UNIQUE TOWN

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 75, 26 September 1932, Page 7

UNIQUE TOWN

INSIDE A MOUNTAIN

A WONDER OF CHILE

GEEAT COPPEE MINE

Northern <shile represents ■ the ultimate contrast of which this amazing country is capable. It is a desert, but paradoxically it lias been the source^of natural and individual wealth, writes Eosita Forbes in tho London "Daily Telegraph." H ' ■"■ '.';

'Flying from.: Santiago to Antofagasta, we passed ranges of snow-covered hills. Aconcagua, 22^i00ft in height, * dominated other mighty giants of the Andes. Their glaciers ;were a blinding bluewhite, but on the other sido of the aeroplane as we',, looked down was a tumult of hot, reddish-grey hills, tufted with cactus. Thie..desert, : seamed and crinkled;,'like elephant hide, came up to the. edge of the-snows. , :- •North-east- of Aaitof agasta : is flattened into a successiojtt'of plateaux bounded by, the "Boliviasa, ranges. * Here the nitrate camps are scattered among glittering black shingle. Each of them is a town in itself, isolated by miles.of treeless and waterless desolation. There is not. a scrap of vegetation. It never rains. The ..air is brilliantly clear. For mile after mi?e rthe desert looks as if it had suffered, from one eruption after another.. Otherwise 'flat, sprinkled with dark -quartz and broken up with mirage, it is not unlike tho Eastern Sahara. .But where in Africa you would see a ca-ynel caravan, in Chile there is an - engine or a line of trucks. Instead of"iahe. palaces arid tombs of a • dead., city, 'there are tho rusty tanks, the chimneys, and the galvanised iron sheds of a .deserted ofieina. Everything moving is mechanical. ■--■■ ' UNSEEN WOBKERS. The toilers are invisiblie'in; their artificial craters; but shrines decorated with scraps of clothing or papei* flowers mark in mid-desert the scene, oif an accident or a'murder. And the unemployed who are making a road across the, wilderness have 'measured its progress not with milestones.;, ;but' with monstrous effigies in clay, so'that beasts, men,-and idols stand' sentineT over huts made of mod and scrap irqw.: : ' _ From the nitrate fields tie desert ,rises sharply/ toward v Chnquicamata, the largest surface copper mine in the world. The'townsfcip, whose population once .totalled. 19,000, is isolated in a wilderness of many coloured ssinds. The hospital is trimmed with bushes. One or two houses apparently keep a tree as a pet. Otherwise the aridity is unbroken. ■'.'■»""

Across this painted desert stands a palisade of snow-capped -peaks,: the frontier range .'.of Bolivia. ■ ' ~ ,

The vast mine';-is like a terraced crater,,streaked with green, yellow, and red. 'When it was first opened it was calculated to contain : 1,000,000,00*0 tons of ore. But the, chief, impressian one receives is of £20,900,000 "wprtih. of plant working by itself! : ' ' , Chuquicamata employs from 35U0 to 7000 men, but .only.a decimal fraction of them is visible. The 3,00-ton tileetne shovels, the monstrous dust-recoviery plant which looks like an .organ btfnt by a cyclone, the-vast crushers and iUters and dechlorinators, not to mention the automatically-fed furnaces, appijar to be independent of human direction. }. Andithe 150,000 horse power statioai, of course, is the place wherein twentirone German and American '". engines"''-' (converter^) give the electrical supply, of the mine, qnly;in,the quarter-mile' aong shed.which.contains 1000 electrolytic tanks one may. possibly see half a dozen human beings flattening sheets of ; copper. ' ■■■/■■. ■■ ON A^PEAK. ■■'■H;. ' - The ..equally famous \ Braden copper mine is not in the northern deserts. It is .isolated, 10,000 feet up :on a peak above the agricultural valley of -Bancagua, where fruit,. honey, and vegetables are produced for-the city mar-

For seven eight months of the year the camps of Sewell and Teniente, which supply labour to tne mine, are buried in snow; . The houses of Sewell are like swallows' nests. They adhere to "a precipitous hillside, and in winter the inhabitants dare not venture but of their shelter because of the avalanches which ipour down into the/ ravine, sweeping away everything in their path. . The-mine is unique in;that it goes up, not down., Starting at ground level a lift takes one. up 1800 ft in 3} minutes to the first working. Ore is lowered instead of being raised, because the mine is really upside down in> the top of a peak... -. ■,:'■' j: . ; ■:■ ,- , , : ; •;,-.

, it is .working full time, several thousand people live 'underground, for Teniente is a complete, town inside the mountain—a town which never sees daylight, except;through a few windows (snow-blocked in winter) cut out of the cliff face; a town with cinema, school, and dance-hall, canteens/ clubs DiUiards, saloons, and police station, jewellery store f general emporium; barber s shop, tailor's-shop, shoe-shining parlour, and hospital all duly supplied. Ahis nlace. is an amazing achievement^becanse it is 72 kilometres from the nearest railway, and ' some 8000 ft above it. ißefore the narrow-gauge line was constructed, all the materials and supply, frr the skyscraper tenements » which the workers are housed at lS t »an^ for the *«>«toayte town of I S«V There one underground room £ iv? l ng an4it would takß a week, walking, day and night, to cover all tho passages, had to bo, hauled up in ox. BESIEGED BY SNOW. Moreover, American, enterprise has succeeded in establishing on Sewell 4 whetfT terrace8 ' thZ h% averago Sradicat *» one in ntl'J ? m °l¥ 0 as sophisticated hL £ ?4 Uny U-. S- A- suburb- ' Sewell r,rf v t* }l bTSily Wlth 6000 b°°ks, its private theatre, ,ts electrical domesticity, it has its swimming-pool and bowhng.g round ana tie s e P ]f ana bermg that it is American, dines at seven, -mstead of Santiago's ton or eleven at night. ' Chile is said to have a reserve of 2,000,000,000 tons of copper. Sue can ore^ cheaper than anywhere else except Utah, but as a nation sho makes no direct profit on her copper, for the mines are. owned, by American companies and the shares aro held abroad. All that Chile gets when copper booms is increased employment for her people, the duties on imported material; and! more incomo-tax; ..■■.. \

Nitrate ip in a different category. The nitrate' employees have been cut down from 50,000 to 12,000, and the northern deserts;present the spectacle of a string of. dead camps inhabited by watchmen and lean foxes..