338 Aspects of Nature in Southern Peru. 



the ocean, and sells for about three half-pence the gallon, 

 realizing some £40,000 to £50,000 ; the fuel for this operation 

 being taken froni England or Chile. This great change from 

 when I first knew the place is owing to the discovery and the 

 refining of Salitre, or nitrate of soda, some few leagues in the 

 interior. 



Iquique stands on a thick stratum of shells near to the sea ; 

 on the shore they are in a fair state of preservation, but going 

 inland they assume all the stages of disintegration, until where 

 they touch on the rock of the country they are in fine powder, 

 and on a dark night a slight phosphorescence may be observed 

 in the shell-pits. Independent of mechanical disintegration, 

 chemical changes have been going on, owing to some salt of the 

 ocean having been left with the shells, and among them chlorides 

 of lime, carbonates and sulphates of lime and soda (the last in 

 very fine groups of crystals) are formed. Has this and similar 

 sloping shell plains been- elevated by internal forces of the 

 earth, or has the sea retired ? Perhaps the former is the more 

 logical supposition. 



The climate is so dry that, during a three years' residence 

 there, I only once saw a very slight rain. 



The mean winter heat at noon is 67°, the mean summer heat 

 80°, but in the sun it is scorching. Indeed, the coast would be 

 unbearable on the score of heat if the winds during the long 

 summer of this latitude were not the cool breezes from the 

 south, and were not the climate further tempered by the cool 

 current from the south, running rather rapidly at times along 

 the shores of the Pacific. 



The occupations of the natives, when not fishing (which took 

 up but little time), were chatting and smoking. One day I asked 

 an old fisherman, who appeared to me to be always smoking 

 paper cigars, how many he smoked daily ? He answered, forty ; 

 and this he had done for some fifty years. At the price then of 

 these paper cigars, he had smoked £470 worth, and 730,000 

 cigars ; and this for a ragged, shoeless fisherman ! As the sale 

 of tobacco and paper was a government monopoly, in these two 

 articles alone what a tax on his luxury he had paid. 



