The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-09-06

the coal. Such fuel in the high Andes is worth $50 ton.
 Our.ride over the Bolivian plateau wee through Q country as smooth as a floor The plateau is covered with stones. IL IS supposed to have been at one time vast inland sea- and sea shells are often found upon 1t. Professor Agassiz said that the water level of the ancient Andean sea was 300 or 400 feet higher than the present level of the plateau. If so, it has all disappeared, as today the only large bodies of water found there are in the lakes Ti- ticaca and Poopo. The latter is a braclk- ish lake joined to Lake Titicaca by the River Desaguadero. It is only about one third as large as Lake Titicaca. Lake Poopo is the home of many wild fowls and the region about it is filled with birds of many kinds, including wild ducks and flamingoes. The lake has no visible out let, but the waters from Titicaca are all ways flowing into 1t. and there must be some underground channel that carries the surplus away.
 Oruro is 36 hours from Antofagasta. It is thriving mining town. situated 12,500 feet above the sea in the heart of the Bo- livian desert. It has about 20.0O0 people, and it does a great trade with the tin min- ing regions of the interior. It's population rises and falls as tin goes up and down.
  theatre, a public library and a mineral museum. It has many business houses and some very respectable stores. The streets are paved with cobbes, and a rickety carriage carried me at a cost of S5 from one end of the town to the other. It has plaza upon which the public buildings face. but altogether it is exceed ingly dreary.
 Leaving there. I took the narrow gauge ba now width of only 30 inches. but it is to be widened to a gauge of 40 inches, which is the standard guage for this part of the world. The main line starts at Antofagasta and crosses a pass of over 13,000' feet at a distance of 223 miles from the coast. It then descends to level of more than 12,000 feet, which it keeps prac- tically all the way north to Oruro.
 The trip from Oruro to the sea is over one of the most picturesque routes of the Andes. The most of the way is bleak and desertlike, but one sees several snok- ing volcanoes and also great sat lakes with green islands apparently floating upon them After crossing the Chilean boundary we came to the great borax lakes. These are owned by the borax trust, and they supply the greater part of that mineral for the whole of the world. There are, in fact, only .,ree or four places on earth where borax is found in large quantities. The most important is these lakes. Next in size are some mines on the plateau of Tibet in Asia, and last are the deposits found in Death valley, California. The Chilean lakes seem to be covered with snow and the snow is the borax that 'ises to the surface and forms a blanket or crust on the water so firm that men can walk on it. It looks like ice. and you feel like stopping the train for skate. In some places the crust las been broken up into floating cakes and in others it is being taken out to be refined and shipped to the markets Some of the borax is as clean as the whitest of spun silk; other pieces are dirty and look like snow that has lain for some- time. On the shores of the lake are pal- vanized iron roofed refineries, in which the stuff is prepared for the market. We were over an hour going by the largest of the lakes. It is right near the rail- road It is "A miles long and is the greatest reservoir of borax in the wcrld Indeed, it is the chief source of the worlds borax supply
 Shortly after leaving this lake we