That there will ever be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape seems to me exceedingly doubtful, for the political, territorial, and financial obstacles are many, and not easily to be disposed of; but that the not-far-distant future will see the completion, under international auspices, of this great transcontinental trunk line seems to me to be as certain as that the locomotive sparks fly upward or that the hoar-frost [Pg 200] on the rails disappears before the sun. Rhodes always said that the success of such a system must largely depend on the junctions to the east and west coasts, which would affect such a line very much as 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 Germans are rushing a railway through to Ujiji, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the engineer-in-chief assuring me that it would be completed and in operation by the summer of 1914. From Beira, in Portuguese East Africa, the Beira, Mashonaland, and Rhodesia Railway carries an enormous stream of traffic inland to its junction with the main line at Bulawayo. from the Portuguese possession of Delagoa Bay connects with the main system at Mafeking, on the borders of Bechuanaland, while Kimberley is the junction for a line from Durban, in Natal, and De Aar for feeders from East London and Port Elizabeth, in Cape of Good Hope. From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, [Pg 201] a railway has already been pushed nearly five hundred miles into the interior of German Southwest Africa which will eventually link up with the “Cape-to-Cairo” in the vicinity of the Victoria Falls, running through German territory practically all 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 and the cities of the Rand will be shortened by at least six days. It will be seen, therefore, that the “Cape-to-Cairo” system will have eleven great feeders, eight of which are already completed and in operation, while all of the remaining four will be carrying freight and passengers before the close of 1914. When the last rail of the “Cape-to-Cairo” is laid, and the last spike driven, its builders may say, without fear of contradiction, “In all the world no road like this.” And in the nature of things it is impossible that there can ever be its like again, for there will be no more continents to open up, no more frontiers to conquer. It will start on the sandy shores of the Mediterranean and end under the shadow of Table Mountain. In between, it will pass 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 antipodean metropolis on the edge of the Southern Ocean. On its way it traverses nearly seventy degrees of latitude, samples every climate, touches every degree of temperature, experiences every extreme. At Gondokoro, in the swamp-lands of the Sudd, the red-fezzed engine-driver will lean gasping from his blistered cab; at Kimberley, in the highlands of the Rand, he will stamp with numbed feet and blow with chattering teeth on his half-frozen fingers.
