But we must return to the seaboard. We have already remarked that Bolivia possesses no ports. She is isolated from the coast, having lost the port of Antofagasta in the Nitrate War of last century.
In passing, it might be remarked that the comity of the South American nations on the coast might be consolidated if this seaport could be restored to Bolivia. Nothing in the future is likely to cause more enmity than the arbitrary cutting-off of peoples by adjoining nations from access to seas and navigable rivers, whether in America or Europe. The nitrate region, which was the scene of the bloody struggle between Peru and Chile, and in which Bolivia took part, stretches like a veritable Sahara upon the littoral here, south of Tacna and Arica. These two last-named provinces were, students of South American polity will recollect, possessions of Peru, and are now held by Chile. They are still the cause of bitter controversy between the two nations, which periodically threatens to bring about war between them. It is greatly to be lamented that this fruitful source of contention cannot now be settled, and an era of neighbourly feeling brought about, instead of the hypocritical diplomatic expediency and veiled hatred which do duty for international relations on this coast. The matter might well be made the subject of arbitration, with friendly nations (perhaps Britain or the United States) as umpires.
The sun-baked rocks and sands of this part of South America have been stained with the blood of thousands of Chileans and Peruvians, and the same events might occur again. Yet both these nations have more territory than they can efficiently develop.
But the Spanish American people have ever much difficulty in settling their quarrels. Their traits of pride and over-individualism, inherited from the Spaniard, render it difficult to give way. If one performs an act of magnanimity, the other may suspect or accuse it of weakness or cowardice. Both wrap themselves in haughty reserve, both invoke the high gods to bear witness to their own truth, both are quixotic and quick-tempered. Yet they are people of the same civilization, speech, laws, literature and culture, with splendid qualities and a promising future, and if these quarrels could be composed, the progress of the region would be hastened.
The port of Iquique (with Pisagua), south of Arica, is well known to many travellers and other persons interested in the Chilean nitrate fields, of which it is the principal shipping centre.
The greater share of the business of nitrate production is in British hands. The oficinas are establishments peculiar to Northern Chile, forming small colonies or localities, whose workers consist of the Chilean rotos—a hardy and turbulent but industrious folk—headed by English managerial staffs.
Around these centres of industry, on every hand, broken here and there by small oases where water-springs occur, stretches some of the most dreadful desert land in the world. Such, for example, are the desert of Tarapaca, and those intervening between the nitrate pampas and the Cordillera, where neither man nor animal can live, nor blade of herbage can flourish. Nature here, as far as the organic world is concerned, is dead, or has never lived.
Iquique is a town of wooden houses, overlooked by sand-dunes that threaten it from the wind-swept desert, but it has pleasing features, and the English colony here, with its well-known club—it has a reputation for hospitality, and, incidentally, the consumption of cocktails—has its own marked characteristics. The Nitrate Railway ascends through high, broken country to the east to the Pampa. Indeed, the life and thought of the region is largely embodied in the words "Nitrate" and "Pampa."
The deposits of this mineral are unique in geology. There is none other of the same nature on the globe. The mineral lies in horizontal beds a few feet beneath the surface. We may be riding over the flat, absolutely barren pampa, or plain, floored with nothing but fragments of clinkstone, eroded by the ever-drifting sand and unrestful wind, gleaming in the metallic sunlight, for no shower of rain ever visits this wilderness, a place where we might think Nature has nothing to offer of use or profit. But we should be mistaken. An excavation will reveal the sheet of white salts beneath, deposited in geological ages past by marine or lake action, under conditions not clearly understood—deposits which cover many miles of territory. The material is blasted out in open mining and conveyed to the oficinas—large establishments of elaborate machinery and appliances—where it is boiled, refined, re-crystallized and thence shipped for export.
Still farther afield through the deserts here are vast areas of salt, the ground presenting the appearance of a suddenly arrested, billowy sea, over which the horseman makes his way like a lost spirit in Hades. Upon the horizon are the steely Andes, upon whose plateaux here, reached by the highest railway in the world, we find rich copper mines, such as those of Colhuahuassi, and various deposits of the salts of copper.