Some effort had been made to plant a few trees in the sandy, rocky soil around the station of Volcan, which is not far from the mud-slide. They seemed, however, to be having a hard time of it, although, at a ranch near by, quite a grove of eucalyptus trees had been successfully raised by means of irrigation. The mountains round about are very barren and gave evidence of being rapidly wasted away by erosion, their summits assuming many fantastic forms.
Twenty miles beyond Volcan is Maimará, where there was further evidence of irrigation in the valley, the trees and green fruits being in marked contrast to the barren hillsides.
As the road ascends, the country becomes more and more arid. Cactus is common. Sometimes it is used as a hedge; at other times, by being planted on the top of a mud-fence, it answers the same purpose as a barbed wire.
Great barren mountains on each side continue for mile after mile, making the scenery unspeakably dreary. Judging by the northward inclination of the cactus and the trees, the prevailing wind is from the south.
Some of the valley is irrigated, but there is little sign of life anywhere. Nothing grows without irrigation. In the days before the railway it was absolutely necessary to have alfalfa and other animal fodder grown near the post-houses that supplied travellers and freight-carriers with shelter at night. This business has, of course, fallen off very much in the past few months, yet just before reaching Humahuaca we stopped at Uquia, where enough hay is still raised to make it worth while to bale it and ship it north to the barren plateau beyond.
Late in the afternoon, we saw a group of llamas, but they are not at all common in this region.
At Tres Cruces, 1052 miles from Buenos Aires, we reached our highest elevation, something over 12,000 feet. It was a dreary spot with scarcely anything in sight except barren mountains, the two wire fences that everlastingly line the railroad tracks, and the mud-walled railroad station. The little “hotel” looked like an abandoned adobe dwelling in Arizona, and the region bore a striking resemblance to the unirrigated part of our new southwest. Erosion has cut the hillsides into interesting sections of shallow gulches and semi-cylindrical slopes. The only green things to be seen are occasional clumps of bushes like sage-brush.
From here to La Quiaca, sixty miles, we maintained about the same altitude, although La Quiaca itself is 500 feet lower than Tres Cruces. We had, in fact, surmounted the great plateau of the Andes. South of us lay the desert of Atacama; to the north the arid valleys of southern Bolivia and the Bolivian tableland. East of us, beyond many intervening ranges and the steep slopes of the eastern Andes, lay the Gran Chaco of Bolivia and the valley of the lower Pilcomayo with its wild Indian tribes and its tropical forests. To the west lay the still higher Andes of the great Cordillera, some of whose peaks rise at this point to an altitude of twenty thousand feet. Notwithstanding these interesting surroundings, the extreme bareness of this desolate region reacts on one’s enthusiasm.
We reached La Quiaca just before nine o’clock. The railroad offices were still incomplete, as the line had only been opened to traffic for a month or two. The old town of La Quiaca, a small mud-walled affair two miles away from the railroad station, is destined soon to be deserted for the thriving young settlement that is springing up near the terminus of the railway. There are two “hotels.” Ours, the 25 de Mayo, had only just been opened. In fact, its exterior walls had not yet received their proper coat of whitewash and stucco.
All day long we had been travelling through an extremely sparsely populated region, so dry, high, and inhospitable as to dispel any idea that this railroad can rely upon it for much traffic. In fact, the line was built by the Argentine Government, not so much to open up this part of the Republic as to tap the mining region of southern Bolivia, with the idea of developing Argentina’s foreign commerce by securing in Bolivia a good market for her food-stuffs and bringing back in return ore to be shipped to Europe from the ports of the Paraná.