Excerpt from The Rainfall of Chile The north Of Chile is a hideous expanse of yellow sand and rock. At Iquique one millimeter Of rain has fallen in the last five years (to the end of December, Of the last twenty years fourteen have had no drop of water from the sky. The whole catch of the twenty years has been 28 millimeters (a little over an inch). This is the nitrate desert. The drought does not begin to break until one reaches Copiapo, nearly 500 miles farther south. Here rainfall years are infrequent - 1910 and 1913 were such - but the average fall is only I7 millimeters a year (about two-thirds Of an inch). The total rain fall at Copiapo in the last twenty-four years has been 408 millimeters, about one-third of what falls in New York in a year. At Ligua, less than 50 miles from Santiago, it rains every year, on an average 269 millimeters (between 10 and II inches). Though the country is still arid, the irrigated spots begin to attain significant size. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.