LAND * WATER 
norcmber 6. jqxy 
than ihp (art that it was to he the first through trunk hue to 
tfiivorsr ono of the groat contuientr; from end to end; and 
perhaps tlio bitttrost disappointment he ever knew was when 
hi> country, in 18S9, acquiesced in Germany's entermg uito 
the possession of the region between Hritisli Kasl Africa and 
Hliodesia, and at a single stroke, creating an apparently m- 
surmountable barrier many hundr.-ds of miles wide, athwart 
the route he had decided' that his railwav should follow. 
Wlielher, in the clearness of his vision, he realised even then 
--a decade or two before the ominous truth began to smk 
liome to even the most far-seeing of his countr\inen— the 
-uiister import of Germany's designs I have never heard, 
lie never did give up working for the consutnmalion of 
what he was firmlv convinced was tli<> xinr qua non to the 
success of his great plan, and at the time of his deatli it is said 
he had negotiations pending with the Kaiser by which some 
sort of a British zone— acro>s the west end of German East 
.\frica— could be purchased or leased. If it is true that 
Jihodes was really willing to build his railway over so pre- 
carious a right-of- waw it is all the evidence we need to be 
reasonably certain that oAen his eagle-eye had not pierced to 
the cloven hoof beneath the German jack-boot. 
Rhodes was too much of a man of action to allow tlie 
(|iiestion of right-of-way through a region which, at best, 
could not Ix- eiitered hv rails for many vi-ars to \\<i\f\ up the 
whole project. The thing to do was to get construction under 
wav : the matter of route could, he hojied. be arranged later. 
His plan was to utilise the i,o(n) miles of lake-way and 
river-wav wiiicli occur almost exactly upon a straight line 
drawn between the two termini, and to build the intervening 
railway links, totalling 4,000 miles in length, as rapidly as 
the financial and physical diflicnltie- 'onld be owrmmr. 
* 
The First Railways 
South African railway construction in early days was 
almost entirvly directed toward one objccti\-e — the great 
mining an<l consuming centres in the north. First Kimbcrley 
and its diamonds, was the goal ; then the Kand, with its 
gold. The magnet of the diamond mines had taken the. 
railway to Kimberley in 1S84 and by 1890 the gold mines of 
the Rand had carriixl it on to Johannesburg, somewhat to 
one side, howevi-r, of the direct Capc-to-Cairo route. The 
beginning of the Rhodesian railways was the tangible ex- 
pression that Rhodes gave to his "All Red ^o\\tc " dream. 
\\'hen his Chartered romj)any took o\-er Rhodesia, the 
nearest railwa\' was at Kimberley. boo miles from Cape Town : 
and one of Rhodes' first acts was to get it extended to Vry- 
burg, near the border of the vast region which liad been made 
subject to his direction. From here was started the 
Rhodesian trunk line, \\hich reached Bulawayo, 600 miles 
to the north, in 1S95. • 
Construction on the line from Bulawayo to the Zambesi 
was inaugurated before the outbreak of the Boer \\'ar, but 
the disturbed condition of the country preceding and during 
that struggle made it difficult to make much headway during 
these years. After the restoration of peace, Rhodes, by 
])ersistence, arranged tlie difficulties of finance. Construction 
was started anew in Rhodesia, but before the railway liad 
reached the gorge of the Zambesi, the hand that was driving 
it forward relaxed, and grew cold in death. 
But what was in many ways the most difficult part of the 
undertaking — the, linancing of the Northern Rhodesian portion 
of the line — was already done. For that the enthusiasm 
and the indomitability of a Rhodes was imperative ; the rest 
was a matter of time. Victoria Falls was reached in 1904, 
the Broken Hill mines in 190(1, and in 1909 rail-head 
rested on the Congo Border at Bwana-M'kubwa. Here all 
idea of carrying the line up through German East Africa was 
abandoned, and the survey was carried across the Belgian 
Congo to Ehzabethville. This latter point was reached in 
1911 when it was expected that the 300 miles of comparativch' 
easy construction between there and the southern end of 
Tanganyika would be finished by the end of 1915. 
We have l>een told but little regarding railway construction 
in this rtigion since the outbreak of the war, but we will prob- 
ably be fairly safe in assumLig that military exigency has 
acceleratiVd rather than retarded work on any line or lines 
i-alculated to improve communications in tlie direction of 
German East Africa. It may well be, thert-fore. that the 
lifting of. the war curtain will re^'eal not only tlie whole of the 
2,600 rniii'S between Cape Town and T.inganyika coinpleteK' 
bridged l>v railway, but that a more westerly line may ha\e 
Deen carnted up through Xorthern Rhodesia to and across 
the bordeirs of " German East " along the route Rhodes first 
l>rojected for the " Capc-to Cairo " route. . 
The location of the. great A'ictoria Falls railway bridge 
furnished a striking example of tliegolden vein of .sentiment 
■ which stre-.iked the iron puqxjisefnlness of.the ICnij).iie Builder. 
There wea? other jwints where it is said the gorge of the 
Zambesi could have been crossed a( less expf-nse and in easier 
conformity to the limiting grades of the railway, facts whiili 
were clearly demonstrated at the outset by the enginrors. 
But when they confronted Rhodes with the drawing!>*and 
estimates, he only set his square jaw and issued a decree that 
the bridge was to span the gorge at " The Cliff of the Rain- 
bow," and that no other point was to be considered. 
" Nowhere else can a bridge be built within view of tJie 
l'alls,"lie said, " and I am not going to incur the reproaches of 
generations yet uiilKirn by allowing it to be run in another 
])lace. If tlie British can't build it, give the Americans a 
chance. Never mind who does it ; only see that it is done ! " 
Although the contract for constructing the bridge was not 
let until a year after Rhodes' death, his wishes in the matter 
were scrupulously respected. There was no difficulty in 
finding a British concern ready to undertake tin; unprecedented 
task, whVh was completed in 1905. It is what engineers call 
a " two-hinged spandrel-braced arch," a type which, both 
architecturally and from the engineering standpoint, is best 
suited to its peculiar purjiose. It is 650 feet long, and its 
.joo feet of height above the waters of " The Devil's Boiling 
Pot " makes it the loftiest bridge of its type in the world. 
• By a hapi)V chance something like ninety per cent, of the 
main-line railway in tlic British controlled parts of North 
Africa is available as a section of the Cape-to-Cairf) 
trunk railway. The Nile hardly varies a degree from the 
.;2nd parallel in its whole course from the Victoria Nyanza to 
Cairo, and the fact that the narrow strip of cidtivation along 
the Nile is about all of Egypt and Sudan worth reckoning 
with has been responsible for practically all of the railway line 
outside of the Delta being nm in a north and south direction. 
The first northern link of the Cape-to-Cairo railway is that 
formed by the main trunk of the Egyptian State lines, and the 
second is that of the main line of the Stidan Government 
Railway's. The former ends just above the First Cataract, 
near Assuan, and the latter begins at \\"ady Haifa, below the 
Second Cataract.. The intervening distaiice — ultimately to 
be bridged by rail— is a two-days' ste-amer voyage up the Nile. 
The 575 miles of line from Haifa to Khartoum-one of the 
wonders of the railwaj- world — is the first extensive piece of 
desert construction ever attempted. 
Three decades ago, when Rhodes' visioning eyes first saw- 
in fancy two glistening hands of tie-bound steel reaching from 
the Cajic to tlie Mediterranean, he was t(jld that, even if there 
were no others, one insurmountable difficulty in the way of 
realising his dream would be found in the impossibility of 
maintaining a line across the drifting, waterless sands of the 
Sudan. For the want of such a line that other dreamer, 
Gordon, watched from the houseto])s of ringed Khartoum for 
the glint of sun on British bayonets that were fated to arrive 
too late to save him from the Mahdi's wrath. 'Because there 
was no such line the fanatical hordes of the Mahdi's successor, 
the Khalifa, blackened the sands of the Sudan with fire and 
blood through the ten awful years, while the British Lion, 
rallying his miglit in Egypt, gathered himself for a spring. 
"The Khalifa cannot be destroyed without a railway;" 
said Kitchener." 
" Build it," said Cromer. 
" But there is no water either above or below ground, "- 
protested the railway engineers. 
" Then carry it with you," replied Cromer. 
" But even if we succeed in building such a line, it will 
disappear under the drifting sands within a few months," 
said the engineers. "There is no jirecedent " 
" It will justify itself a dozen times over if it enables 
Kitchener to come to grips with the Khalifa," retorted Cromer. 
' Build it : And build it faster than ever a railway was built 
before." 
.\nd so, as there was no alternati\'e offered, the engineers 
went ahead and did as those two men of iron Cromer and 
Kitchener decreed. Carrying their water with them as they 
went, even as the camel caravans had done for thousands of 
years before them, they laid twin lines of burning steel across 
the blistering sand wastes at the rate of a mile, two miles, 
and — once or twice— even three ihiles a day. It was not 
much of a railway to begin with, but it gave Kitchener's 
mixed force a \-ery substantial lift towards the field 
of Omdurman. As' a result of this whirlwind campaign the 
power of the Khalifa was destroyed, Gordon was avenged, 
the peace of Upper Egypt was assured, and the " one insur- 
mountable obstacle " on the Capc-to-Cairo. route was bridged 
for all time. 
But the end of the wonders was not yet. This desert 
railway was not overwhelmed with sand at "the end of a year 
(the\- found ways to guard against that), but it was over- 
whelmed with something else— almost the last thing in the 
world that had been expected— traffic. First came the old 
