70 TUCUMAN AND MENDOZA 



outlet for its wheat and flour, and facilitated the 

 export of its tobacco to the coast-provinces. The 

 waggon-owners were really contractors, conveying stuff 

 at their own cost. Moreover, part of Bolivia came to 

 make its purchases at the shops (tiendas) of Tucuman, 

 and the merchants of the town took in exchange 

 Bolivian ore for export. Thus the road built up a 

 nucleus of available capital at Tucuman. This capital 

 was invested, at the close of the nineteenth century, 

 in sugar ; and it has increased a hundredfold. Most 

 of the works still belong to old families of the 

 town. 



The sugar-region is comparatively small. It covers 

 an area which has exceptional climatic features, owing 

 to the vicinity of Mount Aconcagua. While the higher 

 chains of the Andes further north are separated from 

 the Chaco plain by lower ranges, on which the east 

 winds leave their stores of moisture less freely, Tucuman 

 has on its west the great mass of Aconcagua. It rises, 

 a giant landmark, at the beginning of the plains, from 

 which there is nothing to separate it, and gathers the 

 clouds round it. 



On the eastern slope of Aconcagua is the limit of 

 the crescent of tropical forest, which begins about 

 three thousand miles away, on the flank of the Vene- 

 zuelan and Colombian Cordilleras, and is connected in 

 the centre, in the equatorial zone, from Guaviare to 

 Mamore, with the forests of the Amazon region. At 

 its two ends it is reduced to a narrow belt which does 

 not reach, in the east, the alluvial plains, the savannahs 

 of the Orinoco and the scrub of the Chaco. The humid 

 forest of the Argentine Andes is nowhere more luxuriant 

 than near its southern limit, above Tucuman. There 

 are no palms or tree-ferns, but the convolvulus abounds, 

 and the evergreen trees are covered with epiphytes. 

 Aconcagua is one of the sharpest climatological limits 

 in the world. In the latitude of Salta one has only 

 to go about 150 miles to pass from the moist forests 



