The train halts beside a replica of an Indian settlement, then rolls past an old sawmill and fields of wild berry bushes now dormant in the snow as the smokestack's plume rises in the pale winter light. And each year they needed to build the train line farther out as they cut farther and farther away from the city,'' the guide says. Soon the train enters the Tierra del Fuego National Park, pocked with peat bogs and hardscrabble hills. Across the Beagle Channel, the Chilean mountains of the Darwin Cordillera glow a pale blue-white. Chile and Argentina share the main island of Tierra del Fuego.
Beech forests rise up the mountains and whisper in the wind.
Clumps of green lichen called ''devil's beard'' swing from bushes. With the prisoners long gone, beavers now do the work of felling trees, leaving trunks with chiseled toothmarks. Snowy footprints, perhaps a fox, lead up a streambank. A cormorant, a seabird whose wingspan can reach six feet, flies in search of an inviting lake as the train ride comes to an end. Here in Tierra del Fuego, water is as much a formidable presence as land.