westward across the Maritime Cordillera to Chiuchiu and Calama; but the journey required eighteen to twenty days, and of the 60 cattle that started all but 28 were lost.
The fame that San Pedro has long enjoyed and the facilities it has for accommodating transient herds and droves attract the stockmen of Catamarca, La Rioja, San Luis, and Cérdoba. For years they have sent droves of mules to be sold in the nitrate oficinas of the coastal desert farther north, but if they cannot sell them at a set price they turn northeast at Chiuchiu, east of Calama, and go up over the Maritime Cordillera to the great annual fair at Huari. The completion of the Antofagasta railroad has greatly disturbed this traffic. In place of mule transport there is now railroad transport, and the completion of the railroad itself liberated a great number of mules from the work of construction. Where 200 to 300 formerly went up to Huari there are now sent only about 100 or 150. They are driven across the cordillera principally in December, January, and February. They come in from the pampas to Catamarca, where they winter and get accustomed to the altitudes and are sent to San Pedro de Atacama by way of Antofagasta de la Sierra (Fig. 1).
