Identifier: americantropics00corl (find matches)
Title: The American tropics;
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Corlett, William Thomas, 1854- (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: Cleveland, The Burrows brothers co.
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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(69) The American Tropics superlative degree. Fortunately we reachedLa Brea Point at nine in the morning, thusavoiding the extreme heat of mid-day. De-serted by my companions and receiving butslight encouragement from the guide-booksor previous trippers, yet to me the greatPitch Lake, discovered by that hardygallant of Queen Elizabeths Court, Sir Wal-ter Raleigh, was one of the chief attractionsof the trip and of sufficient importance toinduce me to brave the heat and toil.A walk of a mile, or to be exact 4,000 feet,up an easy grade lined with morning-glories,yellow cassia and white hibiscus, with fieldsof pineapple growing to perfection, bringsone to Pitch Lake, which Kingsley likenedto the very fountains of Styx. The walk isover a hard roadway, said to have beenformed by the overflow of the lake, althoughit looked as if it had been made by depositingthe pitch in the ordinary way, as no evidenceof anything like an overflow could be madeout. The lake looks like an ordinary bog or(70)
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A Midwinter Cruise swamp with pools of water and tufts of wildgrass, excepting that its surface is hard ornearly so, and upon closer inspection the pe-culiar formation occasioned by the oozing tothe surface of the thick, black bituminoussubstance can be seen. It covers an areaof about a hundred acres and its depth hasnot been fathomed. Already more than amillion tons have been taken from the lakeby the present company, yet no impressionhas been made on the supply. The pitchoozes imperceptibly and keeps the surfacenearly level. The workmen engaged inpicking it out told me that after removingit all day the excavations thus formed werefull the following morning so that one couldnot see that any had been removed. Thesupply comes from a bituminous stratumforced upward by the pressure of the super-imposed earth and appears to be inexhausti-ble. Standing on an islet of pitch surroundedby water it looks like numerous cone for-mations which on reaching the surface flat-mi The American Tropics

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