Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/231

Rh

decidedly primitive, especially as regards sanitary arrangements. It is quite true that the camp commonly is placed where the wind will not carry the odors to the houses occupied by the manager and his subordinates. But in the bright sun and dry air of the desert, most disease germs do not thrive, and there filth, unpleasant as it may be, does not lead to the sickness which it might cause elsewhere. In order to get some return from the monthly assessment of a peso for doctor's services, so it is said, the people commonly feign illness, until the free medicine is received, whereupon the medicine promptly is thrown away. There probably is some truth in all the claims that the lot of the nitrate workers is not everything which could be desired, yet it is undeniable that they are better off than a good many of their own countrymen who are working elsewhere.

Living in the nitrate pampa has some compensations, as in the feelings inspired by the desert and especially in the beauty of its nights, but not even the mighty Pacific can lend charm to the seaports which act as middlemen between the oficinas and the outside world. Iquique, Antofagasta, Taltal, Chañaral, Mejillones, Pisagna and Tocopilla, ranging in population from 50,000 down to 5,000, suggest mining towns of our far west in varying early stages of evolution. Some of the foreign residents profess to find enjoyment there, as in a morning plunge in the ocean and a brisk canter along the beach, and with the clubs later in the day, but all too commonly the pleasures take the form of hard drinking as the only way of varying the painful monotony of existence. Iquique, the largest, generally is regarded as somewhat better than the others, but one who visits the others first is comforted mainly by the feeling that it must be hard to find anything worse.

A picture of one of these ports does almost equally well for all the