But the Spanish American people have ever much difficulty in settling their quarrels. Their traits of pride and over-individualism, inherited from the Spaniard, render it difficult to give way. If one performs an act of magnanimity, the other may suspect or accuse it of weakness or cowardice. Both wrap themselves in haughty reserve, both invoke the high gods to bear witness to their own truth, both are quixotic and quick-tempered. Yet they are people of the same civilization, speech, laws, literature and culture, with splendid qualities and a promising future, and if these quarrels could be composed, the progress of the region would be hastened. The port of Iquique (with Pisagua), south of Arica, is well known to many travellers and other persons interested in the Chilean nitrate fields, of which it is the principal shipping centre. The greater share of the business of nitrate production is in British hands. The _oficinas_ are establishments peculiar to Northern Chile, forming small colonies or localities, whose workers consist of the Chilean _rotos_--a hardy and turbulent but industrious folk--headed by English managerial staffs. Around these centres of industry, on every hand, broken here and there by small oases where water-springs occur, stretches some of the most dreadful desert land in the world. Such, for example, are the desert of Tarapaca, and those intervening between the nitrate pampas and the Cordillera, where neither man nor animal can live, nor blade of herbage can flourish. Nature here, as far as the organic world is concerned, is dead, or has never lived. Iquique is a town of wooden houses, overlooked by sand-dunes that threaten it from the wind-swept desert, but it has pleasing features, and the English colony here, with its well-known club--it has a reputation for hospitality, and, incidentally, the consumption of cocktails--has its own marked characteristics. The Nitrate Railway ascends through high, broken country to the east to the Pampa. Indeed, the life and thought of the region is largely embodied in the words "Nitrate" and "Pampa."