THE Southernmost oil well in the world, which was brought in at Springhill on the main island of the Archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in December 1945, and which it is hoped will help to make Chile independent of petroleum imports, turned the eyes of the world once again to the possibilities of great resources at the very tip of the Americas. The increased activity in the region during the last two years recalls the gold-rush days of the 19th century and the establishment of the vast flocks of sheep that have been the basis for the fortunes of the ranch barons living in Punta Arenas.

been the scene of a number of interesting books written by Chilean authors in recent years. In 1936 the city of Santiago granted to Juan Marín its annual prize for his novel Paralelo 53 Sur, which describes the same general region he treated the year before in Un Avión Volaba. Also from 1936 there dates a novel of Patagonia, La Ciudad de los Césares, written by Manuel Rojas. In 1940 Enrique Campos Menéndez published in Buenos Aires Kupen: Cuentos de la Tierra del Fuego, and in the same year Domingo Melfi gathered together the impressions of a trip he made to the Straits in El Hombre y la Soledad en las Tierras Magallánicas. In 1941 Francisco Coloane brought out a collection of stories, Cabo de Hornos, and the short novel El Último Grumete de "La Baquedano," and in 1945 another set of stories, Golfo de Penas, and the drama La Tierra del Fuego Se Apaga.

Although some of the stories of Enrique Campos Menéndez and Juan Marín and the novel of Manuel Rojas are romantic

weavings of the author's fantasy, most of this fiction describes realistically the life and typical characters of the region. Through these detailed pictures the reader can feel the thrill of the wild and solitary beauty of southern Chile and can reconstruct the geography of the different parts of the Land of Magellan.

The entrance to the fjords leading to the Straits is at the Gulf of Penas, the scene of Coloane's story of that name. The crossing is famous among mariners, rough even on calm days, treacherous during storms. The trip southward can be followed in Melfi's book. The boat glides through a "liquid desert that forks like the veins of a giant's dismembered body," winding in and out among a labyrinth of tiny islands. The sky is usually forbidding and the fog low, but when the clouds are suddenly rent by a shaft of light the clarity of the air and the brightness of the sun are dazzling. Along the east runs the long