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Show Traveling Around America SAILING ON WllLIiKS COMMUTING to work on sailing cars Is a good old desert custom cus-tom In Chile. These men are en route to the nitrate fields with the wind blowing them to work in the morning and obligingly shifting at night to blow them home again. Chile's rich nitrate fields occupy about one-third of the narrow coastal desert whicb extends fifteen hundred miles along the west coast of South America. They yield the world's only supply of naturally produced nitrate of soda, which is a valuable fertilizer. It is a strange paradox that nitrate ni-trate which Is found in desert beds utterly devoid of vegetation is a valuable aid to the growth of plants. It la a paradox, too, that nitrate and its important by-product. Iodine, can deal out either life or death. Nitrate Ni-trate helps to furnish us with food; iodine is an important element ot nutrition. Yet both figure heavily in forces of destruction employed in times of war. To obtain nitrate from the fields the two layers above the caliche in which it is found are "blown off" with dynamite and the caliche broken up ready to be collected and transported to oflclnas or processing process-ing plants from which it emerges as almost pure nitrate of soda ready for shipment by rail to ports visited weekly by ships plying between be-tween Chile and New York. In the year 1937-38 Chile exported mora than 1,600,000 metric tons of nitrate. Edna Mae Stake. |