The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-06
Chi1e's Andea11 Gate1uay
BY FRANK G. CARPENTER

brought in by our steel trust The place Is the busiest of all the port between Valparaiso and Panama, and now that the canal is completed it will send northward the nitrate. borax, copper, tin and other minerals now pouring into it from the regions behind.
 I came to Antofagasta from La Paz My route was the one that I took To years ago, when I rode three days across the plateau on the top of the wagon that carried the Bolivian mails. This was from La Paz to Oruro. rail- way station about 600 miles from where with stoaes and kept them on the gall lop from daylight to dark. 1t was cold and we almost froZe at the rude inns of the highlands. From Ouro to the sea l came on the train.
 My journey this year was all the way in a comfortable car and the trip to Antofagasta took only two days Our train had Bolivian mil1ionaires Eng fish, Austrian and American commer- cial travellers, miners of a half dozen different nationalities, and number Of tourists. We stopped for six hours at Oruro and there got sleeping compart- ments for the rest of the journey. We
  travelled in comparative ease.
 At the same time the fares were much cheaper. Our sleeping berths cost us B night, and the frst-class passenger rare was about S21 with 8 charge for our bag gage of about cents per pound. l have a number of trunks and my extra bag gaze cost half as much as the fare The price for meals on the diner was $l.5o gold. with an extra charge for mineral water, which was about twice. what the sameS water would cost in the United States.
 The first part of this trip was over the high plateau of Bolivia. This is semi desert country about 800 miles long and of varying width It's only vegetation is half-starved grass and dry bushes, but it feeds thousands of sheep, alpacas and llamas, and we had animal life in sight almost all of the way down to Aruro. Now and then we passed village of ln- dians and always there were the scat tered huts of the Aymaras spotting the plain. The latter were round in shape and many of them had roofs made or mud bricks, symmetrically joined. A sim gle family often had several of these round huts and in addition corrals for it's stock.
 At one of the stations where we stopped to get our dining car we saw great drove of llamas. They had brought fuel to
 
 were about to start back with merchant disc for their return trip to a town in the hills The fuel was what I might call Bolivian cord wood It consisted of the limbs of stunted evergreens, each as big around as your finger. They had been grubbed from the mountains and packed LID in bundles about three feet square and two feet in thickness.
 Further down the road we saw great piles of peat moss, another fuel that grows in the Andes. The moss is of a woody resinous nature, and when light ed gives out a great heat It grows on the top of the ground in disks ranging in size from the diameter of a tin wash basin to that of d tube.
 All along the railroad we could see also the piles of English or Australian coal used by the engines. This is in the shape of bIiquettes. laid up in regular order At Uyuni, where the new road for the Argentine is to join the La Paz-Anto- fagasta line, l saw thousands of these bricks. They were corded up, as it were, and around the edges of the pile | mo- ticed that white band had been painted I asked the reason, and was told that it was to prevent the Indians from stealing