The Last Frontier

dle of that dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the bronze image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad

ching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a railway

tile, sparsely settled country virgin soil for the building up of a new and greater Britain. The predominance of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, [Pg 191] and the fact that the territory under British control stretched with but a single break from the mouths of the Nile to Table Bay, gave rise in the great empire-builder's mind to the project of a trunk-line railway "from the Cape to Cairo," and under the British flag all

ed forest, desert, and jungle, filled with hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers, lay between. But the man who had added to the British Empire a territory greater than France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had organised the corporation controlling the South

ed the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise-the actual proof, as it were

ncellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure [Pg 193] of national funds, was frigid and discouraging, but finally relaxed enough to say: "Get a proper survey made of your proposed railway, with estimates drawn up by responsible engineers, and if the figure is not too unreasonable we will see what can be done." Fortified with this shred of hope, Rhodes again betook himself to the country north of the Zambezi, and, after months of work, hardship, and privation, facing death from native spears, poisonous snakes, and the sleeping-sickness, his men weakened by malaria and his animals kille

n of it, Wernher [his partner] and I." That [Pg 194] meant success. Though ministers of the Crown turned a cold shoulder to the great imperialist who came to them with a great imperial enterprise, help came from two German Jews who had become naturalised Englishmen. The next day the City brought the total up to a million and a h

is impossible," objected the engineers. "What you ask cannot be done." "Then I will find some one who can do it," said Rhodes-and he did. The bridge was built where he wanted it, and as the Zambezi Express rolls out above the torrent the passengers have to close the windows to keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906 the rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a mining centre in northern Rhodesia; three yea

rdure-clad plains stretching away to the foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire absence of those dense forests and steaming jungles which have always been associated, in the minds of most of us, with Central Afric

while on every station platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing fellows in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their flannel shirts open at the neck, their broad-brimmed h

tastic; skilled workmen can command almost any wages they may ask, and common labour is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scientifically trained farmer, and the skilled workman have ric

in Northwest Rhodesia herds of bush-buck, zebras, and ostriches scamper away at sight of the train; and as you lie in your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on lonely sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see the gleam of the camp-fires by means of which the railway employees keep them away. On one occasion, when our train was lying on a siding south of the Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly [Pg 197] exclaimed, "Look there, gentlemen-look over there!" His excitement was justified, for from over a screen of bushes, scarcely a bi

e-to-Cairo," for, in order to come to hand-grips with him, Kitchener and his soldiers pushed the railway down the desert to Khartoum at record speed, laying close on two miles of track between each sunrise and sunset. There it halted for a number of years; but after the British had done their work, and Khartoum had been transformed from a town of blood, lust, and fanaticism into a city with broad, shaded streets, along [Pg 198] which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic

ndeed, the plans are drawn, the routes mapped, the levels run, and on the Katanga-Tanganyika section the railway-builders are even now at work. But when the Victoria Nyanza has been reached by

cial, exists, and the Germans feel that already far too much of the continent is under the shadow of the union Jack; secondly, because the Germans are, as I have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, themselves building a railway from Dar-es-Salam, the capital of their east-coast colony, to Lake Tanganyika, and by means of this line they expect to divert to their own ports the trade of all that portion of inner Africa lying between Rhodesia and the Sudan; thirdly, because it is unlikely in the extreme that England would give Germany su

tributary streams affect a river. A number of such feeders are already in operation and others are rapidly building. Beginning at the north, the main line of the "Cape-to-Cairo" is tapped at Cairo by the railways from Port Said and Suez; and at Atbara Junction, in the Sudan, a constantly increasing stream of traffic flows in over the line from Port Sudan, a harbour recently built to order on the Red Sea. The misnamed Uganda Railway is in regular operation between Mombasa on the Indian Ocean and Port Florence on the Victoria Nyanza, whence there is a steamer service to Entebbe in Uganda. From Dar-es-Salam, the capital of German East Africa, the

l the way. Still another line is being built inland from Lobito Bay in Angola (Portuguese West Africa) to join the transcontinental system near the Congo border, nearly half of its total length of twelve hundred miles being completed. It is estimated that by means of this line the journey between England an

through jungle, swamp, and desert; it will zigzag across plains where elephants play by day and lions roar by night; it will corkscrew up the slopes of snow-capped mountains, meander through the cultivated patches of strange inland tribes, [Pg 202] stride long-legged athwart treacherous, pestilential swamps, plough through the darkness of primeval forests, and stretch its length across the rolling, wind-swept veldt, until it finally ends in the great

statue of Gordon, seated on his bronze camel, peering northward across the desert in search of the white helmets that came too late; at Entebbe his eyes will be dazzled by the shimmering waters of the Victoria Nyanza, barring Lake Superior the greatest of all fresh-water seas; at Ujiji he will see natives in German uniforms drilling on the spot where Stanley discovered Livingstone. He will hold his breath in awe as the train rolls out over the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, for there will lie below him the mightiest cataract in the world-an unbroken sheet of falling, roaring, smoking water, two and a half times the height and ten times the width of the American Fall at Niagara; at Kimberley he will see the great pits in the earth which supply the women of the world with diamonds; in the outskirts of Johannesburg he will see the mountains of ore from which comes one-third of the gold supply of the world. And