very 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.

Sixty feet and more aloft, the short smooth columns of the Moriches
{154} towered around us, till, as we looked through the 'pillared
shade,' the eye was lost in the green abysses of the forest.
Overhead, their great fan leaves form a groined roof, compared with
which that of St. Mary Redcliff, or even of King's College, is as
clumsy as all man's works are beside the works of God; and beyond
the Moriche wood, ostrich plumes packed close round madder-brown
stems, formed a wall to our temple, which bore such tracery,
carving, painting, as would have stricken dumb with awe and delight
him who ornamented the Loggie of the Vatican. True, all is 'still-
life' here: no human forms, hardly even that of a bird, is mixed
with the vegetable arabesques. A higher state of civilisation, ages
after we are dead, may introduce them, and complete the scene by
peopling it with a race worthy of it. But the Creator, at least,
has done His part toward producing perfect beauty, all the more
beautiful from its contrast with the ugliness outside. For the want
of h