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This does not mean that the trade by trail is a constant thing or that there is a permanency to the commercial life of the towns to which the trails lead. On the contrary, there is the greatest variation in the commercial fortunes of the towns and an equally great variation in the trade by trail from town to town. To take a few illustrations. One of the old historic seaports of western South America is Cobija, now a place of no consequence at all—a place, in fact, that may be said to be practically non-existent; yet in its day it was the port of entry of a trade to Potosi (see p. 73). The distance was 575 miles. The freight included almost every sort of thing which could be found in a city of that time, though the price of goods con- veyed by pack train was increased 100 per cent in the transit across the Desert of Atacama and the Western Cordillera to the central plateau. ‘The lack of pasturage and water made it necessary to carry forage as part of the cargo, and this of course greatly increased the cost. When the mines at Cara- coles, Chile, 90 miles east of Cobija, were opened, they com- peted so successfully with the port merchants for carts and mules that the cost of trail transportation increased im- mediately. It was only as Jate as 1892 that Oruro was con- nected with Antofagasta by rail, and the commerce of the trails from the coast declined accordingly. One town alone has retained its earlier importance, and that is Calama, an oasis in the Loa valley, now a station on the railway a day's journey northeast of Antofagasta.

From Calama two roads lead out to the coast, one toward Tocopilla, now an active nitrate port, the other toward Anto- fagasta and Mejillones. The railway has taken advantage of the same depression across the Andes that guided the routes of the earliest caravans to Calama. Many trails north and south of Calama have becn tried, but there has not been dis- covered a single pass for hundreds of miles in either direction that can compare in low height and accessibility with this. The first effect of railroad completion on Calama was de- pressive. When the town lay on the route of the pack trains on the way from seacoast to high plateau, its fields and pastures