Page:Isaiah Bowman - Desert Trails of Atacama (1924).pdf/243

 home he consumes the prevailing drink, maté. The plant is called verba in the field and maté only when it is prepared for stecping. I[t is supposed to prevent scurvy among the meat- eating Argentinians of the Chaco.

The laborers are required principally on the sugar estates, a line of which has been developed along the railway between Embarcacién and Giiemes. Some forty years or so ago the first of these estates were organized, when everything that was brought thither, from supplies to heavy machinery, had to be transported by oxcart from the end of the railway at Tucuman. When the railway was extended to Gtiemes this town became the base, and later Perico. It was only about twelve years ago that the railway actually passed the doors of the estates, so to speak. With the coming of the railway new companies have sprung up that have developed the neigh- boring lands irrigable from the mountain streams, for the line of the railway is near the line of break between mountains and plains. The belt of sugar land is capable of early and great development northward as far as there is available water and yet an absence of dense forest. Santa Cruz is on the southern edge of a wet belt that extends northward with increasing rainfall until it merges into the zone of dense jungle and forest that embraces the eastern Andean mountain slopes and the Amazonian plain. From the Rio Grande at Santa Cruz southward to Yacuiba is a belt of relatively dry country with irrigation possible only in a narrow zone at the base of the mountain, and the adjacent plain is grass covered. From Yacuiba southward to Embarcacién there extends a wetter zone. Still farther south, at Tucumén, irrigation is the rule, and the Chaco forest climbs up the hill slopes and appears as a belt of dense green between the cold arid belt above and the hot arid belt below (Fig. 86, p. 253).

The sugar estates, even as far south as Cérdoba, employ a great deal of Indian labor, and this is the source of the labor expeditions into the Chaco for the purpose of obtaining Indian peons. I talked with the captain of one of these parties who is accustomed to take a dozen or more leading laborers from the sugar cstates and go in with presents to distribute to the