The Opelousas courier., 1885-10-03
A SCENE OF D~ESOLATION.
South Americas Valuable Nj
trate Of Soda Beds.
A Region Where the Sun Shines Twelve
Hours Daily, and Rain Never Falls.

A4ONIp Dtt ~ : III AoOAA
The coast from Callao to Valparaiso,
says a correspondent of the Philadet-
pAia Press, is a panorama of desola-
ton, a constant success ion of bleak
and barren cliffs, with not a green or
lovely thing for 1900 miles. The YES
sells steaming up and down always
hug the shore, within hearing of the
bark of the sea-lions and the screams
of the water birds. millions Of which
haunt the coast, and have covered the
rocks with the guano that so long en-
riched Peru. Nowhere are birds and
seals so numerous, and their bones and
excrement, with the decayed fish they
have carried upon the rocks, are often
found in masses hundreds of feet
deep, baked hard like clay, in a region
where the sun shines twelve hours
each day and rain never falls. This
is the guano of commerce, millions of
tons of which have been shipped to
Eun9e to enrich the impoverished
SOY that continent.
!adthin the coast from ten to fifty
,nill i, and stretching for hundreds of
mil d, are the famous beds of nitrate
of yda, which, purified, is saltpetre.
beTg in themselves an i~nexhaustible
SC rec of revenue to their owners, and
obtaining enough of the material to
apply the world for a thousand
sars. These deposits, more profitable
Lnan silver or guano, were discovered
accidentally by a vagrant Englishman
named George Smith, but were not
operated to any extent until recent
years. Now nitrate, having been
'sfound a valuable component of a
1hundred chemical forms, is in demand
the world over, and millions of dol
liars worth is shipped from the ports
1along the coast annually. Before its
was fully known number Of
n farsighted men located claims after
the fashion in vogue in mining-camps
everywhere, and then the government
stepped in and forbid any further pre-
emption. But the original locations
cover enough of the deposit to supply
the market for a century or two, and
to keep up the prices they have form
ed a pool, a monopoly combination,
under which they charge from 81 to
So per hundred weight, that costs
them about Is cents. These owners
live in London and Paris, and count
their profits, while the mines efnre
worked by superintendent or admin
istrators."
There is apparently no limit to the
stuff, the bed stretching up and down
the coast for three hundred or four
hundred miles. The surface of the
country is as complete a picture of
~desolation as nature ever framed. On
one side is the Pacific ocean, with its
great swells sweeping almost around
the globe, as regular aud constant as
the throbbings of the human pulse.
On the other side the imprenetrable
Andes rise in a range whose altitude
averages $4,000 feet and whose peaks
tower 10000 and $4,000 feet above the
sea. Between the ocean and the
mountains for 1000 miles, with a
varying width from 20 to so miles,
lies a strip of drifting sand which no
rivers water and where rain never
falls. All the water used by the in
habitants is taken from the ocean,
that for mechanical purposes being
used in its natural condition and that
used for food being condensed into
steam and purged of its salt by ma
chinery. There is not a well or a
spring along the coast, and drinking
water is an article of merchandise,
like ice or -four, costing abolt z cents
a gallon to the consumer.
Under the sand of this desert.
which drifts before the wind like
snow, nature has laid the bed of nj
trate. No one knows how it was
formed, and man has not attempted to
measure it's extent. The sand is first
shoveled off, and then a crust of sum
baked clay from four to twelve inches
is removed. This discloses a bed of
white material that looks like melting
marble, full of moisture, and as soft
as cheese. The stratum is often four
or five feet thick, and averages two or
three feet. 1t is broken up by crow
bars and shoveled into cars, in which
it is taken to crushers, which grind it
into particles as large as pebbles.
These are lifted by elevators into
great watts, where it is boiled until
dissolved in ordinary sea water. Then
the solution is run off into a series of
shallow iron watts, exposed to the air,
which, being moistureless and heated
by constant sunshine, causes rapid
evaporation. The salt from the water,