THE OCEAN VOYAGE US 



game of billiard costs two reales; an hour of bowling in 

 a fairly good alley means one peso (8 reales) and so on. 

 Even the ordinary bread— none but wheat bread is 

 known here— is enormously high, twelve little loaves, 

 the size of 2 pfennig ( ' -e) biscuits cost one real. 



If (as I wrote to you) Valdivia has absolutely failed 

 to leave a foreign impression upon me, Valparaiso has 

 abundantly made up for it. The city extends about half 

 a German (1 '/& Eng.) mile in a northerly direction, along 

 a deep bay, is crescent, shaped and built upon the narrow 

 beach, which is often less than 50 yards in width, lying 

 between the steep, majestic coast mountains, the Cor- 

 dilleras, and the niveau of the ocean, partly in the moun- 

 tains, so that, observed from the bay, the whole looks 

 like a ten-ace, built along the foothills and sides of the 

 mountain range. Thus even nature divides Valparaiso 

 into two parts: the lower and the upper city: (1) the 

 city of wealth and (2) the city of poverty; of extreme 

 luxury and pomp, of wide, well paved streets with mag- 

 nificent stores and residences and steep, crooked, rocky 

 mountain alleys between low, miserable huts; below, the 

 splendid carriages and the glittering of silk dresses; 

 above, the climbing of half-fed donkeys and mules, and 

 half-naked women and children, tramping in mud. The 

 only things which the upper and lower Valparaiso have 

 in common are the mud during the rainy season, and 

 the endless dust in summer time; innumerable barking 

 dogs, fleas of immense size and bedbugs during all 



sen SOUS. 



The lower city is built in Italian stylo, light but ele- 

 gant. The houses are mostly two-story, built with large 1 

 adobe bricks, as more solid construction is inadvisable 

 on account of the many earthquakes, which have left 

 their marks on nearly every building, by large and small 

 cracks. The upper story is generally provided with an 

 extensive balcony, running the full length of the house 

 and having elegantly stained-glass windows; and on the 

 east side of the city, where the beach fonns a beautiful 

 valley, we find the houses built like squares and the in- 



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