It is not solely for the sake of industry and commerce that Bolivia may welcome the advent of railways. She is the least naturally cohesive and in some ways the least nationally united of South American states. Europeans and North Americans hear but little about her, and underestimate the difficulties she has had to contend with. Imagine a country as big as the German and Austrian dominions put together, with a population less than that of Denmark, four-fifths of it consisting of semicivilized or uncivilized Indians, and the few educated men of European or mixed stock scattered here and there in half a dozen towns, none of which has more than a small number of capable citizens of that stock. An energetic monarch with a small but efficient and mobile army might rule such a country, but it offers obvious difficulties to the smooth working of a republican government, for one of the essentials to such a government is that the minority of competent citizens, be they many or few, should be in easy communication with one another, capable of understanding one another and of creating a public opinion. This has hitherto been difficult, owing to the want of railways, for Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, and Sucre (Chuquisaca) have all been a many days' journey from one another and from La Paz. These towns know little of one another and are mutually jealous. The old Spanish-colonial element in them regards with disfavour the larger but more Indian La Paz. Sucre is made the legal capital, but neither it nor any other city has both the size and the central position that would qualify to act as a unifying force. There is hardly any immigration, and little natural increase of population, so the vacant spaces do not fill up, even where they are habitable. Anything, therefore, that will help both to increase the material prosperity of Bolivia and to draw its people together will be a political benefit.
Besides the railway which is to run from Uyuni to Buenos Aires, five other lines through the High Andes are likely to be constructed. One is to connect Cuzco with the existing railway from Lima to Oroya, a wonderful line, which reaches a height of 15,600 feet. A second will continue that line eastward to the Ucayali River. A third is also to cross the Eastern Cordillera from Tirapata (north of Lake Titicaca) to the river Madre de Dios. A fourth will run from La Paz down the canyon of its torrent to the river Beni. A fifth will connect Potosi with a port upon the Paraguay River via Sucre and Santa Cruz. The opening of these communications must accelerate the development of Peru and Bolivia.
Uyuni is smaller than Oruro, and even less attractive. It has an enormous empty plaza and four wide streets of mud houses. Standing at 12,500 feet above sea-level, in a dry and cloudless air, where the radiation of heat is great the moment the sun goes down, we found the later hours of night so cold that the water froze inside our sleeping car, while the heat of the day, reflected from the desert floor, is no less intense. There is a famous mine at Pulucayo, in the eastern mountain range, – some ten miles distant from Uyuni and fifteen hundred feet above the town. We mounted to it by a little railway and were struck by the appearance of vegetation when we had risen some hundreds of feet above the torrid plain. Conspicuous was a cactus-like plant, with white, silky hairs, lifting its prickly fingers ten feet up, and ending in clusters of brilliant crimson blossoms. The staff of the French company who work the mine received us hospitably and explained the processes of extraction and the way in which electricity is applied to do the work. Silver, copper, zinc, lead, and iron are all found associated here; and shafts one thousand feet deep are sunk from the long galleries, driven far into the mountain, one of which goes right through to Huanchaca on the other side. A town of six or seven thousand people has grown up, to accommodate the labourers, all Indians or Cholos.46 A church and school and tiny theatre have been built for them, and as their hardy frames can support the cold and the thin air, they seem cheerful and contented. The contrast between the refined appliances of modern science and the rudeness of semicivilized man never seemed sharper than when one saw this machinery and these labourers.
From this height of about fourteen thousand feet one could look for more than a hundred miles over the desert, – and such a desert! Many of us can remember the awe and mystery which the word Wilderness in the Old Testament used to call up in a child's mind. When a boy reads of the Desert of Sahara, he pictures it as terrible and deathful. After he has grown up and travelled outside Europe, the only continent that has no wildernesses, and has seen the deserts on either side of Egypt, or the Kalahari in South Africa, or the deserts of India, or Arizona, or Iceland, he comes to realize that a large part of the earth's surface is desert, and that deserts, if awful, can have also a beauty and even a charm of their own.47 This may not seem to the practical mind to be a sufficient final cause for their existence, but that is a side issue, and philosophy has, since Bacon's time, ceased to enquire into final causes. Of the deserts I have named, those of northern Arizona are perhaps the most beautiful, but this high plateau of southern Bolivia, while very different, is not less impressive.
Right in the midst lay a sparkling plain of white. It was a huge salt marsh, on which the salt crystals shone like silver, for at this season it looks dry, though soft enough to engulf and entomb in its bottomless depths of mud any misguided wayfarer who may attempt to cross it. Beyond it to the northwest and north the waste of sand stretched out to the horizon, while southwest and south long ranges of serrated mountains ran hither and thither across the vast expanse, as if they had been moulded on a relief map, so sharp and so near did they seem to lie, though fifty miles away. Some were capped or streaked with snow, indicating in this arid land a height of seventeen thousand feet.
The splendour of such a view consists not only in the sensuous pleasure which the eye derives from the range of delicate tints and from the fine definition of mountain forms, hardly less various in their lines than they are in their colours, but even more in the impression which is made on the imagination. The immensity and complexity of this nature speak of the vast scale on which natural forces work and of the immense spaces of time which their work has occupied.
Returning to the railway at Uyuni, we set off in the afternoon on our southward way across the desert floor, here perfectly flat and about 12,000 feet above the sea. A deep red soil promised fertility if water could be brought to it, but there was not a tree nor a house, though many a mirage shewed shining water pools and trees around them. Rocky hillocks rising here and there like islands strengthened the impression that this had been in some earlier age the bed of a great inland sea, larger than Lake Superior in North America, stretching from here all the way to the Vilcañota peaks north of Titicaca, and including, besides Titicaca itself, the salt lagoon of Poopo and the white salt marsh we had seen from the heights of Pulucayo. Subterranean forces which, as we know, have been recently at work all over these regions, may have altered the levels, and alterations of level may, in their turn, have induced climatic changes, which, by reducing rainfall, caused the inland sea to dry up, as the Great Salt Lake of Utah and the Aral Sea are drying up now. Looking eastward, we could see heavy clouds brooding over the eastern ranges, which shewed that beyond it lay valleys, watered by the rains which the trade-wind brings up from the far-distant Atlantic. Presently the sweetest hour of the day came as the grey sternness of the heights to the south softened into lilac, and a pale yellow sunset, such as only deserts see, flooded the plain with radiance. The night was intensely cold, and next morning, even at eight o'clock, the earth was frozen hard in the deep, dark hollow where the train had halted.
We were now just inside the Chilean frontier, in the heart of the Western Cordillera, among some of the loftiest volcanic mountains of the Continent. On one side a branch line of railway, the highest in the world, begins its long climb to the Collahuasi copper mine. On the other side, there rose above us the huge black mass of Ollague,48 snow patches on its southern side and steam rising in wreaths from a cleft not far below the summit. We guessed the height at 19,000 feet. The Collahuasi mine is nearly 16,000. Beside us was what seemed a frozen lake, which glittered white when the welcome sun began to overtop the heights and warm our shivering bodies. Although the height is only 12,200 feet, this is a particularly cold spot, and the one place on the line which is liable to severe snowstorms. We had reached the smaller of the two famous lakes of borax, parts of which are water holding borax in solution, while the rest is mud covered with the valuable substance. They have neither influent nor outlet. This place, and a similar lake in Peru, not far from Arequipa, furnish the world with a large part of its supply, the rest coming from California and Siberia and Tibet, where the conditions of a rainlessness that keeps the deposit from being washed away out of the soil are somewhat similar. Presently we reached the larger lake, which is twelve miles long and two to five wide, and stopped to see the method of gathering and preparing the mineral. One end of the (so-called) lake is dry, a thin stratum of whitish earth covering the bed of borax, which is about three feet thick. When dug out, the mineral is spread out on the ground round the works to dry, and then calcined in furnaces, forming a white mass of crystals, which are packed in sacks and sent down to the coast to be shipped to Europe and there turned into the borax of commerce. A large number of labourers are employed in this lonely and cheerless spot fifty miles from the nearest village. When I asked what fuel was used for the furnaces, they pointed to a long wire cable stretched through the air from the works to a point high on the mountain side opposite Ollague. Down this rope small cars were travelling, containing masses of a kind of very hard, stiff plant with whitish flowers so inconspicuous that it is usually taken for a sort of moss.49 It grows abundantly on the slopes between eight and fourteen thousand feet, and its thick hard cushions have to be cut out with a pickaxe. Being very resinous, it burns with a fierce flame, but so quickly that large masses must be constantly thrown in to keep the fire going. Hardly anything else grows on the mountains, but they are inhabited by the little chinchilla, whose light grey fur, exquisitely soft, fetches a high price in Europe.
From this point onward the scenery is of incomparable grandeur. I doubt if there be any other spot in the Andes where the sternness and terror that surround the volcano are equally felt. The railway skirts the borax lake and then rises slowly along a ledge above it, whence one looks down on its still surface, where patches of whitish green open water reflect the crags and snows of the peaks that tower above. The deep, dark valley so winds and turns that it is in some places hard to guess where the exit lies. Above it stands a line of volcanoes, seventeen to nineteen thousand feet high. Their tops are of black rock, their faces, from which here and there black crags project, are slopes of ash and cinders, shewing those strange and gruesome contrasts of colour which are often seen in the mineral world when vegetation and the atmosphere have not had time to tell upon them. In some of these peaks one whole side of the crater seems to have been blown out by an explosion, laying bare the farther wall of the hollow, for the colours are just such as are seen in craters like those of Etna and Hekla, though here more vivid, because here there is so little rain to wash off their brightness. One such breached crater, forming the face of what is called (from the variety of its tints) the Garden Mountain, displays almost every colour of the spectrum, bright yellow and orange, pink and purple, and a brick red passing into dark brown. A ridge that stands out on its face shews on one declivity a yellowish white and on the other a brilliant crimson. But the intensity of these colours heightens rather than reduces the sombre gloom of the landscape. One seems admitted to view an abandoned laboratory of Nature, in which furnaces, now extinct or smouldering low, fused the lavas and generated the steam that raised them to the crater's edge and sent them forth in fiery streams. Where there is now a deathlike silence, flames lit up the darkness of the clouds of ash that rose with the gushing steam, and masses of red-hot rock were hurled to heaven while explosions shook the earth beneath.
In the middle of this narrow pathway which leads through the purple depths of the Cordillera we reach at Ascotan the top of the pass, 13,000 feet above sea-level, whence the valley, turning to the northwest, begins to descend towards the Pacific. The majestic portal through which one looks out into the western desert is guarded by two tall volcanoes standing side by side, St. Peter and St. Paul. The latter has been long extinct, but San Pedro still smokes or steams from its summit. A red hill near its foot has in quite recent times poured forth from its crater a vast lava stream through which the railway passes in a cutting, and which, splitting itself wherever it met a natural obstruction, has sent its long black tongues far down into the valley of the Loa River. For here, after hundreds of miles, one comes again upon a river. Behind the mass of San Pedro fountains fed by its snow break forth from the ground and come down into a clear green stream which has cut its way through the rock in a splendid cañon, across which the line is carried. The river has been turned to account by building several large reservoirs, whence pipes have been laid to the coast, supplying not only the nitrate fields below (of which I shall speak presently), but also the seaports of Antofagasta and Megillones one hundred and forty miles away, all these regions being without brook or spring.
Here we emerged from the mountains into broad sunshine and saw in front of us long ridges falling away, one behind the other, towards the still distant Pacific. Rattling rapidly down the incline, past junctions whence branch lines climb to mines high among the hills, we came at last to Calama, the first Chilean village, where rivulets drawn from the Loa make an oasis of bright green corn and alfalfa and support a few shrubs that gladden the wilderness. Evening is always the pleasantest time in the tropics, and it is most so in a desert, when, instead of the hard afternoon glare, gentle lights begin to fall upon rocks and earth and make their dryness luminous. It was our fortune to have at this best hour of the day a distant view of the Andes, as lovely as the landscapes through which we had passed were awesome. We were now some way west of the chain, and could see it running in a long serrated line from San Pedro southward. This line is the Western Cordillera, which from here all the way to the Straits of Magellan is the main Andean axis, rising over, and apparently created by, the great telluric fissure along which the eruptive forces have acted. Nearest and grandest were the massive cones of San Pedro and San Pablo; and from them the line of snows could in this clear and lucent air be traced without a break, peak rising beyond peak, till ninety miles away it sank beneath the horizon.
Seen close at hand, as we saw Ollague and the other volcanoes that rose above the borax lake, these mountains would be grim and terrible as those were, their slopes a chaos of tumbled rocks and brown cinders and long slides of crumbling ash, telling of the ruthless forces of Nature that had been at work. But seen afar off they were perfect in their beauty, with an exquisite variety of graceful forms, their precipices purple, and their snow crowns rosy in the level light of sunset. So Time seems to soften the horrors and sorrows of the Past as it recedes, and things which to those who lived among them were terrible and to those who had lived through them were fit only to be forgotten, become romantic to men of later generations, a theme for poets or painters, and glories for orators to recall.
Just where the range is lost to sight in the far south it forms the western wall of the great Desert of Atacama, long a name of terror to the Spaniards. Not often in these countries does one find natural objects associated with events important enough to figure in history. But it was in the dreary and waterless wastes of this desert that Almagro, first the friend and partner, then the rival and enemy, and at last the victim, of Pizarro, lost half his men and nearly perished himself in his march into Chile from Peru through what is now northern Argentina. The enterprise was one amazing even in that age of adventure, for Almagro's force was small, there was no possibility of succour, and he went into a land utterly unknown, a land of deserts and mountains. But it was an unlucky enterprise. The tribes of Chile were fiercer than those of Peru; he had gone beyond the regions of civilization and of gold, and returned an empty-handed conqueror.
CHAPTER VI
CHILE
Except Egypt, there is not in the world a country so strangely formed as Chile. Egypt is seven hundred miles long and nowhere save in the Delta more than twelve miles wide. Chile is nearly three thousand miles in length, nowhere more than one hundred and thirty miles wide and for most of her length much narrower. Even Norway, whose shape and sea-front best resemble those of Chile, has but fifteen hundred miles of coast and has, in her south part, two hundred and fifty miles of width. Much of the Chilean territory is a barren desert; much that is not desert is in fact uninhabited. Over large tracts the population is extremely thin. Yet Chile is the most united and the most ardently national in sentiment among all the Spanish-American countries.
Nor is Chile any more singular in the shape of her territory than in her physical conditions also. On the east she is bounded all the way down to Magellan's Straits by the Cordillera of the Andes, the height of whose summits averages in the northern regions from fourteen to twenty thousand feet and in the southern from five to nine thousand, some few peaks exceeding these heights. Parallel to the Cordillera, and geologically much older, there runs along the coast a range averaging from two to three thousand feet, between the foot of which and the ocean there is practically no level ground. The space between this coast range and the Cordillera is a long depression from twenty to thirty miles wide, sometimes hilly, sometimes spreading out into plains, yet everywhere so narrow that both the Coast Range on the one side and the spurs of the Andes on the other are within sight of the inhabitants who live between them. This long and narrow central depression is Chile, just as the cultivable land on each side the Nile is Egypt; and in it all the people dwell, except those who are to be found in the few maritime towns.
It may seem strange that a country of this shape, three thousand miles long, and with only three million three hundred thousand people, should be conspicuously homogeneous, united, and patriotic. When the difference between territorial Chile, the country of the map, and actual Chile dawns upon the traveller, his surprise disappears. There are in the republic three distinct regions. The northern, from latitude 18° south as far as Coquimbo in latitude 30° south, is arid desert; some of it profitable nitrate desert, most of it, like Atacama, useless desert. The south, from Puerto Montt in latitude 42° south down to latitude 54° south, is an archipelago of wooded isles with a narrow strip of wooded mountain on the mainland behind, both of them drenched by perpetual rains and inhabited only by a few wandering Indians, with here and there a trading post of white men. It is the central part alone that is compactly peopled, a narrow tract about seven hundred miles long, most of it mountainous, but the valleys generally fertile, and the climate excellent. This central part is the real Chile, the home of the nation.
To central Chile I shall return presently. Meantime a few pages may be given to the northern section, which, though a desert, has an enormous economic value, and is, indeed, one of the chief sources of natural wealth in the two American continents. It is the region which supplies the agriculturists of the whole world with their nitrates, and the nitrates are here because the country is absolutely rainless. Rains would have washed the precious mineral out of the soil long ago and swept it down into the Pacific.
One enters the nitrate fields in two or three hours after leaving the Bolivian plateau and passing through the Western Cordillera described in the last preceding chapter. They are unmitigated desert, a region of low stony hills, dry and barren, not a shrub, not a blade of grass. Sources of fertility to other countries, they remain themselves forever sterile. All the water is brought down in pipes from the upper course of the Loa, the stream which rises on the flanks of the volcano of San Pedro already mentioned. One can just descry in the far distance its snow-streaked summit. But the desert is all alive. Everywhere there are narrow-gauge lines of rails running hither and thither, with long rows of trucks passing down them, carrying lumps of rock. Groups of men are at work with pickaxes breaking the ground or loading the trucks. Puffs of smoke and dust are rising from places where the rock is being blasted with dynamite. Here and there buildings with machinery and tall iron pipes shew the oficinas where the rock is ground to powder, then washed and boiled, the liquid mass run off and drained and dried into a whitish powder, which is packed into sacks and sent down to the coast for shipment. The mineral occurs in a stratum which lies about a foot below the surface, and averages three feet in thickness. It is brownish grey in colour and very hard. There is a considerable by-product of iodine, which is separated and sent off for sale. The demand for it is said to be less than the supply.
Each oficina– that is the name given to the places for the reduction and preparation of the mineral – is the centre of a larger or smaller nitrate estate, and the larger and more modern ones are equipped with houses for the managers and workpeople, each being a sort of village where the company supplies everything to the workpeople, who are mostly Chilean rotos, sturdy peasants of half-Indian blood. In South America one sees plenty of isolated mining villages in deserts, but here a whole wide region unable to support human life is alive with an industrious population.
The air being dry and pure (except for the dust) at this considerable elevation, averaging from three to five thousand feet, the climate ought to be healthy. But it is impossible to imagine a more dismal place to inhabit, and those parts of the surface from which the mineral has been removed are at once forsaken.
These nitrate fields cover a very large area in the northern provinces of Chile, but some districts in which the mineral is believed to exist are still imperfectly explored, and many in which it does exist shew a comparatively poor stratum, so that it is not possible to estimate how much remains to be developed and the length of time it will take, at the present rate of production, to exhaust that amount. We were told, however, that, so far as can be conjectured, the fields might (at the present rate) last nearly two centuries, before the end of which period much may happen in the field of scientific agriculture. The export duty or royalty which the Chilean government levies produces a large annual revenue, and is, indeed, the mainstay of the finance of the republic, enabling taxation to be fixed at a low figure.50 There are those who say that this is no unmixed benefit, because it reduces the motives for economical administration. The guano deposits of Peru proved to be the source of more evil than good, for by pouring into her treasury sums which excited the cupidity of military adventurers, they made revolutions more frequent. No such danger need be feared in Chile; yet there are always temptations incident to the possession of wealth which a man or a nation has not earned by effort. As the nitrates are part of the capital of the country which will some day come to an end, it would seem prudent to expend what they produce upon permanent improvements which will add to the nation's permanent wealth, such, for instance, as railroads and harbours. A good deal is, in fact, being spent on railroad construction, and a good deal on the creation of a naval stronghold and docks at Talcahuano.
Between the nitrate fields and the sea there lies a strip of wholly unprofitable desert, traversed by that range of hills which rises from the coast all the way along the west side of Chile and Peru. Its scenery is bold and in places striking, but the utter bareness and brownness deprive it of all charm except that which the morning and evening sunlight gives, bringing out delicate tints on distant slopes. Here the railway line forks, sending one branch to the port of Antofagasta, and the other to the smaller town but better sheltered roadstead of Megillones. We went to the latter. Local interests of a selfish kind have here, as elsewhere along the coast, caused the selection of Antofagasta as the principal terminus of the line; and though it is now admitted that Megillones would have been a fitter spot, so much capital has been sunk in buildings at the former that it is deemed too late to make a change. The bay of Megillones, guarded by a lofty promontory on the south, and commanding a view of ridge after ridge of mountains stretching out to the north, has a beautiful sweep, and is enlivened by the abundance of seals and sea-lions, who wallow and bark to one another in the long, slow rollers of the Pacific. The beach is excellent for bathing, but the water so cold that only in the hotter part of the year do the Englishmen, who manage the railway and its machine works and who retain here the national love of salt water, find it suitable for anything more than a plunge in and out again. Though rain is extremely rare, one may conclude from the gullies in the hills down which torrents seem to have swept either that violent storms come occasionally or that the climate has altered since hills and valleys took their present form.
Antofagasta, where we landed on the southward voyage down the coast, is a much busier place than Megillones, but a less attractive one, for it has no such sweep of sand and space of level ground behind, being crushed in between the dreary, dusty hills and the rocky shore. Landing in the surf is often difficult and sometimes dangerous, but as the chief port of the southern nitrate country it receives a good deal of shipping, and has a pleasant little native society, besides an English and a German colony.
Nearly five hundred miles further south are the towns of La Serena and Coquimbo, the former a quiet old Spanish city, placed back from the coast to be out of the way of the English and Dutch marauders, who were frequent and formidable visitors in these seas, after Sir Francis Drake had led the way in his famous voyage in 1578, when he sailed up and down the coast plundering towns and capturing ships. Coquimbo is a newer place, with a fairly good harbour, and thrives on the trade which the mines in its neighbourhood assure to it. It is an arid land, yet here there begins to be some rain, and here, therefore, we felt that we were bidding farewell to the desert, which we had first struck at Payta, fifteen hundred miles further north. Nevertheless there was little green upon the hills until we reached, next day, a far more important port, the commercial capital not only of Chile, but of all western South America, and now the terminus of the trans-continental railway to Buenos Aires.
This is Valparaiso, where the wanderer who has been musing among prehistoric ruins and Bolivian volcanoes finds himself again in the busy modern world. The harbour is full of vessels from all quarters, – coasting steamers that ply to Callao and Panama, sailing ships as well as steamers from San Francisco and others from Australia, mostly with cargoes of coal, besides vessels that have come from Europe round Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan. The so-called harbour is really an open roadstead, for there is no shelter to the north, and when, as often happens, the dreaded gale from that quarter breaks, vessels that have not had time to run out under steam are in danger of drifting ashore, for the water deepens so quickly from the land that they cannot anchor far out. Why not build a breakwater? Because the water is so deep that the cost of a breakwater long enough to give effective protection would be enormous. There is a more sheltered haven some miles to the north, but as all the business offices and warehouses are here, not to speak of the labouring population and their houses, the idea of moving the city and railway terminus has not been seriously considered.
Seen from the sea, Valparaiso is picturesque, and has a marked character of its own, though the dryness of the hills and the clearness of the light make it faintly recall one of those Spanish or Italian towns which glitter on the steep shores of the Mediterranean. It resembles Messina in Sicily in being very long and very narrow, for here, as there, the heights, rising abruptly from the shore, leave little space for houses, and the lower part of the town has less than a quarter of a mile in breadth. On this narrow strip are all the places of business, banks, shipping offices, and shops, as well as the dwellings of most of the poorer class. On the hills above, rising steeply two hundred feet or more, stands the upper town, which consists chiefly of the residences of the richer people. Their villas, interspersed with gardens, have a pretty effect seen from below, and in rambling along the lanes that run up to heights behind one gets charming views over the long line of coast to the north. Communication between the lower and upper towns is carried on chiefly by elevators (lifts) or trolley cars worked on the cog-wheel system.