Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

“Another trouble is the white ant. That little termite eats anything wooden. It chews up the insides of our cars and even attacks the furniture. Where there is the least moisture the ants will go for the railroad ties, and they will chew out the insides of the wooden telegraph poles. They always work under cover, leaving a thin shell of wood outside. The result is that a tie or pole may look sound then all at once it will crumble to pieces. We have to inspect the road very carefully at regular intervals and watch out for weak points. We now use hollow steel tubes as ties. They do not make so smooth a road as the wooden ties, but the ants cannot eat them. We also have steel telegraph poles.”

“I noticed my train was pulled by an American locomotive. How do they compare with those from Great Britain?” I inquired.

“Not well,” replied the railroad director. “We have some of your engines which we bought seven years ago. We are still using them, but most of them have been repaired and made over. You people make locomotives, expecting to run them to their full capacity for four or five years and then throw them on the scrap heap. This is not advisable out here in the desert, where freight costs so much and the trouble of getting our rolling stock is so great. We want machinery that will stand all sorts of trials, including the climate. We want it rustproof and rotproof and heavily made all around. We have here not only the dry air and the sand to contend with, but also in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea the salt air and the alkali water.”

“I suppose the lack of water is one of your chief difficulties, is it not?” I asked.

“Yes. This railroad is over three hundred miles long and the track is laid through the sand. For about one third of the distance inland from the Red Sea the country is mountainous, but the rest of it is flat. There are no streams, so we have to rely on artesian wells for our water supply. We have bored a number, but we find that the water in many places is salt. We struck one well which had three per cent. of salt in it, and another in which the water was one per cent. salt. Of course such water is useless for our locomotives.

“We are having trouble also in getting a good water supply at Port Sudan. We sunk one well to a depth of eight hundred feet and struck a good flow of fresh water. We had hardly completed, it, however, before the salt water began to seep in, and we are now drilling again. There are some stretches along the route where there is no water whatever. In such places we have to carry our supply with us. For this we have tanks of galvanized iron, each of which will hold about fifteen hundred gallons.”

From Atbara I took a later train to continue my journey on toward Khartum. About one hundred miles south of Atbara we stopped at Shendi, where the Queen of Sheba is said to have lived. This is a station on the east bank of the Nile five hours or more from Khartum. It is a considerable town with railroad shops. I saw great piles of steel ties such as Captain Midwinter mentioned.

The mud towers outside some Egyptian huts are used by whole families as cool sleeping places out of reach of scorpions. Sometimes mothers leave their babies in them while they are working in the fields.