over the Salar de Bella Vista to the nitrate establishment of Alianza, arriving long after dark and glad to accept the hos- pitality of the nitrate officials there. No welcome could be more cordial than that which these Englishmen gave us, and they instantly telephoned word of our arrival to the nitrate oficina at Lagunas. They had heard the day before that we had overstayed our period of exploration in the mountains, and great anxiety was felt partly on this account and because of our limited food supply and partly on account of the heavy snows that had blanketed the mountains for days and in which they knew we must surely have been caught. It had been planned to organize several searching parties to set out the following day by different routes into the mountains. From Alianza we went by train to Lagunas the following day, our pack train going down under the care of the guides. As a result of the effects of the altitude and of the change in the quality of the water, and of our excessive use of the desert wa- ter when we first came down, we were ill for a week at Lagunas.
As soon as we were able to manage it we started out again southward through the desert. Our first day’s journey was from Lagunas seventy-five miles by trail southward by way of Monte la Soledad and the Pampa del Tamarugal to Quil- lagua, in the Loa valley. This course is now covered by a railway, but at that time it was virgin desert with no sign of habitation in that entire stretch except a cluster of huts at Monte la Soledad (Fig. 12), where lived a family of three— father, mother, and son—maintaining themselves by means of a single well and a mixed flock of goats and sheep supple- mented by a few riding mules and fowl. It was the smallest and the most isolated settlement that I have ever seen in the desert, but it was once a little larger, the rest of the inhabit- ants having gone to work in the nitrate ficlds. By contrast, Quillagua in the Loa valley is in a broad, fertile, terraced val- ley; and, although the Loa River is notorious for its content of salt, the inhabitants manage to irrigate their fields from it and from a few bordering brooks, springs, and seepage lines and thus to maintain what is by contrast to most desert settle- ments a prosperous-looking community of farmers and shep-
