Thus, though there is not much for the tourist to see or do, nor for the art student to admire, still La Paz is a picturesque place, with a character so peculiar that it makes for itself a niche in the memory and stays there, as being unlike any other place. The strange irregularity of the steep, rough streets with cliffs of brown earth standing up at the ends of them, the brawling torrent, the wild-looking Indians in their particoloured dresses, the flocks of graceful llamas with their long, curved necks and liquid, wondering eyes, the extraordinary situation of the city in this deep pit, deep but not dark, for the vertical sun blazes into it all day long; and, above all, the magnificent snowy mass of Illimani, towering into the sapphire blue sky with glaciers that seem to hang over the city though they are forty miles away, its three pinnacles of snow turning to a vivid rose under the departing sun,—all these together make La Paz a fascinating spot, one of those which flash quickly and vividly before the mind when you think of them.
The outskirts of the city, too bare and stern for beauty, have a weird grimness which approaches grandeur. A pretty avenue between rows of Eucalyptus, the only tree that seems to thrive here, and which stands the frost better than it does in England, perhaps because Bolivia has a dry air and a strong sun which more nearly reproduce the conditions of its Australian home, leads to a public park whence a splendid view of the surrounding heights and down the valley is obtained. The precipices of hard earth that enclose it have been here and there broken up into lofty earth pyramids like those which one sees near Botzen in Tyrol, and have doubtless been formed, like those, by the action of rain upon the softer parts of the cliff. Behind the eastern earth wall rise the spurs and buttresses of the Cordillera, wild, bare glens running up to the watershed of the chain, across the head of one of which is the pass which leads down into the forest Montaña. It reminded me of some of the recesses among the Noric Alps behind Gastein, but was on a vaster scale, and more gloomy, as Andean landscapes usually are. Quitting the city on another side, I rode southward for some seven or eight miles along the road which leads down the gorge, by a long and devious course, through the heart of the Eastern Cordillera under the southern flanks of Illimani, into the land of gold and rubber, of alligators and jaguars. In the sheltered nooks at the lower end of the town there were gardens full of bamboos and flowering shrubs, and one met strings of llamas, mules, and donkeys coming up the road, laden with tropical fruits and other products of the Yungas, as this region is called. Farther down the scenery was stern and harsh, with great rock-masses, crowning slopes that rose steeply three or four thousand feet above the valley, but here and there where there was room for cultivation beside the river, a patch of bright green alfalfa relieved its monotony of brown and black—a weird country, with these sharp contrasts of heat and cold, of verdure and sterility. The air was already warm, and after thirty miles, one comes into the rains and the insects and the fevers of the tropics.
Within the city there is little for a visitor to do except wander through the market and buy rugs made of the deliciously soft and warm wool of the vicuña, the finest and costliest of Andean skins. Neither is there much to see except the museum, which contains an interesting collection of minerals, specimens of woods, stuffed animals, and all sorts of curiosities, such as Indian weapons and various kinds of handiwork. As the rooms are far too small for their contents, these are not seen to advantage. The gentleman who seems to have the chief share in the management (Señor Ballivian) is a historical scholar and archæologist of high repute, belonging to one of the old families of La Paz. Such accomplishments are not common in Bolivia, yet there are few countries which offer a wider and more attractive field to the naturalist and to the student of ethnology.
The legislature being in session, I was invited to be present at its sittings. Both houses are small in number and are composed chiefly of lawyers, as, indeed, are most South American legislative bodies, law being the occupation which naturally leads to and comports with the profession of politics. On this particular occasion the proceedings were unexciting and the speeches conversational in tone. Members speak sitting, a practice which, though general in these republics, seems ill adapted for displays of that sonorous eloquence which belongs to the Spanish-American temperament. Among the eminent citizens whom it was my good fortune to meet none impressed me more than the veteran General Pando, who has been president of the republic and might have been so again, had not his patriotism made him prefer to devote his energies to the organization of the Bolivian army, the smallness of which makes its efficiency all the more needful. Nobody in the country is more widely respected and trusted.
There is a handful of foreign residents, German business men, English and North American railway men, a pleasant little society. The best school is said to be that conducted by a North American mission, which, however, devotes itself to education and not to proselytizing. Children of good Roman Catholic families attend it.
That the educated residents of Spanish stock should be few is not surprising when one realizes that La Paz is really an Indian city. Aymará is the language commonly spoken by three-fourths or more of its inhabitants. It has probably a larger aboriginal population than any other city in the New World, though the percentage of Indians may be somewhat greater in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. This may be a fitting place to give a brief account of their present condition, since of what they seem to have been before the Conquest something has been said in the last preceding chapter.
Though the bulk of the inhabitants of La Paz and Cuzco are Indians, the larger Andean towns are generally Spanish in appearance, and it is in the rural districts that the Indian is best seen and understood. He is essentially an agriculturist. Nearly all the land except in some coast plantations where a little Chinese or negro labour is employed is cultivated by the Indian, and all the llamas and sheep are herded by him. There is, indeed, no other industry by which a living can be made, except mining, for no factories on a large scale yet exist in these countries. Attached to the land, and dwelling usually in small villages which, save in fertile tracts like the Vilcamayu Valley, are seldom near together, the Indian has retained the beliefs and habits of his forefathers more than even the peasantry of Russia or the Turkish dominions. His primitive organization, the ayllu or clan, composed, like the Roman gens, or perhaps rather like a Greek phratry, of persons who traced their descent to a supposed common ancestor, still subsists in Bolivia, though it has of late years been interfered with by a new kind of grouping, that of the tenants or labourers on the same finca (landed estate). A number of ayllus made up a tribe, but this division has lost its importance since the cacique or chief of ancient times vanished. In every Indian agricultural community there are two officials. One is the Ilacata, whose functions are administrative, including the division of the land each year between the persons who are to till it and the receipt of the crops from common land, and the supervision of common labour. The other is the Alcalde, who combines executive and judicial powers, maintaining order, deciding petty disputes, and leading in fighting if the need for fighting should arise. The peasant, though legally free, practically goes with the estate, and though legally a voter, practically does not vote, the government being kind enough to relieve the rural citizens, and frequently the urban ones also, from a duty which few of them are qualified to discharge. They are in some places oppressed by the landowners,—that one must expect where there is a great difference of race and capacity,—yet much less than in colonial days, for there have been Indian risings, and firearms are more largely in their hands than formerly. They so preponderate in numbers that any movement which united them against the upper class might, could they find a leader, have serious consequences. Thus the fear of trouble restrains the excesses of power. Those who have land of their own are said to fare as ill at the hands of the lawyer and money-lender as any tenant could do at those of a landlord.
Scarcely any are educated. In Titicaca Island, with a population of about three hundred, there was a few years ago only one man who could read. In all Bolivia only 30,000 children were in the schools out of a population of 2,000,000. The sparseness of the population makes the provision of instruction difficult; nor do the aborigines seem to care for education, being so far satisfied with their lot as to have no notion of other pleasures than those which their fairs and festivals supply, and those derived from the use of alcohol at these festivals, and at all times of the coca leaf, which is for an Indian the first necessity of life. He is never without his bag containing a bundle of leaves, which he masticates (usually with a little clay) while walking or working, finding in them a support which enables him to endure fatigue without food for long periods. The leaf when chewed is tasteless, and whether taken thus or in a decoction produces no directly pleasurable feeling of stimulus. I have experimented with it in both forms without being able to discover any result except that of arresting hunger. Taken by chewing the leaf, as the Indians take it, it cannot have the highly deleterious effects of cocaine, which is a concentrated essence; indeed, if it had those effects, the aborigines of the plateau must have been long ago ruined by it.41 Possibly there is something in the physical conditions of their life rendering it comparatively or altogether innocuous. It does not seem to be much used by the whites, nor in the lowlands by any class of the population. Perhaps, therefore, it is "indicated" in the mild form of a chewed leaf, as a stimulant suitable to those who take continuous exertion at great altitudes.
What has been said here refers generally to the aborigines of the high Andean regions, but there are two great divisions of them, the characteristics of which are not altogether the same. In very early times there were probably many diverse tribes, and every valley spoke a language, or at least a dialect, of its own. This is still the case in the Montaña region (the forests at the east foot of the Andes), where adjoining tribes are sometimes wholly unlike one another in speech and aspect. The conquests of the Incas, with their levelling and unifying rule, effaced most of these distinctions. There was a tongue called Mochica spoken by the coast people of Chimu, the race to whose artistic talent reference was made in last chapter, which seems to have been quite unlike the speech of the plateau. It is now extinct, but a grammar, made by a learned ecclesiastic, has fortunately survived. There is also another distinct tongue which remains among a half-savage tribe called the Urus, who dwell, now very few in number, among the rushy lagoons on the Desaguadero River, near the southwest end of Lake Titicaca. With these exceptions, the Spaniards seem to have found on their arrival only two forms of speech prevailing over Peru, corresponding to two racial divisions, the Quichuas to which the Incas apparently belonged, and the Aymarás. The latter held all the Collao, i.e. the country round Titicaca, and south of it round La Paz. The former occupied the northern valleys of Peru and the coast regions south of Lima, and a part of what is now southern Bolivia around Oruro and Uyuni. As these two languages are of the same type, it is generally held that the Quichua and Aymará races are cognate. Those who know both declare that the Quichuas are the gentler and the less forcible. The Aymarás, by the testimony of European as well as Peruvian observers, are ruder in manners, more sullen and vindictive in disposition. Both races are alike secretive and suspicious of the whites, and for this sentiment they have had good reason. The impressions of a passing traveller are of no value, but it seemed to me, in noting the faces and deportment of the Indians whom we saw, that while both races had less intelligence and rather less look of personal dignity than the Indians of Mexico, the Aymarás seemed both a more dogged and a less cheerful race than the Quichuas. We might, perhaps, expect to find little buoyancy of spirit in those to whom Nature turns on this wind-swept roof of the world so stern a countenance. Yet the Icelander, whose far-distant isle is surrounded by a melancholy ocean, is of a lively and cheerful temper.
Both Quichuas and Aymarás have that remarkable impassiveness and detachment which belongs to all the American peoples and which in the Old World one finds only in some of the East Asiatic races. With plenty of stability, they lack initiative. They make steady soldiers, and fight well under white, or mestizo, leaders, but one seldom hears of a pure Indian accomplishing anything or rising either through war or politics, or in any profession, above the level of his class. The Mexican Juarez, the conqueror of Maximilian and of the priesthood, was a pure-blooded Indian. Since the days of the Araucanian chiefs Lautaro and Caupolican, South America has shewn no native quite equal to him. Curiosity and ambition are alike wanting to the race. Though one sees plenty of Indian blood in Peruvians and Bolivians of eminence, so that there must have been formerly much racial intermixture, and though there is practically no social distinction (except in three or four cities) between the white and the educated mestizo, intermarriage between pure Indians and pure Europeans is very uncommon.
The Indian of the plateau is still only a half-civilized man and less than half a Christian. He retains his primeval Nature worship, which groups together the spirits that dwell in mountains, rivers, and rocks with the spirits of ancestors, revering and propitiating all as Achachilas. In the same ceremony his medicine man invokes the Christian "Dios" to favour the building of a house, or whatever enterprise he undertakes, and simultaneously invokes the Achachilas, propitiating them also by offerings, the gift made to the Earth Spirit being buried in the soil.42 Similarly he retains the ceremonial dances of heathendom and has secret dancing guilds, of whose mysteries the white man can learn nothing. His morality is what it was, in theory and practice, four centuries ago. He neither loves nor hates, but fears, the white man, and the white man neither loves nor hates, but despises him, there being some fear, at least in Bolivia, mingled with the contempt. They are held together neither by social relations nor by political, but by the need which the white landowner has for the Indian's labour and by the power of long habit which has made the Indian acquiesce in his subjection as a rent payer. Neither of them ever refers to the Conquest. The white man does not honour the memory of Pizarro; to the Indian the story is too dim and distant to affect his mind. Nor is it the least remarkable feature of the situation that the mestizo, or half-breed, forms no link between the races. He prefers to speak Spanish which the Indian rarely understands. He is held to belong to the upper race, which is, for social and political purposes, though not by right of numbers, the Peruvian (or Bolivian) nation.
In no capital city have I felt so far removed from the great world, the European and Asiatic and North American parts of which are now so closely linked together, as here in La Paz. There may probably be an equal sense of isolation in Quito and Bogotá, there can hardly be a stronger one. To be enclosed between two lofty ranges and two deserts, to live at the bottom of a hole and yet be nearly as high above sea-level as the top of the Rocky Mountains or the Jungfrau are strange conditions for a dwelling place. Nevertheless it was a place in which one might do much meditation, for new sensations awaken new thoughts, and solitude helps one to pursue them. So it was with regret for everything except its climate that we quitted La Paz early one morning to resume our southward journey, bidding a long farewell to the Achachila43 of the majestic Illimani, to which we had offered orisons of admiration in each dawning and each departing light. After we had climbed to the rim of the Barranca in the electric car, an hour's run on the steam railroad carried us across the open plateau to Viacha, whence one route leads to Titicaca and over the lake to Mollendo, and another, now in construction, will in 1913 be ready to carry passengers down through the great Western Cordillera to the Pacific at Arica.44 As this will be hereafter the most direct way of reaching La Paz from the coast, Viacha may some day be an important railroad centre, like Crewe or Chicago or Cologne. At present it is inexpressibly bleak and dreary, standing alone on a dusty and treeless waste. But the traveller of the future who has to wait here to "make his connections" will, while he paces up and down enquiring how much the incoming train is behind time, be able to feast his eyes on the incomparable view of the great Cordillera Real, piercing the northeastern sky, and here ending towards the south in the snowy pyramid of Huayna Potosi, round whose flanks gather the clouds that rise from the moist eastern forests sixteen thousand feet below.
At Viacha we entered the cars of the Antofagasta and Bolivia railroad, owned by an enterprising English company, and moved off to the south across a wide undulating plain which seemed an arid waste, but turned out to be pastured upon by flocks of sheep and llamas. Dry as the ground looked,—it was the end of September, when the summer showers were just beginning,—there was feed to be had and a few brooks here and there supplied drink. Some of those ancient round buildings of unmortared stone which the natives call Chulpas and which seem to have served as tombs rather than shrines were to be seen. Here and there were villages, clusters of rude mud huts, sometimes with a bare, ugly church far too large for the place, and probably owing its size to the zeal of some seventeenth-century Jesuit or Augustinian. At first low, brown mountains cut off to the west the view of that Western Cordillera through which the Arica line is making its difficult way, but presently they subside, and one sees far off across the plain a group of magnificent snowy peaks, apparently, from their shape and their isolation, ancient volcanoes. Sahama, the highest, a pyramidal cone of beautiful proportions, seemed, from the amount of snow it carried, to be not less than 21,000 feet high. It has never yet been ascended. In this western range the snow line is higher than it is in the Eastern Cordillera because the latter receives more moisture. To the northeast the great Cordillera Real which one admires from Titicaca has now disappeared behind the low ridges crossing the plain, and Illimani is seen only now and then overtopping the nearer hills. On the east, however, farther south than Illimani, a new line of snows comes into view, distant, perhaps, nearly a hundred miles and doubtless forming part of the Eastern Cordillera. On each side there stretches out a wide plain, but in one place the line runs for some miles through a range of hills of black (apparently volcanic) rock, following the course of a stream which presently wanders off to the west and is there lost, swallowed up in marshes. Besides the tufts of coarse bunch grass and a few low shrubs, there is still in the moister spots some little pasture,—it is astonishing how llamas can find something to eat on what seems bare ground,—but the land grows more and more sterile as the line continues southward. Presently the Indian villages cease; and great flats are seen to the west which are covered by water in the wet season. At last a group of high, brown hills marks the site of Oruro, an old and famous mining town, one of whose mines, which has been worked for hundreds of years, formerly stood second only to Potosi in its output of silver. Copper and tin as well as silver are worked in the hills, and on mining depends the prosperity of the town, which has now some twenty thousand inhabitants. The long, straight streets of mean one-story adobe houses, covered with plaster, with only a few better residences where the business men and foreign mining people live, give little idea of the former importance of the place, but there is a large and rather handsome Plaza wherein stand the government buildings and a well-built arcade containing good shops. Beside the big church are two enormous bells, of which the city has long been proud, but which have to stand on the ground because too heavy for the little erection on the church roof on which the bells in daily use are hung. To the east, beyond a barren flat some eight or ten miles wide, a range of hills bounds the plateau, and beyond them the ground falls towards the Argentine frontier, so that within a day or two's riding one can get off this dry land of scorching days and freezing nights down into soft moist air and tall trees.
Oruro used to be the end of the railway which came up hither from the Pacific coast, and from here southward the gauge is of only two feet and a half. It is, however, to be widened, for traffic is increasing, and the company prosperous.
Next to the Germans, the most ubiquitous people in the world are the Aberdonians, so I was scarcely surprised to meet one here in the person of the principal doctor of the place, who, when we had talked about our friends on the banks of the far-distant Dee, gave me much information regarding the health conditions of Bolivia. He described Oruro as a more agreeable place of residence than its rather dreary externals promised. There was some agreeable society, for mining, which does not improve the quality of the working population, usually draws to a place a number of men of superior ability and sometimes of scientific attainments. Here, as elsewhere in Bolivia, foreigners, including some Chileans, own the mines, while business is chiefly in the hands of Germans. Manual labour is done by Indians (here speaking Quichua), whose number does not increase, because, although the families are large, the mortality among their children is very high, or else by half-breeds, here usually called Cholos, who would be good workers, were they not addicted to the use of the horrible spirits that are too easily procurable. There are, however, also some Chilean half-breeds and some English-speaking men, brought for the higher kinds of work.
About twenty miles away to the south is the great lagoon called Aullagas or Poopo,—the names are taken from villages on its shores,—which is fed by the river Desaguadero. This singular lake, which has the interest of a vanishing quantity, is fifty-three miles long by twenty-four broad, is nowhere more than nine feet deep and mostly less than five, is salt, turbid, with a bottom of dark mud, and full of fish too small to be worth catching. Like those of Titicaca they belong to species found nowhere else. Having so small a volume in proportion to the surface area which it exposes to a strong sun and an intensely dry air, it loses by evaporation all the water it receives by the river from Titicaca and probably a little more, for it seems to be now shrinking. When Titicaca, itself probably subsiding, has still less to give, Poopo will disappear altogether, and this plain will become a sheet of glittering salt.45
As one pursues the journey farther south, the country becomes always more arid, and at Uyuni, the next town of consequence, it is a veritable desert where only the smallest stunted shrubs are seen among the sand and stones. This uninhabited region will soon be a converging point of railroads, for it is here that the existing line from La Paz to the Pacific coast at Antofagasta is to be joined by the new railway which is to be constructed to provide a quick through route from central Bolivia to the Atlantic coast at Buenos Aires. Its completion from Uyuni to Tupiza near the Argentine border is expected by 1916, and when the link has been made, there will be a complete railway connection across the Continent from the River Plate to the Pacific at Arica. Bolivia has hitherto suffered greatly from the want of communications, so when La Paz has been brought within twenty-four hours of the one ocean at Arica and within seventy-two or eighty hours of the other at Buenos Aires, a great impetus ought to be given to her export trade. This lofty and desert part of Bolivia finds its only source of wealth in minerals. The Western Cordillera is especially rich in copper and silver, the Eastern in gold and tin. One-third of all the world's production of tin now comes from Bolivia. Besides the silver found in various places,—the great silver mountain is still worked at Potosi,—the eastern spurs of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes are believed to contain plenty of gold, which would be extracted from the gravels, perhaps from rock reefs also, much more extensively, but for the extreme difficulty of conveying mine machinery across the mountains down abrupt slopes and through trackless forests. It was from these East Andean regions that the Incas obtained those vast stores of gold which excited the cupidity of the Spaniards. Pizarro got from Atahuallpa a quantity roughly estimated at £3,000,000 ($15,000,000) on a promise that the Inca's life would be spared,—a promise broken as soon as most of the gold had been delivered. Yet the contemporary Spanish annalists declare that what the Spaniards laid their hands upon first and last in the days of the Conquest was much less than what the Indians buried or threw into the lakes when they could no longer guard it. Great, however, as is the mineral wealth of the Bolivian highlands, it is less on them, than on the development of the agricultural and pastoral resources of the eastern part of the republic that future prosperity must in the long run depend. Mines are a transitory source of wealth; they enrich the foreign capitalist rather than the nation itself; they do not help to build up an intelligent and settled body of responsible citizens.
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.
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.
At the time of my visit, the city was half in ruins, rebuilding itself after a terrible earthquake. The lower town had suffered most, for here, as at Messina and at San Francisco, buildings erected on soft alluvial ground were overthrown more frequently and completely than those that stood on a rocky foundation. The opportunity was being taken to widen and straighten the principal thoroughfares, and to open up some of the overcrowded poorer districts. The irregularities of the site between a sinuous coastline and spurs projecting from the hills make the city plan less uniform and rectangular than in most Spanish-American cities, and though nothing is old and there is little architectural variety, still the bright colours of the houses washed in blue or white, the glimpses of rocky heights seen at the eastern end of all the cross streets and of the sea glittering at the western give a quality of its own to the lower town, while the upper town has its steep gardens and tree clumps and wide prospects over the bay and the jutting capes beyond.
But Valparaiso is perhaps most picturesque when seen from a steamer anchored in the bay, especially when its white houses and hills, green for a few weeks in spring, meet the eyes of one who comes from the barren deserts of Bolivia and the nitrate region. In front are the ocean steamers and the tall spars of Australian clippers; nearer shore the smaller craft are tossing on the ocean swell; the upper town is seen rising on its cliffs behind the lower, with high pastures and rocky hummocks still further back. Far away in the northeast the snowy mass of Aconcagua, loftiest of all American summits, floats like a white cloud on the horizon.
A few miles north of Valparaiso is the pretty residential suburb of Viña del Mar, beyond which the rocks come down to the sea, here and there enclosing stretches of sandy beach on which the great green rollers break. The dark yellow Californian poppy (Eschscholtzia) which covers the fields in such masses round San Francisco is equally common here. Woody glens come down from the hills; and in the bottom of one of these the principal sporting club has laid out a race-course and polo ground, where we saw the fashionable world gathered for these diversions, just as popular here as in Europe. (South America has not yet given any game of its own to the world as the North American Indians gave La Crosse and the East Indies polo.) Everything looked very pretty in the fresh green of October, but everybody shivered; for though the summers are extremely hot, the spring was less genial than one expected in this latitude. Valparaiso has winds equally chilling whether they come down from the snowy Andes on the east or up from the Antarctic current on the west. It is a windy place and in summer a very dusty one, but in comparison with the dismal barrenness of Mollendo and Antofagasta it deserves its name of Valley of Paradise.
Despite earthquakes and northern gales, Valparaiso continues to be the most flourishing seat of world trade on the western side of its Continent, the only South American rival of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. It is also the centre of the coast trade of the Chileans, the only Spanish-American people who have shewn taste or talent for seafaring. We felt ourselves back in the modern world when we saw a Stock Exchange, having since we left New York passed near no city possessing that familiar appliance of civilization. Apart from stocks, abundant opportunities are supplied for speculation by the sudden and violent fluctuations in exchange upon Europe. The commercial houses are chiefly English and German, and among the Chilean firms there are some that bear English names. The Europeans of former days soon made themselves at home here, and their descendants in the third or even the second generation are patriotic Chileans. Some of the heads of British firms told me that the young men who come out to them to-day from England, are not, as a rule, equal either to those of thirty years ago or to the young Germans who are sent to serve German houses. "They care less for their work,"—so my informants declared,—and "they do it less thoroughly; their interests at school in England have lain chiefly in playing, or in reading about, cricket and football, not in any pursuit needing mental exertion, and here where cricket and football are not to be had, they become listless and will not, like the young Germans, spend their evenings in mastering the language and the business conditions of the country." What truth there is in this I had no means of testing, but Valparaiso is not the only foreign port in which one hears such things said.
Fifty miles inland, as the crow flies, but much farther by railway, is Santiago, the capital of Chile, and in population the fourth city in South America.51 Except Rio de Janeiro, no capital in the world has a more striking position. Standing in the great central valley of Chile, it looks out on one side over a fertile plain to the wooded slopes of the Coast Range, and on the other looks up to the gigantic chain of the Cordillera, rising nineteen thousand feet above it, furrowed by deep glens into which glaciers pour down, with snowy wastes behind. At Santiago, as at Innsbruck, one sees the vista of a long, straight street closed by towering mountains that crown it with white as the sea crowns with blue the streets of Venice. But here the mountains are more than twice as high as those of the Tyrolean city and they never put off their snowy vesture. Wherever one walks or drives through the city in the beautiful public park and on the large open grounds of the race-course, these fields of ice are always before the eye, whether wreathed with cloud or glittering against an ardent sky.
The interior of the city does not offer very much to the traveller. There is one long, broad and handsome thoroughfare, the Alameda, adorned with statues and with four rows of trees, as well as several plazas, small compared to those of Lima and Arequipa, but very tastefully planted. There is a cathedral of the familiar type, spacious and well proportioned, with the usual two west towers and the usual silver altar. There are handsome government offices, and a fine building for the legislature. The streets are narrow, the houses seldom high, for here also earthquakes have to be considered. Everything looks new, as might be expected in a place which was small and poor till the end of the eighteenth century, and which has grown rapidly within the last sixty years with the prosperity of the country. Prosperity and confidence are in the air. Great, indeed, is the contrast between old-fashioned Lima and still more ancient Cuzco, or between La Paz, nestling in its Barranca under the mountains like an owl in the desert, and this brisk, eager, active, modern city, where crowded electric cars pass along crowded streets and men hurry to their business or their politics even as they do in western Europe or North America. Santiago is a real capital, the heart of a real nation, the place in which all the political energy of the nation is focussed, commercial energy being shared with Valparaiso. Here are no loitering negroes, nor impassive Indians, for the population is all Chilean, though close inspection discovers a difference between the purer and the less pure European stock. A great deal of native blood flows in the veins of the Chilean roto.
There is little of historical or archæological interest in Santiago, no skeleton of its founder (as of Pizarro in Lima), for Pedro de Valdivia was taken prisoner and killed by the Araucanian Indians hundreds of miles away; no palace of the Inquisition, for Santiago was in the seventeenth century too small a place to need the elaborate machinery of the Holy Office for the protection of its orthodoxy. Till the War of Independence it was a remote provincial town. But Nature has given it one spot to which historical associations can attach. When Valdivia, one of the ablest and boldest of the lieutenants of Pizarro, was sent down hither to complete the conquest of that southernmost part of the Inca dominion from which Almagro had returned disappointed in the quest for gold, his soldierly eye lit upon and marked a steep rock that rose out of the plain on the banks of a torrent descending from the Andes. On this rock he planted (in 1541) a rude fort and, after receiving the submission of the neighbouring Indians, marched on still further south, into regions which the Incas had never conquered. After some successes, a sudden rising of the natives chased him back and he had to take refuge in the fort upon this rock, now called Santa Lucia. Besieged for many weeks and reduced to the utmost extremity of famine, he held out here with that desperate tenacity of which the men of Spain have given so many examples from the days of Saguntum to those of Cortes at Mexico and from those of Cortes to those of Palafox at Saragossa. The Indians had, however, no notion of how to conduct siege operations and at last Valdivia was relieved. The fort remained, and beneath it there grew up in course of time the city.
The ancient Acropolis or Hill Fortress is a familiar sight in India, in Greece, and Italy, and in western Europe also. Gwalior and Trichinopoly, Acrocorinthus and Taormina, and in England, Old Sarum, Durham, Exeter, Shrewsbury, London itself, are instances, and the Fortress has often as in the last four cases, been the germ of a city. But so far as I know Santa Lucia, below which Santiago has grown up, is the only conspicuous instance in the two Americas of any such stronghold built by Europeans. The hill, a little over two hundred feet high, is much lower than are the Castle Hills of Edinburgh and Stirling, and the space on it smaller. It is lower even than the Castle Rock of Dumbarton, which it more resembles. Like those three, it is a mass of hard igneous rock, so irregular in form as to suggest that it may be a detached fragment of an old lava flow, and most of its sides are so precipitous as to be easily defensible. The buildings which had defaced it having been nearly all removed, it is now laid out as a pleasure ground, and planted with trees. Walks have been made round it, with a footpath to the craggy summit, and there is a statue of Pedro de Valdivia, the only monument to any one of the Conquistadores which I can remember to have seen in Spanish America, for the men of that famous group are not much honoured by their colonial descendants. Every evening we walked to the top to enjoy the wonderful view over the valley, and the last rays of the sun reddening the Andean snows. A still more extended view is obtained from the summit, surmounted by a colossal statue of the Virgin, of the hill of San Cristobal, whose base is half a mile from the town.
Chile, like the rest of South America, is a country of large estates, the early conquerors having received grants of land, many of which have not since been broken up into smaller properties; so there exists a landed aristocracy something like that of England in the eighteenth century, with peasants cultivating the soil as tenants or labourers, while the small middle class consists of shopkeepers or skilled artisans in the towns. The leading landowners spend the summers in their country houses and the winter and spring in Santiago, which has thus a pleasant society, with plenty of talent and talk among the men, of gaiety and talk among the women, a society more enlightened and abreast of the modern world than are those of the more northern republics, and with a more stimulating atmosphere. Santiago has always been the centre and heart of Chile both politically and socially and has in this way contributed to give unity to the nation and to create a Chilean type of character. The jealousy felt by the country folk against the capital which has been the source of so much strife in other states was generally less marked here. Santiago leads; Santiago's influence forbids any attempts at federalizing the republic. Though learning and science have not quite kept pace with conquest and prosperity, there is a thriving university, and a fine museum, placed beside the zoological and botanical gardens. The last and the present generation have produced some gifted writers and among the too few students of to-day is one of the most accomplished historians and bibliographers in Spanish America, Señor José Toribio Medina. The bent of Chilean genius has, however, been on the whole towards war and politics. The material development of the country by railways, the opening of mines and the extension of agriculture, important as these are, do not absorb men's thoughts here so much as they do in Argentina and indeed in most new countries. Politics hold the field just as politics held it all through the nineteenth century in England and in Hungary, perhaps the most intensely political countries of the Old World.52
The mention of these two countries suggests another point of resemblance. The Chileans, a race of riders, are extremely fond of horse-racing. The races at Santiago rouse immense interest and are the occasion of a great deal of betting, not only in the city, but also at Valparaiso, for such of the Valparaiso sportsmen as cannot come to the capital gather in their clubhouse and carry on their betting during the progress of each race, every detail of which is reported from moment to moment by telephone, the bets coming as thick and fast as if the horses were in sight upon the course.
Chile is the only country in South America which can boast to have had no revolution within the memory of any living man. In 1890 there was a civil war, but that conflict differed materially from the familiar military revolutions of the other republics. President Balmaceda had quarrelled with the legislature, claiming that he could levy taxes without its consent, and was overcome, after a fierce struggle, the navy supporting the Congress, and the command of the sea proving decisive in a country with so long a coast line. So scrupulously regardful were the Chileans of their financial credit, that both Balmaceda and his congressional antagonists, each claiming to be the lawful government, tendered to the foreign bondholders payment of the interest on the same public debt while the struggle was going on.
There were, at the time of my visit, five political parties or divisions of the Liberal party, besides the Conservatives. The President had died suddenly while travelling in Europe, and the Liberal sections, holding the majority in Congress, met to select the candidate whom they should put forward as his successor. The discussions and the votings in their gatherings went on for several weeks, but force was never threatened; and the Chileans told their visitors with justifiable pride that although twelve thousand soldiers were in or near the capital, no party feared that any other would endeavour to call in the help of the army. Chile is also the only South American state which takes so enlightened an interest in its electoral machinery as to have devised and applied a good while ago a system of proportional representation which seems to give satisfaction, and certainly deserves the study of scientific students in other countries. I saw an election proceeding under it in Santiago. The result was foreknown, because there had been an arrangement between Liberal sections which ensured the victory of the candidates they had agreed upon, so there was little excitement. Everything seemed to work smoothly.