From the Cairo end, meanwhile, the northern section of the great transcontinental system was being pushed steadily, if slowly, southward. The difficulties of river transportation experienced by the two Sudanese expeditions had proved conclusively that if the Sudan was ever to be opened up to European exploitation it must be by rail rather than by river. It was the Khalifa who was unconsciously responsible for the rapid completion of much of the Sudanese section of the “Cape-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 which stalks law and order in the khaki tunic of a Sudanese policeman, the railway-building fever, which affects some men as irresistibly as the Wanderlust does others, took hold of Those Who Have the Say, and the line was again pushed southward, along the banks of the Blue Nile, to Sennar, one hundred and fifty-eight miles south of Khartoum. With the completion, in 1910, of several iron bridges, it was advanced to Kosti, a post on the White Nile, with the northern end of Lake Tanganyika some twelve hundred miles away.
That a few more years will see the northern section extending southward, via Gondokoro, to Lake Victoria Nyanza, and the southern section northward to Lake Tanganyika, there is little doubt. Indeed, 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 the one section, and Tanganyika by the other, there will come a halt, for between the two rail-heads there will still be six hundred miles of intervening territory—and that territory is German.
Unless, therefore, England can obtain, by treaty or purchase, a railway zone across German East Africa, such as we have obtained for the Canal across the Isthmus of Panama, it looks very much as though there would never be an all-British railway from the Mediterranean to the Cape, and as though the life dream of Cecil John Rhodes would vanish into thin air. There are several reasons why Germany is not inclined to give England the much-desired right of way. First, because between the two nations a bitter rivalry, political and commercial, 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 such a quid pro quo as she would demand—as, for example, the cession of Walfish Bay, the British port in German Southwest Africa, or of the British protectorate of Zanzibar, or of both; fourthly, because the Germans now have the British in just such a predicament regarding the completion of the “Cape-to-Cairo” railway as the British have the Germans regarding the completion of the Bagdad railway. In other words, the only condition on which either country will permit its rival's railway to be built through its territory is internationalisation.
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 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. Still farther south a line 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, 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, 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.
The traveller who climbs into the Cape-to-Cairo Limited at the Quay Station in Alexandria, in response to the conductor's cry of “All aboard! All aboard for Cape Town!” can lean from the window of his compartment as the train approaches Cairo and see the misty outlines of the Pyramids, those mysterious monuments of antiquity which were hoary with age when London was a cluster of mud huts and Paris was yet to be founded in the swamps beside the Seine; at Luxor he will pass beneath the shadow of ruined Thebes, a city beside which Athens and Rome are ludicrously modern; at Assuan he will catch a glimpse of the greatest dam ever built by man—a mile and a quarter long and built of masonry weighing a million tons—holding in check the waters of the longest river in the world; at Khartoum, peering through the blue-glass windows which protect the passengers' eyes from the blinding sun glare, he can see the 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 finally, when his train has at last come to a halt under the glass roof of the Victoria Terminal in Cape Town, with close on six thousand miles of track behind it, the traveller, if he has any imagination and any appreciation in his soul, will make a little pilgrimage to that spot on the slopes of Table Mountain known as “World's View,” where another statue of that same bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, this time guarded by many British lions, stares northward over Africa. He will take his stand in front of that mighty memorial and, lifting his hat, will say: “You, sir, were a great man, the greatest this benighted continent has ever known, and if one day it is transformed into a land of civilisation, of peace, and of prosperity, it will be due, more than anything else, to the great iron highway, from the Nile's mouth to the continent's end, which is the fulfilment of your dream.”