to bridge its water channels, we took a look round at this oddest of corners of the earth. In front of us was the unit of civilization,--the police-station, wooden, on wooden stilts (as all well-built houses are here), to insure a draught of air beneath them. We were, of course, asked to come in and sit down, but preferred looking about, under our umbrellas; for the heat was intense. The soil is half pitch, half brown earth, among which the pitch sweals in and out as tallow sweals from a candle. It is always in slow motion under the heat of the tropic sun; and no wonder if some of the cottages have sunk right and left in such a treacherous foundation. A stone or brick house could not stand here; but wood and palm-thatch are both light and tough enough to be safe, let the ground give way as it will.