No one knows how long Chile's saltpeter belt is.

After the Great Lakes coalfield incident in the Toyo Military Administration, the military government explicitly ordered the exploration of Chilean saltpeter mines without rewarding silver.

Because firstly, Chen Mu knew very well that there was no need to detect, and secondly, Shao Tingda proved with practice that he could dig it out at will, and there was no need to detect.

It is not difficult to dig out saltpeter mines, but it is difficult to get the miners to survive on this land.

In the north of Chile, it is a desert wilderness, full of sand and rocks.

The wind and sand blew through the strange rocks that stood abruptly in the desert, swept the gravel and hit the figure of the steel pickaxe under the strange stones, it was a young man in a linen robe and a hat, his right hand holding the axe and hammer was calloused in the tiger's mouth, and there was a road under his feet, which stretched from the edge of the strange stone to the north and south, until it disappeared into the red phantom of the rising heat in the distance.

The rudimentary road was wide enough for eight horses to walk in parallel, and the cracked earth of the road could fill the cracks with a gust of wind and sand, and there was no difference between the inside and outside of the road, except that the stones picked up in the desert were piled up one foot high and the markers were piled along the road.

The young man put down his pickaxe and axe and squeezed his eyes to wipe the sweat from his chin, untied the water bladder from his waist and carefully poured two sips into his mouth, slightly relieved the dryness of his throat that was about to smoke, looked up with a scarred face and squinted at the sun, took out a copper pocket watch from his wide belt, and looked at the time.

It's close to noon.

The impatience on his face quickly faded, and he slowly crouched down with joy, letting the shadow cast by the hat cover his sturdy body as much as possible, and set his eyes on the end of the southern road, waiting quietly.

On the huge strange stone behind the young man, the words 'Daming Chile Nitrate Mine 14th Factory' were chiseled out by a hammer pickaxe, and the last two words have not yet been chiseled, this is his work today.

He is from Liaodong named Li Ning, Jiangyang thief was born with unusual gun skills, two years ago he was incognito at Li Chengliang as a housekeeper, but because he couldn't speak obediently, he was sent to Beiyang as a flag army.

Six months ago, they found that this place has all the conditions for opening a saltpeter mine, and after several times of site selection and exploration, they finally chose this place as a mine, just after he chiseled the towering broken mountain wall not far from the north of the strange stone, it is where the site of the 14th nitrate mine is located.

The site selection here has nothing to do with the nitrate mine, but mainly due to the proximity of the indigenous tribes who lived in the desert for the same generation, because it is related to the extraction of water.

Just as people who get lost in the desert will follow the camels, the camels may not know the way, but they know where there are minerals and where there are oases, and the Ming army, who is blind to the desert, also needs to know from the desert natives where there are small oases and where to get water.

At the beginning, several nitrate mine sites were set up close to the coast, and water and various daily necessities were easy to obtain, but the deeper the plant sites were set up, the more difficult it was to obtain water sources, and the same was that the better the quality of the nitrate ore was excavated, the better the nitrate ore, the more trouble-free the refining, the less impurities in the finished product, and the more powerful it was to make gunpowder.

The nearest aboriginal tribe lives in the mountains twenty miles away, and they use plant fibers to weave wide cloths on the mountains to collect the mist condensation in the early morning for life.

There were 100 households stationed in Shuishan, and the banner army recruited the natives to weave hundreds of larger nets of cotton cloth to build water sheds, take clean water at night, and send it to the mine during the day.

The source of joy in Li Ning's eyes and the purpose of waiting are exactly this, every day the sun rises, the flag army of the 100 households in Shuishan will send a convoy of horses to distribute the three nearby nitrate mines, and the quota of water delivery in the 14th factory is 37 pokes per day, and the natives who follow the car will easily throw the stones picked up on the mountain and the road on the side of the road.

The Ming army entered the desert and had no spare strength to build roads, and the so-called roads were just like this, the men and horses found a relatively flat road in the wilderness during the march, tried to make it shorter between the starting point and the destination, and then sprinkled stones on the side of the road, and over time, it became a road.

In such road conditions, the carriage of the 100 households in Shuishan has to walk for an hour and a half from departure to arrival, and it is difficult to travel in the heat, and the convoy needs to drink water once on the way and once on the way back, so to be precise, the daily water purification of the 14th factory is 35 barrels, each barrel is 20 large liters, and one large liter is 1,073 milliliters.

There were more than 500 banner soldiers, gunpowder craftsmen, native miners, and their families in the mine, and more than 30 large and small livestock, and 35 buckets of water were not enough to drink, let alone bathe, let alone open 120 acres of land.

The flag army and the gunpowder maker are all genuine Ming people, the gunpowder master is okay, he is busy refining the nitrate ore dug out by the miners every day, and the martial artists of the flag army are really idle, and even the animals in this desert Gobi are not willing to stay longer, and if they want to hunt, they have to run dozens of miles to the mountains to catch the big rabbit.

It's a strange thing, the body is bigger than the rabbit of the Ming Dynasty, the sun during the day to put the head into the crack of the stone to sleep, even if it is woken up, it looks like it can't wake up, and it has a special spirit at night, and it is like the New Year.

But Li Ning, the general banner, felt that the rabbit should not run around during the New Year, and should be put in the pot.

The people of the Ming Dynasty, who are serious and have nothing to do in this desert where birds don't, have nothing to do, they must have to grow some vegetables in slices.

They need water to grow vegetables on cultivated land, and they can't drink enough water, so where should they come from?

Forty miles to the north, there are geyser hot springs; Thirty miles to the northeast, there is a salt lake.

The water and dogs can't drink it, and it can't be distilled, just like sea water, light quenches thirst and doesn't work, and basically no one in these Beiyang Flag Army doesn't drink distilled water at sea, and they all know that drinking steamed seawater has more people lose their hair and dogs lose their hair.

But it can be used for bathing, frying nitrate, and can be mixed with mountains and rivers to drink, with relatively less nutrition, but it will not lose hair and quench thirst.

Li Ning shook the empty water bladder, this Oriental military mansion is really not as comfortable as the Liaodong Army, everything over there is close to the generals and family members first, it's good here, hundreds of households, general flags, small flags, flag army, not to mention what to eat and what to use, even how much water to drink every day and how much water to use are stipulated to die, the flag army has one liter of pure water, three liters of steamed water, and the general flag is only two percent more than the flag army.

Other than that, not a single drop is more.

But it is precisely because of this that water is especially precious when it is delivered.

A few shouts came from the ridge in the distance, the flag army on duty stood on the edge of the cliff with a red flag and waved, the official road came from the swaying bell of Maluan, Li Ning also looked up like a big rabbit in this land, and in the phantom of the rising heat, the horse convoy of Shuishan came.