who lives in Santiago told me how he could set out tomato
plants in the best soil, take a little handful of nitrates that look
like common salt, dissolve it in water and pour it on the soil and the
difference it would make is almost unbelievable. But a spoonful dropped
on the plant will kill it. It never rains on these nitrate beds--if it
did they would be worthless.

Of course, the people who do the work in these deserts or in the little
ports along the shore have a hard life. No green lawns or trees adorn
their villages. The dust is irritable and the people are a hard-looking
class. In one of these towns which I saw, Antofagasta by name, the water
the people use is brought nearly two hundred miles. The people used to
drink champagne mostly for it was cheaper than water.

Not far from Antofagasta are the great salt plains, said to be large
enough to supply the whole world with this commodity for generations.
The real nitrate beds are from fifteen to fifty miles from the ocean and
at least three thousand feet above sea level. The largest beds are from
four to five hundred miles in length so the supply is practically
inexhaustible. When the nitrates are richest they are mixed with
rock--about half and half. It is blasted out with dynamite, loaded on
carts and dumped into great machines that grind it to a coarse powder,
then thrown into immense tanks of boiling water where it forms in
crystals on the sides and bottom. The water is then drawn off, the white
sparkling stuff shoveled onto drying boards and when thoroughly dry is
sacked and shipped.

The liquid that is drawn off from these vats is made into iodine, which
is so valuable that a cask of it is worth several hundred dollars. Chile
owns about all the nitrate deposits yet discovered. She exports millions
of tons of it annually, levies a tax on every ton of it and thus the
government receives an immense income each year from this one industry.

In addition to the nitrate industry, Chile has immense stores of copper,
tin and other metals. At one port where the ship stopped a small boat
brought out a few sacks of copper ore. It took but a few minutes to put
it on board but one of the officers said it was worth thirteen thousand
dollars. At another Chilean port six hundred tons of tin were added to
our cargo. Chile is about the only country in South America where coal
is found in anything like large quantities.

Of course such a mountainous region is volcanic. Ther