Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/704

686 of two brooks, one bringing warm water from the mountains and the other cold water from springs, where we may take our choice between the temperatures, or of a mixture of the two, or between a douche and a plunge-bath, and for our final start to the boiling lake. There are two bodies of standing water on the island: one is called the freshwater lake, and is cold; while, though lying at a considerable height above the sea, and probably occupying an extinct crater, it is less remarkable for its geological features than for the beauty of its surroundings. The other, the "Boiling Lake," is the object of our excursion. Soon we entered upon a dark wood of painful grandeur. The trees were so large and tall that we were not able with the naked eye to distinguish the forms of the leaves, the flowers, or the fruit upon a single one of them. Even our guns could not reach the atmospheric vegetation, and we had to content ourselves with the examination of casual fallen specimens, or with pulling at the ropy air-roots of the clusias, when the pouring of water into our faces would inform us that there were tillandsias and brocchinias above. Of animal life, we observed a curious rodent occasionally dashing quickly across the way, but no large mammalia, and two large brightly colored parrots peculiar to the island, of which we did not succeed in getting any specimens. It is a remarkable fact that most of the birds of Dominica are found nowhere else. The ornithologist Ober, who visited Dominica in 1880-'81 and studied its birds, was surprised to remark that a very considerable proportion of them were of perfectly new species. Another species that must not be forgotten is one of large land-crabs which run over the ground, and of which Ober records the habit of going every year in the same month to lay their eggs in the saltwater, where they may be met by thousands and thousands. In a short time we reach a mountain-river of clearest water, which is called the Breakfast River, because excursionists to the boiling lake, reaching it at about ten o'clock in the morning, are accustomed to stop and rest awhile and take their breakfast.

On the other side of this stream we have to climb a steep, bush clad rock-wall, till in an hour we reach the top of the mountain and look on a panorama of astonishing magnificence. Behind us in the west lies the forest we have traversed, and the narrow green valley of the Breakfast River. Before us in the east stretches a bare, ravine cut waste, strewed with volcanic stones and yellow sulphur-beds, and seething with hot springs, streams, fumeroles, and solfataras, covered with the remains of destroyed woods, and crowned with a pillar of vapor reaching to the clouds. Beyond a turn of the valley at our feet sounded a dull rumbling, which with the vapor indicated to us the direction in which the boiling lake lay. We scramble over the steep cliff into the valley through a wood of trees burned to a cinder, but yet standing. This desolation was occasioned by an eruption of the lake, which took place in 1880, by which immense masses of