In the old days, the tin was discarded as the eager Spanish miners thought only of the silver. But now the richer veins of silver have become exhausted, and although some are being worked, most of the activity is confined to the tin ore. At the top of the cone there is an immense quantity of it; the only difficulty is how to get it down to the smelters in the valley between the hill and the city.
In this valley runs a small stream of water that comes from the hill reservoirs. Attracted by its presence, most of the smelters have located themselves on one side or the other of the little gorge. There are innumerable small ingenios worked by the Indians in a very primitive fashion. Some of them are scarcely more than a family affair. Besides these there are twenty-eight large smelters, and all of them devoted more to tin than to silver. Not one of these is owned by a Bolivian. A few belong to English capitalists, more to Chileans, and the largest of all to a Frenchman who has constructed an aërial railway to bring the ore from high up on the mountainside to his furnaces. The never ending line of iron buckets adds a curiously modern note to the ruins over which they pass. Ore is also brought down on the backs of donkeys and llamas. The workmen are mostly Quichuas. Some of them are evidently not city bred, for they dress with the same pigtails and small clothes that they wore when Spanish conquistadores forced them to take the precious metal out of the hill without any thought of reward other than the fact that they were likely to die sooner and reach heaven earlier than if they stayed quietly at home. The product of this smelter is shipped both as pure tin in ingots and also as highly concentrated and refined ore.
The most picturesque feature of the valley was a small chimney smoking lustily away all by itself, high up on the opposite hillside, like a young volcano with a smoke stack. In order to get a good draft for
the blast furnaces, the smoke is conducted across the stream on a stone viaduct, enters the hill by a tunnel, and ascends a vertical shaft for one hundred and fifty feet to the chimney which then carries it thirty feet further up into the air. The tunnel does just as good work in the way of producing a draft as though it were a modern brick chimney, two hundred feet high, but the effect is uncanny, to say the least.
We found among the boarders at the Hotel Colon a group of young Peruvian and Chilean mining engineers who were very congenial. They made the best of their voluntary exile, and although none of them enjoyed the fearful climatic conditions, they managed to make their surroundings quite tolerable with hard work, cheerful conversation, birthday dinners, and social calls.
The courtyard of the hotel was a fine example of the prevailing mixture of old and new. The roof was covered with beautiful large red tiles whose weight had crushed down the rafters in places so as to produce a wavy effect. Meanwhile the shaky old balcony that ran around the court connecting the rooms on the second floor, was sheltered from the rain by strips of corrugated iron! The fine old stone-paved patio was marred by a vile wainscoting painted in imitation of cheap oil-cloth. In one corner stood a little old-fashioned stove where arrieros, who need to make an early start, cook their tea without disturbing the hotel servants. An archway running under the best bedrooms of the second floor, led out to the street. Another archway led in to the filth of the backyard where, amid indescribable scenes and smells, six-course dinners were prepared for our consumption. It was a miracle that we did not get every disease in the calendar.