We must therefore conclude that it percolates
under ground from the Cordillera, though distant many leagues. In
that direction there are a few small villages, where the
inhabitants, having more water, are enabled to irrigate a little
land, and raise hay, on which the mules and asses, employed in
carrying the saltpetre, are fed. The nitrate of soda was now
selling at the ship's side at fourteen shillings per hundred
pounds: the chief expense is its transport to the sea-coast. The
mine consists of a hard stratum, between two and three feet thick,
of the nitrate mingled with a little of the sulphate of soda and a
good deal of common salt. It lies close beneath the surface, and
follows for a length of one hundred and fifty miles the margin of a
grand basin or plain; this, from its outline, manifestly must once
have been a lake, or more probably an inland arm of the sea, as may
be inferred from the presence of iodic salts in the saline stratum.
The surface of the plain is 3300 feet above the Pacific.
JULY 19, 1835.
We anchored in the Bay of Callao, the seaport of Lima, the capital
of Peru. We stayed here six weeks, but from the troubled state of
public affairs I saw very little of the country.
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