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 or forty miles up and down the Huasco valley extend the flatter lands where the valley farmers live, and there a com- pany has developed a vast ranch that uses the principal part of the water supply. Outside its holdings any one can cut the wood and sell it to the dealers. The wood consists of crooked roots and stumps of gnarled desert shrubs six to eight feet high and is sold even in the smallest quantities, Children come to the dealer's counter to obtain from two to five cents’ worth of wood at a time or barely enough to cook a single meal. Whole- sale it costs from eight to ten pesos per one hundred kilos, or one dollar per hundred pounds.

Wood that is obtained from the highest elevations at which it is gathered is called Jefia barrilla and is brought down to the railway by burros. A man will leave the valley and travel three days out across the desert foothills to reach the ravines and favored spots where the shrubs grow. He will spend one day cutting them and three days coming back. The best wood in the cordillera is the resinous and green tola bush. It has bright yellow flowers in season and a strong odor, which it imparts to food cooked over the fire. A plant closely resem- bling the tola is called folilia, but it has a very limited distribu- tion. Pata-del-oro is like a small conifer and gives out a strong odor on burning, which is also imparted to the food cooked over it. It grows much taller than tola, is very resinous, and is not found in localities where other woods grow. I[t is confined to situations of modern elevation.

In some localities the people are supported principally by traffic in wood, as in the foothill belt where wood is gathered in the moister ravines and taken to San Pedro and other towns of importance, the beasts that carry it being loaded with provisions on the return journey. On the eastern side of the cordillera there is an extensive commerce in cardén, also called guisco, the straight cactus (Cereus alacamensis).

About Vallenar and eastward to the mountains there grows a shrub called algarrobilla. It is from two to five feet in height