Suddenly, a loathsome smell defiled the air.

Was there a gas-house in the wilderness?
Or had the pales of Paradise been just smeared with bad coal-tar?
Not exactly: but across the path crept, festering in the sun, a black runnel of petroleum and water; and twenty yards to our left stood, under a fast-crumbling trunk, what was a year or two ago a little engine-house.

Now roof, beams, machinery, were all tumbled and tangled in hideous and somewhat dangerous ruin, over a shaft, in the midst of which a rusty pump- cylinder gurgled, and clicked, and bubbled, and spued, with black oil and nasty gas; a foul ulcer in Dame Nature's side, which happily was healing fast beneath the tropic rain and sun.

The creepers were climbing over it, the earth crumbling into it, and in a few years more the whole would be engulfed in forest, and the oil-spring, it is to be hoped, choked up with mud.
This is the remnant of one of the many rash speculations connected with the Pitch Lake.

At a depth of some two hundred and fifty feet 'oil was struck,' as the American saying is.