Calle Miller, Tacna
I made arrangements with Signor Raiteri for three horses, a mozo, provisions, and blankets. It is certain that Señor Carmona would have shared blankets with Prat and myself, but since I did not care to impose upon him we brought our own equipment which in reality belonged to Raiteri. As it was Carmona refused to allow me to use any of the provisions I brought along, but made me eat from his larder, his mozos doing the cooking.
Alameda, Tacna
At eight o'clock in the morning we started from a courtyard across the street from the market. Now the direct way out of the city was to follow the Alameda, but Carmona evidently wishing to inspire the inhabitants with a reverence for his own importance had his caravan of mules cross the Alameda and turn up the main street, which indeed created a general diversion for all the clerks ran to the sidewalk and the pedestrians halted to view this extraordinary cavalcade. At the parochial church we again turned into the Alameda and followed that avenue the length of the extremely long town.
The valley of the Caplina is narrow, fertile, and is a veritable garden. One thing I noticed as we left the city behind. We would come to fields in the height of production with irrigation ditches full of water. Adjoining them we would see parched fields of bushes trying to eke out a meager existence. The flow of water from the Caplina is not sufficient to supply all the arable land in the valley. A farmer will raise crops for several years in one field; then when the soil has run out he will cultivate an adjoining field, neglecting the first one, and will deviate the water to the new one. After a few years he will give up the new field and return to the first one which in the meantime has been fertilized by nitrate. Since there are but few cattle on the coastal plain, no manure is used to bring up the land, but nitrates are easily imported from Pisagua. On account of nitrates washing away they are put on the uncultivated land during the period that the fields are not in use. The road follows the right bank of the stony river bed whose water has been turned aside to water the quintas as the small gardens are called. In some spots there is an intermission of the cultivation where the sandy desert comes down to the river bed, but the trees and green gardens always begin again. From this valley Iquique receives most of its fruits and vegetables.
Calientes which we reached after six hours' travel but which can be reached in one and a half hours by automobile and in two and a half by carriage, is the place where we left the road. On our way there we passed through three hamlets—Calana, La Vilca, and Pachia. Each has a cantina and thither Don Santiago, Prat, and myself repaired to moisten our dusty throats with native red wine while the mules took a breathing spell. The thirsty mozos stood humbly at one end of the cantina drinking their wine in silence while we stood at the counter which served as a bar. Calientes is so named from some hot springs which here gush forth from the sides of a barren mountain. They are sulphurous and when the rivulet which springs from them enters the Caplina, the water is turned black caused by the precipitate the sulphur of the rivulet makes with the copper properties of the Caplina. There are at Calientes but a few huts. Here we unsaddled the beasts and in the hour's rest the mozos cooked a stew which served as a midday repast.
An hour after leaving Calientes we arrived at a couple of huts which are called Tacuco and two hours later in the dim light of the waning day reached the end of the first day's ride at the hamlet of Challata deep down in the valley at the foot of Mount Pallagua. The night was cool and the bountiful meal of cazuela, stew, and vegetables eaten before a roaring camp-fire with the murmuring of the rapidly flowing stream at our feet made me rejoice that I was far away from the sham and inane conventions of modern city life. A peon offered us his only bed in his hut but Don Santiago and myself spread our blankets on some straw pallets in an open shed with the starlit sky for a canopy, and there we slept until awakened by the sonorous grunting of sows at dawn.
"We have a hard day ahead of us," remarked Señor Carmona after we forded the Caplina and started the steep ascent up the sandy side of Pallagua. A high mountain range to the right had shut off a vista of the snow peaks of the Cordillera, but upon reaching a stony plateau, suddenly the high dome of the extinct volcano Tacora, 19,338 feet high reared its lofty summit above the whole eastern mountain chain. To the northeast appeared Uchusuma, 18,023 feet high, while near at hand were the ice fields of the Cordillera del Baroso. These high mountains are visible from Arica, at which port the Andes come nearer the ocean than at any other place on the South American continent except Puerto Montt. After two hours' climb up the barren ridge we reached a spine and then descended by zigzags to the canyon formed by the Quebracho de Chero in which grew a few mountain shrubs not unlike chaparral. In Indian file we followed the narrow trail between the mountains Pallagua (altitude 13,065 feet) on the right and Palquilla (altitude 12,415 feet) on the left and arrived at midday at the Pass of Caquilluca about 12,000 feet above the sea level where we rested a couple of hours and had our dinner.