Chapter V: Chilean Landscapes (1)

Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty is very early in Santiago.” My second discovery was that the Chilean capital was squalid. Landing at the most northern of her three railroad stations—which turned out to be no worse than the other two—had been like dropping into Whitechapel; and the electric sign toward which I headed had brought me to the lowest type of slum hotel. Had I come down the West Coast and been familiar with nothing better than Lima, Santiago would perhaps have seemed less oppressive, for it is a trifle more modern and only a few degrees more shabby in appearance than the City of the Kings. The change from the Argentine, however, or, more specifically, from Buenos Aires, was like that from the best section of New York to the lower East Side.

This contrast, I was soon to discover, is to a large extent true of all Chile. The _roto_ who makes up the bulk of the population, in or out of the capital, always looks like a very low-paid brakeman on a coal-train, who has just come in from an all-night run through a waterless country. With this class as a basis, Santiago was dirty, unkempt, down at heel. The cobbled streets were in many cases only half paved, full of dusty holes with loose cobblestones kicking about in them; the very house fronts were covered with dust; nothing seemed to have been cleaned or repainted since the last century; the city looked as if the civic feather-duster had been lost—though there was no lack of ragged vendors of this implement making the day hideous with their cries. The great difficulty seemed to be that few could afford them, for it was another shock to find that prices were almost as lofty in Santiago as in Buenos Aires.

The region was, to be sure, suffering for lack of the rain that eastern Argentine had received in such superabundance, but this did not wholly account for the general appearance of disrepair, suggesting a place once of great importance that had lost all ambition to keep its social standing in the world. The huge checkerboard town, with immense blocks of those straight, though narrow, streets required of his colonial builders by Charles V of Spain—perhaps because he had grown weary of losing himself in the Bostonese labyrinths of Spanish cities—contained an extraordinary percentage of slums. Miles upon miles of _cités_ or _conventillos_, ground-floor tenements of single rooms opening off blind alleys, stretched away in every direction from the central plaza, giving off the odor which emanates from cheap lodging-houses and overcrowded, unwashed families. It was the squalor of cities, too, as distinguished from the comparatively agreeable uncleanliness of the country.

The main business section of Santiago is relatively small, with the more important stores, banks, and offices within a few squares of the Plaza de Armas. Even this was considerably down at heel. The building material being chiefly mud plastered upon wooden slabs, there are many half-ruined buildings near the center of town, while “way out there where the devil lost his poncho,” as the Chilean calls the far outskirts, some of the conditions were incredible. Unlike the capitals of Argentine and Brazil, Santiago has never been made over and modernized by the federal government, for all its abundance of “saltpeter money,” and, as elsewhere on the West Coast, there is no distinctly residential section. Some parts are a trifle more fashionable than others, but the uniformity of the town is on the whole monotonous, doubly so because there are few buildings of interest either architecturally or otherwise. A square surrounded by the chief public structures; the capitol, covering an entire block behind the cathedral; the more distant Museum and Art Gallery, make up almost the entire list of imposing buildings. Long _galerías_, roofed passages that are virtually public streets, are almost the only unusual feature. Though its architecture is what might be called modernized Spanish, with sometimes more decorative street-toeing façades and more roomy patios than in Spain, it lacks some of the attractiveness of Spanish buildings, and at the same time makes little provision for plumbing, and none whatever for artificial heat. In Chile, to all appearances, the social standing of soap and water has not yet been recognized. The River Mapocho runs through town in a cobble-paved channel, but like those of all the west-coast capitals, it is insignificant either as a stream or a laundry and bath. Even boarding-schools and colleges take no account of that strange modern habit of “washing the body all over”; it is a rare house of even the “proud old families” that has a bathroom.

Of late years many of these old families have found that they can materially augment their ever less adequate incomes by renting the lower stories of their “palaces” as shops, with the result that the always slight line of demarcation between business and residence has now been almost wholly obliterated. Under the _portales_ of a palatial, red-brick building covering one whole side of the main plaza, its upper stories once the “Hotel de France,” but now a dingy vacancy, are dozens of petty little shops, fly-swarming fruit and peanut and sweetmeat stands, uncleanly male and female vendors of newspapers. As elsewhere in the Andes, there are many little cloth-shops run by “Turks,” as South America calls the Syrians. Street after street is crowded with dingy little hole-in-the-wall merchants; street stands abound in which are sold the favorite dishes of the _gente de medio pelo_, the ragged masses,—_mote molido_ (boiled and mashed ripe corn); _mote con huesillos_ (the same with scraps of bones and meat thrown in), and the thick, greasy soup known as _cazuela_. The half-trained tailors, to whom no doubt is due the fact that few men of Santiago are in any sense well-dressed, squat in little one-room dens, gazing out upon the passing throng like the craftsmen of Damascus. To make matters worse, the women commonly seen on the street are almost exclusively _mujeres de manto_, dressed in crow-black from heels to the fold of cloth wrapped about their heads, leaving only the front of the face visible, the lack of color adding to the general gloom of the town.

In contrast there is much sartorial display by the small well-to-do class, and at the other end of the social scale there are many hints of the picturesque. Each morning heavily laden ox-carts of country produce, drawn by four, and even six, oxen, led rather than driven by men walking ahead and prodding them over their shoulders with long, sharp, often gaily painted goads squawk into town and almost to the central plaza. The wielders of the goads wear the short, ragged ponchos, sometimes of velvety vicuña cloth, the invariably soiled felt hats, and the _alpargatas_, or, more likely, the simple leather sandals called _hojotas_ common to the _roto_ class. Some of these countrymen come riding in on horseback, their half-bare feet thrust into large wooden closed stirrups, and adorned with immensely rowelled spurs, frequently with a woman sitting sidewise on the crupper behind them. Milkmen—who are often mere boys—use what we call a police whistle, and make the morning hideous with their deliveries.

It is only from Santa Lucía that the Chilean capital gives a suspicion of its great extent. This crowning glory of Santiago, a tree-clad rocky hill rising abruptly in the center of the flat city, a sort of perpendicular park of several stories, is the only place in which it may be seen in anything like its entirety. There, four hundred feet above the housetops, one realizes for the first time that it may, after all, have four hundred thousand inhabitants. To climb any of the zigzag rock-cut stairs leading upward from the imposing main entrance is to behold an ever spreading vista of the city, stretching far away in every direction, monotonously flat and low except for several bulking old churches of the colonial Spanish style. The chief charm of the town, if that word can be used of a city that has little of it, is its proximity to the Andes. It lies well up in the lap of a plain more than two thousand feet high, at the northern end of the great central valley of Chile in which most of its population is gathered, with large hills in the far distance cutting it off from the Pacific, and, so close at hand as to seem almost above it, the everywhere dominating background of the main Cordillera of the Andes. But for this great white overhanging horizon, Santiago would be commonplace indeed; with it, its most dismal scenes have the advantage of a splendid setting. It is never uncomfortably hot; its brilliant winter days are magnificent, chilly rather than cold, even in the mornings and evenings. Except for a few kerosene heaters in the more luxurious homes, where foreign travel has broken the ice of _costumbre_, artificial heat is unknown. The wealthier classes keep warm from June to August by wearing overcoats and wraps indoors or out, at the theater or at their own dinner tables; the great ragged masses accomplish the same end by crowding together in their single-room dwellings, tightly closing all windows—and succumbing early and often to tuberculosis.

Santiago is the only city in South America in which there is any noticeable “smoke nuisance”; the belching of this from many factory chimneys, from the trains of the government railroad, with its smudgy, soft Australian coal, adds greatly to what seems to be a natural haziness of the atmosphere. But one may forget this in a score of quiet shaded nooks of Santa Lucía. Among its several curiosities are a drinking fountain—the only public acknowledgment that water is required by the human system that I recall having run across in South America—and, along with the statue of Valdivia, who here fortified himself against the Indians, and of an odd bishop or two, the tiny Protestant cemetery over which Vicuña-Mackenna, Chile’s chief literary light and a member of one of her oldest and proudest families, caused to be erected the inscription, “To the memory of those exiled from both Heaven and Earth.” Chile has never taken its Catholicism in homeopathic doses. It is only recently that even Protestant missionaries could be married by anyone but a Catholic priest; up to a bare decade ago the wicked heretics might not be buried in cemeteries, but were stuck away in any hole in the darkest hours of the night, to be dug up next day by prowling dogs. Largely through the efforts of American missionaries there is now a civil cemetery and a civil marriage law. Only a few months before my arrival a case had come up under the law against having a saloon next door to a church, and the Supreme Court rendered the, to the clericals “sacrilegious and unprecedented,” decision that a Protestant church _is_ a church, even in Chile.

Not far from Santa Lucía, nearer the edge of the town, is a much larger hill made of the loose shale common to the southern Andes and of much the same appearance as the one of the same name overlooking Lima. San Cristóbal belongs entirely to a group of priests. On top of it is a gigantic statue of the particular saint of their order, with an immense sheet-iron halo on which is squandered much electricity; but this is offset by the income from an enormous sign just below it advertising “Dulcinea Tea.” The Lick Observatory has a station on San Cristóbal, and as the priests have begun selling the mountain as a stone quarry, they wrung money for a long time out of the American scientists by threatening to dig the hill away from under them. Now the observatory is protected by an injunction, and there are other indications that Chile is gradually recovering from her medieval fanaticism.

Santiago has an imposing public library, one which was not only actually open but, strange indeed in Latin-America, one from which books could be taken—if one had several sponsors and could deposit the full price of the volume. One’s attention is usually first drawn to it by a statue of two famous Chileans, not so much because of the artistic merit of the monument as for the terror inspired by the situation of the two immortals. For they stand some thirty feet above the pavement on a pillar-like pedestal so slender that a single step backward or forward, the slightest jostling of each other, would infallibly plunge one or both of them to certain death, and the tender-hearted beholder, glancing at their constant peril, can only hurry by with averted face. Under the glass dome of the reading-room, beyond which most books never pass, readers wore their hats and smoked when they chose. There were, of course, no female readers. It is still considered unseemly in Chile for a lady to be seen reading anything but her prayer-book. Here I heard a lecture one evening under the auspices of the Geographical and Historical Society of Chile, graced by some two hundred of the _intellectuales_ of Santiago. The lecturer, in solemn frock coat, lighting his cigarette after every other sentence and letting it go out after each puff, with an appalling consumption of matches, read a long and laborious dissertation on the burning question as to whether the great Chilean national hero had been entitled to change his name from Higgins to O’Higgins. The speaker contended that this was proper; any other conclusion would have made him an outcast among his fellow-_intellectuales_, for it would have been attacking one of their most cherished illusions. But the long hour and a half during which he argued that the hero in question came of noble stock in Ireland and was not the descendent of Irish peasants, as commonly claimed, left the unprejudiced hearer unconvinced and secretly giving the oblivious object of their solicitude the far greater credit of having climbed to eminence from the more humble origin.

There is a saying in Chile that the population is made up of _futres_, _bomberos_, and _rotos_. The first are well-dressed street-corner loafers; the _bomberos_ are volunteer firemen, and the _rotos_ form the ragged working class that makes up the bulk of the population. The latter, said never to be without the _corvo_, an ugly curved knife, with which they are quick to _tripear_, to bring to light the “tripe,” of an adversary by an upward slash at his abdomen, are not merely conspicuous, but omnipresent. Everywhere this class is struggling for its livelihood. Great streams of men and boys, kaleidoscopes of rags, come racing out of the _Mercurio_ office with pink copies of “Ultimas Noticias” and scatter to the four corners of the flat city—but there seem to be more sellers than buyers. Poor, hopeless old tramps wander up and down the over-named Alameda de las Delicias with baskets of grapes covered with dust and almost turned to raisins, vainly trying to sell them. Slatterns and slouches are the rule among the female division of the _roto_ class, and Indian blood is almost always present in greater or less degree. In the Argentine some eighty per cent. of the population is said to be foreign born; in Chile, certainly in Santiago, not one person in ten suggests such an origin. Very strict immigration laws forbid negroes, Chinamen, and most Orientals to enter Chile, but though the country usually welcomes white foreigners with open arms, they are not greatly in evidence. The inhabitants of all classes have the west-coast characteristics, indefinable but unmistakable, which distinguishes them decidedly from the people of eastern South America.

Santiago has been called the “City of a Hundred Families.” These, still noted for their Spanish exclusiveness and aristocratic pride, powerful owners of most of the country, form an oligarchy of government in which the ostensibly free-voting _roto_ has little real hand. The “best families” oligarchy virtually tells the working class how to vote, and in the main it does as it is bidden, out of apathy, to be obliging, or from pure ignorance. Balloting is not really secret and there is frequent corruption, such as the recent notorious case of half the ballot-boxes in Santiago being carried down into the cellar of a public building and stuffed with a new set of votes. According to law, the voter must be able to read and write, and any _roto_ whom the landlords do not wish to vote is denied the suffrage on this elastic ground. On the whole, however, the oligarchy seems to work better than the more common Latin-American rule of a dictator or a group of irresponsible politicians. Its great fault is the stone wall it builds against rising from the ranks, that and the opportunity it gives the powerful to cast upon weaker shoulders the burden of taxation. The unfair advantages given descendants of the favored “best families” is shown in the frequent recurrence of the same name in Chilean biographies and histories. The expression, “an education according to his rank,” is often heard, and sounds strangely out of place in an ostensibly democratic country. The dawn of industrialism is suggested, however, in the strikes which are more and more breaking in upon the aristocratic patriarchal life. One cannot imagine any other Indian of the Andes striking, but his Araucanian blood has made the _roto_ not only free of speech, sometimes insolent, ever ready with his _corvo_, but ready to fight for himself in more modern ways.

“Some day,” said a Chilean man of letters, “our great land owners will be taxed as they should be; but that will probably require a revolution. The big absentee landlords exploit our natural resources and spend their incomes in Paris, leaving nothing for the advancement of the country. You have something of that problem in the United States, but the proportion of your idle rich who spend their money abroad is negligible compared with ours, and here there is no middle class as a depository of the real culture and sense and moral brawn of the nation.”

Some of the old families of Santiago have lost their wealth, yet still retain their pride and outward aristocracy. It is the custom of all the upper class to go away for the summer, not so much because Santiago grows a bit warm and rather dusty, as because it is the thing to do. One of the standing stories of the capital is of poor but aristocratic families who, unable to afford such an outing, shut themselves tight up in the back of their houses for two months or more, living on what their trusted servants can sneak in to them. Men who had every appearance of being trustworthy assured me that this tale was far from being a fable. One of them asserted that he had been invited the preceding February to the “home-coming party” of a family whom he knew had not been outside Santiago in a decade.

History is continually proving that unearned wealth takes away the energy and initiative of a nation as of an individual, and Chile is no exception to the rule. In the far north of the country, where it has not rained in thousands of years, are deposits which give Chile almost a world monopoly of nitrate, or _salitre_, as the Chilean calls it, the only large source of public wealth in the country. The high export duty on this gives the government four-fifths of its revenue, most of which is spent in Santiago or falls into the pockets of politicians. If some town in the far south needs a new school, or a pavement, or a tin hero to set up in its central plaza, it appeals to Santiago for some of the “saltpeter money”; and if its influence is strong enough, or the treasury is not for the moment empty and praying for a new war, the request is granted in much the same spirit with which our congressmen deliver “pork” to their constituents. Naturally this destroys civic pride of achievement and municipal team-work. Instead of spending the greater part of her revenue from nitrates to develop some industry to take their place when they are exhausted, “we are like a silly wanton, who squanders her easy winnings for gewgaws without recognizing that the time is close at hand when her only source of income will disappear,” insisted one far-sighted Chilean. “Once our saltpeter gives out and Europe stops lending us money, we’ll go to the devil.”

The fertile southern half of the ribbon-shaped country is excellent for agriculture; her population, smaller but far more dense than that of the Argentine, is already utilizing nearly all her resources above or under ground; in the past century Chile has had only one revolution serious enough to have echoed in the outside world, but that gives a misleading impression of her law-abiding qualities. Indeed, all such blanket statements give rather a false impression, for the country is assured no such prosperous future as they seem to suggest. Though he is superior to the Ecuadorian, and perhaps to the Peruvian, it would be easy to get an exaggerated notion of the Chilean. He is interested only in to-day; he, and especially his wife and children, are much given to show and artificial makeshifts: if he is not exactly lazy he is at least far less active and has less initiative than the more European _argentino_.

Chile is the home of fires and the dread of insurance companies. The latter are said to demand higher rates than anywhere else on earth, and the agent of an important foreign one assured me that all his clan live in fear and trembling toward the end of each month and particularly at the end of the year, when their clients are balancing their books, because of the epidemic of arson which results from attempts to recoup fortunes. This short-cut to solvency is constantly referred to in newspapers, plays, and conversation; nor, if we are to believe the older native novels, is it anything new. Chilean law requires the immediate arrest of the owner and the occupant of a burning building, it being the contention that either the one or the other is almost sure to be the instigator of the fire. Nor is it up to the government to prove that the suspect started the conflagration, but the task of the latter to show that he did not, which is a horse of quite a different color. The country is lined with blackened ruins, from mere _ranchos_ to modern several-story buildings in which lives have frequently been lost. I saw more burned buildings in Chile than in all the rest of South America, and far too many to be accounted for merely by the somewhat greater prevalence of wooden structures.

The fires themselves would be serious enough, were there not the _bomberos_ to make them doubly so. There are no professional fire departments in Chile. The glorious honor of fighting the flames is appropriated by the élite, much as certain regiments and squadrons are open only to a certain caste in our largest cities. The youthful males of Santiago’s “best families” become _bomberos_ because it is considered one of their aristocratic privileges to parade before their enamored ladies in fancy uniforms and glistening brass helmets. As often as a fire bell rings, all upper-class functions are temporarily suspended and all the young bloods run—to the fire? Certainly not! They hasten home to don their splendid _bombero_ uniforms, without which, naturally, it would be highly improper to attack the flames. The newspapers always include in their report of a fire the assertion that “the _bomberos_ arrived with their customary promptitude,” which has the advantage of being both true and courteous.

There being no National Guard in Chile, gilded youth has no other convenient way of showing off in uniform than to join the _bomberos_. The regular army would be too serious an undertaking for them, even if it were not below their dignity. Moreover, this is founded on conscription, with a year’s service for those who “draw unlucky,” and as the influence of caste is powerful in manipulating the drawings, the ranks are filled almost entirely with _rotos_ or the poorer classes. The Chilean army is German in tone and uniform, even to the big gray Prussian capes of the officers, many of whom, as well as the commander-in-chief, were of that nationality up to the outbreak of the World War. The army is much in evidence and its splendor is in great contrast to the shoddy, ragged dress of the bulk of the civilian population. Its immediate neighbors credit Chile with a strong Prussian temperament, and it, in turn, sends officers to train the troops of its more distant neighbors. Those who should know maintain that it is only the army that saves the oligarchy in power from the revolutions that are frequently on the point of breaking out, but of which the outside world seldom hears. Chile has no conscription for her navy, and for the first time outside my own land I found placards picturing the ideal life recruiting officers would have us believe is led on warships. As the Chilean on his narrow strip of beach is almost English in his feeling for the sea, there seems to be no great difficulty in manning the best, or at least the second best, navy in South America.

Chileans themselves frequently refer to the prevalence of thieving among their national characteristics, and explain it by saying that the Araucanian Indians, who make up the basis of the population, had communal ownership and still have little conception of the line between mine and thine. Half the nation is by its own official admission of illegitimate birth. In various parts of Santiago there are doors fitted with a _turno_, known among the English-speaking residents as a “bastard barrel,” softly upholstered, into which a baby may be dropped, the _turno_ given a half turn and a bell beside it rung, when nuns or their agents on the inside take charge of the mite without asking questions. Thousands of “orphans,” whose parents are still running about town, are housed by charity, and long troops of them may be seen any fine day taking an airing in the streets. This condition is by no means entirely the fault of the _roto_ class. None but the civil marriage is now legal in Chile, whether by priest, minister, missionary, or rabbi; but the poor man must take a day or more off and disentangle much red tape to get married, only to be informed by his priest that in the eyes of the church he is not married at all, until he produces a handful of pesos to have the union religiously sanctioned. As throughout Latin-America, he is apt to conclude that the ceremony is a mere waste of time and money.

Small as is the foreign population of Chile, the church is largely in the hands of foreigners, so that “a Chilean cannot be born or married or die without the permission of a Spanish, Italian, or French priest.” German monks and nuns are also numerous, yet Chileans are not admitted to most of the monasteries and convents. The foreign priest not only makes the native pay high for his confessions and other formalities, but frequently refuses him a pass through purgatory unless he leaves the church a large legacy to cover his unquestionably numerous sins. Though this property is ostensibly used to aid Chile with schools and the like, even devout Chileans assert that their foreign priests send most of the proceeds to the “Capital of the Christian World.” Complaints against these conditions are legion, but the Chilean, like most Latin-Americans, is more noted for criticism than for effective action.

Though Santiago rises late, and usually takes a siesta from twelve until two, it retires early. Being the social and fashionable, as well as the political, center of the republic, it has, of course, its elaborate “functions,” and it is still near enough to the colonial days to retain the weekly plaza promenade. On gala occasions this is worth seeing. Santiago is one of the countless cities which claim to have the most beautiful women in the world, and some of the claimants to this distinction are comely even under their deluges of rice powder. Chilean women of the better class, with their pale, oval faces and their velvety black eyes, have a vague sort of melancholy in their manner, as if they were thinking of the great world on the other side of the tropics, or at least over the wall of the Andes. But evening entertainments are scarce and poor in Santiago, and by ten at night the streets are commonly deserted, except by the stolid _pacos_ wrapped in their heavy black uniforms, and all doors are closed save those of a few cafés that drag on until midnight. Half a dozen cinemas unroll their nightly rubbish, usually fantastic and volcanic dramas from Italian film houses, woven around the eternal triangle; now and then a _zarzuela_ company succeeds in making a passable season of it. The favorite zarzuelas are such gems as “La Señora no Quiere Comer Sola” (Madam does not wish to eat alone), or “No Hagas Llorar á Mamá” (Do not make Mama weep), the surest way to avoid which would seem to be to keep her away from the histrionic efforts of the Chilean capital. Yet the élite of Santiago attend these mishaps in considerable force and fancy garb, including overcoats or wraps in the unheated buildings, all laboring under the delusion that they are being entertained. There is opera for a month or two in the winter; on rare occasions a really good dramatic company, rather Italian than Spanish, makes a brief stay—and generally loses money, since, as a Chilean novelist puts it, “the artistic taste of our public is better suited to the slap-stick of short plays or the immaturity of some circus of wild animals.” But the audiences which these entertainments turn out toward midnight quickly fade away and leave the streets to solitude.

Among the poorer classes the _zamacueca_, the native dance of Chile, popularly called a “’cueca,” is a principal diversion. A man and woman, each waving a large gay handkerchief, move back and forth, as if alternately repelling and inciting each other, to the tune of a harp and a guitar and the clapping of many hands, while a big pitcher of _chicha de manzana_ or _de uva_, which roughly correspond to our cider and grape-juice respectively, passes from mouth to mouth. The better-dressed class has certain simple pastimes in which both sexes join, though not often and never without an awe-inspiring display of chaperons on the side lines. There is, for instance, the “whistling game.” A man in competition with several of his spatted fellows runs four hundred meters, stops in front of a lady and whistles a tune, the name of which she hands him on a slip of paper, the first one to finish the tune without error and to return to the starting-point, being adjudged the winner. On the whole, the Spanish spoken by this class of Chileans is better than that heard in the Argentine, though there are many “chilenismos,” expressions peculiar to the country. Chile usually gives the “ll” its full sound, rather than reducing it to a poor “j,” but the “s” is largely suppressed. In spelling the country has certain rules of its own, the most noticeable being the use of “j” in many places where Spaniards use “g,” a legacy left by the Venezuelan, Andrés Bello, first president of the University of Chile.

I had looked forward with some interest to that far-famed feature of Santiago, her female street-car conductors. Familiar as they have since become, Chilean women led the world in this particular, the custom dating back to the war with Peru, a long generation ago. The street-cars of Chile are of two stories. Most of them are operated by a woman and a boy, about half the force being female and few of the rest grown to man’s estate. The boy is the _conductor_, which in Spanish means the motorman, and the woman _cobrador_, or collector. Far from inspiring the protection of wealthy rakes or causing enamored youths to squander their income riding back and forth in the car presided over by some unrelenting Dulcinea, however, most of the latter excite such repugnance that the more squeamish prefer to suffer a slight financial loss to accepting change from their unsoaped hands. On the back platform of the dingy electric double-deckers usually stands as un-entrancing a member of the fair sex as could be found by long search, her dismal appearance enhanced by the mournful, raven-black costume she wears. She is sure to be part Indian, her coarse hair tied in an ugly knob at the back of her head, high on top of which sits a hat of polished black, with a long pin stuck through it to add to the perils of life. In short, Chile’s female conductors are not giddy young girls, but stolid women of the working-class, very intent on their duties and only rarely whiling away an odd moment in harmless gossip with the youthful motorman of the car behind. Some romancer has written that the beautiful members of the clan are quickly recruited to more romantic service. Perhaps they are, for they certainly are not on the cars.

Street-car fares are absurdly cheap in Chile, so cheap, in fact, that the service cannot but be poor and dirty. Inside the cars riders pay ten centavos; up on the _impériale_ they pay five, which at the commonly prevailing rate of exchange is less than two and one cents respectively. Not the least amusing thing about Santiago is the street-car caste, or the line of demarcation between the upstairs and downstairs riders. The white-collar, non-laboring class will stand packed like cordwood in the closed car rather than go up on the _impériale_, which is not only preferable in every way but cheaper. It is this latter detail that makes the upper story forbidden ground for the _gente decente_. As a Chilean-born business man of English parents, educated in London and widely traveled, put it in criticizing my “bad habit” of riding on top:

“I would much rather ride up there, too; it is airy, cleaner than inside, you can see the sights, and the weather is generally fine in Santiago. But if I did, my friends would look up from the sidewalk, nudge one another, and say, ‘Hullo, by Jove! There’s Johnny Edwards up there with the _rotos_. What’s the matter; can’t he afford a penny to ride inside? I’d better collect that little debt he owes me before he goes bankrupt,’—and within a day or two my creditors would be down upon me in droves.”

The Chilean _peso_ is a mere rag of paper, originally engraved in New York and more nearly resembling our own bills than those of most South American countries. Theoretically worth a French franc, it is as doubtful of value as legibility, being unredeemable either in gold or silver and waking up each morning to find itself different from the day before. On the face of the few bills that still have visible words runs the statement, “The government of Chile recognizes this as a _peso fuerte_,” which is by no means the same thing as promising to pay a “strong peso” to the holder upon demand. The congress of Chile has decreed that the peso shall be worth ten English pence; but there is nothing quite so incorrigible in disobeying the laws of a country as its national currency, particularly one in which it is the custom, when in need of money, to go to a printing office instead of to a bank. No wonder there is no national lottery in Chile; playing the exchange is gambling enough to suit anyone.

With the exception of a few private, narrow-gauge lines in the nitrate and coal fields, the railroads of Chile are government owned. A state line now runs the length of the country, connecting its southernmost port on the mainland with its most northern province, and even with the capital of Bolivia. In the fertile, well-inhabited southern half of the country the railroads, like the more important ones of the Argentine, have the broad Spanish gauge, and down to where the population begins to thin out the trains are long and frequent. The “Longitudinal,” running for hundreds of miles northward from the latitude of the _transandino_ through dreary deserts a bare meter wide, carries neither through passengers nor freight. The former would probably die of monotony or thirst on the way; the latter would be valuable indeed after paying the breath-taking freight rates. It is far quicker, more pleasant, and cheaper to take, or to send by, the steamers along the coast, and the real raison d’être of the “Longitudinal” is Chile’s determination to keep the two provinces she took from Peru.

On the whole, the railroads of Chile are a sad commentary on government ownership. There are probably more employees to the mile on Chilean railroads than on any other system in the world, not because the Chilean is a particularly poor workman, but because politicians foist upon the helpless public carriers so many needy but influential constituents. Yet both roadbeds and rolling stock of this overmanned system are astonishingly _descuidado_,—uncared for, dust-covered, unwashed, loose, broken, out of order, inadequate, with whole train-loads of perishable goods rotting in transit, and frequent wrecks. It is common rumor that the government pays twice the market price for all railway supplies, thanks to the carelessness and the grafting tendencies of the personnel, while every year finds the railroads with a million or more deficit. How carelessly the trains are operated is suggested, too, by the extraordinary prevalence of missing legs in Chile. It seemed as if one could scarcely look out a train window without seeing someone crutching along beside the track, to say nothing of those entirely legless, as if the railroad habitually ran amuck among the population.

Started by Meiggs, the fleeing Californian who carried the locomotive to the highlands of Peru, and continued by a deserter from an American sailing ship, the Chilean railroads were built chiefly by American capital, as well as by American engineers. They still bear many reminders of that origin. The passenger-trains have comfortable American day coaches, made in St. Louis; the sleeping-cars are real Pullmans; even the freight-cars closely resemble our own. The engines, though supplied with bells, are more often of British or German origin, or from the government shops near Valparaiso. There are three classes, or, more exactly, five, for the prices and service on the express trains are different from the corresponding ones on the _mixtos_. Except that in the former one is more certain of having an entire seat to oneself, there is little difference between first and second class. Fares are comparatively low even in these; on the lengthwise wooden benches of third class they are cheaper than hoboing. Trunks, however, pay almost as high as their weight in passenger, there being no free-baggage allowance. The assertion is frequently heard in Chile that third class is a disadvantage to the country, because the low price makes it too easy for the _roto_ masses to move about. A rule that might not be amiss in our own land is that the engineer who jerks a train either in coming into or leaving a station is subject to a fine, if not to dismissal—but of course the Brotherhood would never permit any such interference with their long-established privileges. The trainboy nuisance, here known as a _cantinero_, with the accent on the beer, is in full evidence. Though the night trains carry Pullmans, there are no diners, because concessions have been given at various stations to men of political influence to run dining-rooms and the trains must stop there long enough to contribute the customary rake-off. The monopolists are less given to brigandage than they might be, however, and of late there has been inaugurated a system of sealed lunches at three pesos, including a half-bottle of wine. Moreover, it is a rare station that does not have a crowd of female food-vendors, especially well-stocked with fruit in the autumn season.

The eight o’clock express from Santiago sets one down in Valparaiso, one hundred and twenty miles away, at noon. From the Mapocho station the train climbs out of the central valley of Chile, squirming its way through many tunnels and over mountain torrents, with frequent magnificent views of the rich, flat plain which gradually spreads out hundreds of feet below. Then the valley narrowed and we came to Llaillai, the junction of the line up to Los Andes and over into the Argentine. Curving around the higher mountains, the other branch coasts leisurely downward, passing here a long vineyard, there pastures bordered by rows of Lombardy poplars and dotted with cattle, now a great estate belonging to a man living in Paris, the stone mansion of his administrator near at hand, the mountains forming the background of every vista. At Calera the “Longitudinal” sets out into the arid north, the fertile part of Chile quickly coming to an end in this direction and turning into the dreary desert which is at present the country’s chief source of wealth and fame. Then all at once the Pacific I had seen but once since entering South America two years before burst out in full ocean-blue expanse, without even an island to break up the unprotected bay in which the winds often raise havoc. Below Viña del Mar, Chile’s most fashionable watering-place, the precipitous hills come down so close to the sea that there is barely room for the highway, railroad, and tram line to squeeze their way past into the commercial metropolis and second city of the country.

Valparaiso, the greatest port not only of Chile but of the West Coast of South America, is the “Vale of Paradise” only comparatively. Built in layers or strata up the steep sides of the barren, shale coast-hills, it stretches for miles along the amphitheater of low mountains that surround a large semicircular bay, behind which one can see jumbled masses of houses sprawling away over the many ridges until these have climbed out of sight. There is so little shore at Valparaiso that there is room in most places only for two or three narrow streets following the curve of the bay, and for only one the entire length of the town, under the edge of the cliffs, much of it occupied by the dingy, two-story, female-“conducted” street-cars. In the central part of town a small space of flat ground has been filled in across one of the scallops of the bay, and on this made land are cramped the principal business houses and the central Plaza Arturo Prat. It is here that the earthquakes do their most appalling damage. The rest of the city climbs steeply up the shale hills overhanging the business section, in a jumble of buildings which give the town its only picturesque and unique feature. To get “top side,” where the majority of the Vale of Paradise dwellers live, there are escalators, or, more properly, “lifts,” since the majority of the largest foreign colony on the West Coast are English. That is, every little way along the cliff are two cars at opposite ends of a cable, which climb the slopes at precarious angles, though they are level inside, in about two minutes at a cost of ten centavos. For those who lack the requisite two cents, and for cautious persons who will not risk their lives on the escalators, several stairway streets rise in zigzag above row after row of sheet-iron roofs to the upper stories of the town. During this ascent the whole city spreads out below, all the panorama of Valparaiso and its semicircular bay, the latter speckled with hundreds of steamers, “wind-jammers,” and small craft, each far enough from the others to be ready to dash unhampered into the safety of the open sea when the wild southwest gales sweep in upon them. The Chileans formed some time ago the courageous project of having an English company protect this great open roadstead with a huge breakwater; but thousands of mammoth concrete blocks have so far been dropped into the seemingly bottomless harbor, leaving no visible trace, and now there are floated out hollow concrete structures of 150-foot dimensions. Once on top there are other street-cars, and more climbing to do, if one wishes to go anywhere in particular, though nothing as steep as the face of the cliff itself. Here may be seen Viña del Mar, a broad expanse of the Pacific, the aërial best residences of Valparaiso, and a picturesque tangle of poorer houses stringing away up the backs of the many verdureless ridges into the arid, uninhabited country.

The earth, like the sea, casts up on its beaches much human driftwood. Valparaiso is no exception to this rule, and here may be found wanderers, beachcombers, and roustabouts of all nationalities. Primitive landing facilities give its rascally boatmen the whip-hand over arriving or departing travelers. Many languages are spoken, English not the least important among them. Along the docks the _roto_ stevedore works barefoot and bare-legged even in the winter season; over all the town rests a pall of aggressive, rather conscienceless commerce which offsets its scenic beauties. The Chilean is not a particularly pleasant fellow at best; down at his principal seaport he is even below the average in this respect. Impudent and grasping, unpleasantly blasé from his contact with the lower strata of the outside world—but all this one forgets in watching the red sun sink into the Pacific from the impériale of a street-car winding close along the edge of the sea, or when the lights of the town, piled into the lower sky, fade away as the traveler turns inland and climbs back up into the Andes.

From the squalid Alameda Station of Santiago another express sped southward through rows of those slender Lombardy poplars that are a feature of any landscape of lower Chile. The broad central valley, distinct from the arid northern section and growing more and more fertile from the capital southward, with ever more frequent streams pouring down from the range on the east to add to its productiveness, stretches almost floor-flat for more than five hundred miles to where the narrow country breaks up into islands. In this autumn season vineyards and cornfields stood sear and shriveled. The slightly rolling country had an indistinct brown tint under a gray, yet illuminated sky, the valley reaching from the all but invisible Pacific hills to the jagged, snow-capped Andean wall, like an irregular dull-white line painted along the canvas of the sky some little distance above the horizon. San Bernardo, a summer colony, was now a large cluster of closed houses surrounded by brown vineyards touched here and there with a deep red, as of poison ivy. A few bushy trees, some still green, the rest yellow, were half-visible on the left; now and then an evergreen grove broke the prevailing color with the verdant emerald of firs, shading away through all the tints of green to late-autumn saffron, a hazy world spreading away on either hand and rising beyond to the Cordillera lying dim-white under a new fall of snow.

Paralleling the railroad were good highways, sometimes with high banks, more often lined with hedges, which added a suggestion of England to the general atmosphere of California in November. Along these roads were many ox-carts, the drivers walking ahead and punching back over their shoulders at the animals with sharp goads. There was color in the ponchos, often in the other clothing of the lower classes here, especially among the _huasos_, as the _gaucho_ is known in Chile, and this color seemed to be in exact ratio to the Indian blood, not of the individual, but of a given locality. Dust was everywhere. We passed numerous large corrals bearing the sign “Ferias Rejionales,” some with cattle in them, all surrounded by an elevated promenade from which prospective buyers could examine the stock. Horses and cattle shipped north in freight trains all had pasted on their rumps a paper bearing their destination. Towns were frequent and sometimes large, and there was much freight as well as passenger traffic, no doubt because Chile is like Egypt in that there is but one route up and down the country, here following the elevated central valley between the Andes and the sea.

At every station of any size groups of women and girls offered for sale fruit, bread, sweetmeats, and the like. They were particularly well stocked with grapes; native apples were plentiful, Chile being the only land in South America which grows them; not a few sold the pretty red _copihüe_, the national flower of Chile, a long bell-shaped blossom growing on a climbing plant of deep roots. The movements of these women were lively and vivacious compared with those of the higher Andes of more northern west-coast countries. Each wore a white dressing-gown over many layers of dark clothes, and most of them were decorated with earrings or necklaces of the red-and-black beans called _guayruros_ with which I had grown familiar in tropical Bolivia. These berries are supposed to bring luck, or at least a man, and the Chilean woman of the ignorant class will sell her only possession for a few of them. Apple and cherry orchards flanked the track here and there, many of them bordered by blackberry hedges stripped now of their fruit. Rather drab farmhouses, hung with withered rose vines, alternated with curiously un-American wheat or straw stacks. Gradually cultivation and villages decreased, and an Arizona-like country wormed its way into the plain in arid patches. Here grapes were still offered for sale, but one might easily have mistaken them for raisins.

We passed several branch lines leading off toward the Pacific, and a few shorter ones climbing a little way up the flanks of the Andes. I dropped off at the fourth of these junctions, in Talca, a large town with far too many churches and the concomitant squalor, poverty, and ignorance. The plaster was beginning to peel off in places from the adobe façade of the big, ostensibly cut-stone building facing the central plaza. Here, as in all Chile, one was struck again by society’s waste of its resources,—robust men in the prime of life scurrying about with baskets of fruit or newspapers for sale, much potential energy frittering away its time for want of occupation. “Los Boi Escouts” of Talca were announcing a benefit performance that evening, but as this did not promise sufficient interest to make up for spending a night in so dismal a place, I went on to the considerable town of Chillan. Here it had been raining and the unpaved streets were full of miniature ponds through which I picked my way to a hotel where I paid three dollars for a bed—and not much of a bed at that.

In stories I had heard Chile was noted for its low prices. If ever it had that particular charm it has now disappeared, at least for the traveler. The hard little apples sold at the stations cost as much as good ones in New York; diminutive loaves of bread were nearly as high as a whole loaf at home. Establishments masquerading under the name of “hotels” are plentiful: if there were one-fourth as many clean, honest, and well conducted it would be a decided improvement. To pay an average of twenty pesos a day in the squalor of most Chilean hotels would be mishap enough; the doctoring to which one’s bill is invariably subjected makes the experience all the more painful. Though the daily rate purports to cover all service, morning coffee and rolls are always charged for as an extra. So also is fruit, at twenty times what it sells for in the market around the corner. Baths, which are so slow in being prepared as to wear out the patience of most foreign guests, cost several pesos each time they are ordered, whether they are taken or not. The crowning trick is to make out the bill by separate items, if one has had the audacity to ask for the daily rate in advance, thus doubling it; or, if one protests against this system, the next one is to contend that the day begins at a certain fixed hour, which is always on the opposite side of the clock from that at which the traveler arrives, and that the first and last meal each constitute a full day, with the result that the man who is continually traveling pays for sixty days a month in hotels even though he spends some half of his time on trains.