Around Tucuman are twenty-five sugar mills, and it is reckoned they produce 200,000 tons of sugar, of which between 60,000 and 70,000 tons are exported. We went to the fine mills at San Pablo belonging to Nouges Brothers, and the senior partner was good enough to show me over the place, so that I could inspect the whole process, from the arrival of the cane until the sugar is loaded in sacks ready to be sent to Buenos Aires. The stalks, as high as a man, are thrown into a machine which literally chews them up. As they pass through heavy rollers they crunch and crack, and yield their juice which runs in a nasty brown fluid into a trough. Again the mashed-up cane is subjected to further squeezings between rollers, until practically the last drop of the syrup is squeezed out. The treacle-like stuff is run into big basins beneath which furnaces are blazing, and is kept at a simmer until the sugar reaches the consistency of dough. After that it is sluiced into highly heated steel cups, which are constantly whirling. It is interesting to stand by in the sickly-sweet atmosphere and watch how, in the constant spinning and evaporation from the heat, the stuff loses much of its brown appearance and becomes, when thoroughly dried, like the cheap brown sugar as we know it at home. It is further refined in other hot chambers until it is quite white. Then men with sacks catch the stream of sugar as it rushes from the mouth of the refinery. Much of it is spilt, and the men are up to their boots in sugar. But the bags are quickly filled, pushed on one side, sewn up, hastened on lorries to waiting carts, which, when loaded, convey the freight to the railway wagons close by. Señor Nouges told me that at that time his firm was turning out 175 tons of sugar a day. The sugar-cane must have plenty of sun and water. The rivers I saw during harvest time were miserable, shallow streams, meandering their way through what looked like a broad boulder-strewn bed of what once had been a wide stream. I was there, however, in the dry season, but was told that in the rainy season these streams are increased a thousandfold in volume, are frequently a quarter of a mile wide, and, when the torrents are heavy, overflow their banks and inundate the land. Irrigation is carried to a high point, so that in times of flood the waters of the rivers can be conveyed many miles and utilised in providing moisture to the cane.