The child so contentedly sucking sugar cane is, like four out of every hundred children in Egypt, blind in one eye. This is due chiefly to the superstition and ignorance of their parents.
Shendi consists of an old and a new town. The latter has been laid out by the British and has a park in the centre watered by the Nile. In ancient times there was a great city here, for it was the capital of the country and the supposed residence of the Queen of Sheba, who went from here down the Nile and crossed to Palestine. There she had her famous flirtation with King Solomon. The Abyssinians say that she went back by the Red Sea and stopped in their country; and that while there she bore a son whose father was Solomon and who became the head of the line of kings which rule Abyssinia to-day. The Mohammedans, on the other hand, say that the Queen of Sheba did not live here at all. They claim that her residence was in Yemen, Arabia, and that Solomon went there to visit her. The queen’s name was Balkis. As witty as she was beautiful, she gave the wise Solomon many a riddle which he was puzzled to answer.
CHAPTER XIX
ACROSS AFRICA BY AIR AND RAIL
The airplane has completed the conquest of the Dark Continent. A two-months’ journey from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope has been reduced to a possible fifty-two hours of flying, each hour representing one hundred miles through the skies.
Cecil Rhodes died hoping that one day his countrymen would finish the greatest of his African projects, an all-British route traversing the continent. His dreams were based upon steam, and compassed a route of rail and water transport taking advantage of the Nile and the Great Lakes. Those dreams are becoming realities, and to-day only a few gaps remain unfilled on the long way from the north to the south. In the meantime, aircraft has sprung almost full fledged into the skies, and the gasoline engine and the airplane have beaten the steam locomotive and its steel track through the wilds.
The first flight from Cairo to the Cape was made by two officers of the South African Air Force, Colonel P. Van Ryneveld and Lieutenant C. J. Q. Brand. Of four competitors who started from Cairo, they were the only ones to land at Cape Town. They had several accidents and wrecked two machines on the way. Leaving Cairo on February 10, 1920, they took twenty-eight days to reach Cape Town, although their actual flying time was counted in hours. Their nearest competitor covered only half the distance, while the two others did not succeed in getting across the desert wastes of the Sudan.
In the airplane of our imagination, let us take the trip they made. We may be sure of excitement, for even under favourable conditions we are starting out on one of the most dangerous air journeys known to the world. But let us first look at a map and pick out our route. It is a jagged line, extending from north to south, the length of the continent. It is marked with dots and triangles, each showing a place where we may land. As we look at the map it seems quite simple and easy, but actual experience proves its great difficulties.
We shall leave Cairo at dawn and follow the Nile to Khartum. This is a flight of one thousand miles, but landing places have been prepared along the entire route at intervals of two hundred miles. We shall stop at one of these long before noon and spend several hours to avoid the heat of the day, when gusts of hot air, rising from the sun-baked desert, make it dangerous to fly at low altitudes. At the start of our flight we shall rise a mile or more to avoid these treacherous currents, which frequently take the form of “air spouts,” often visible on account of the dust and sand they have sucked up with them. Such currents have force enough to toss our plane about like a leaf in the wind. With these great gusts of hot air spouting upward are cold currents rushing downward. These are even more dangerous, as they are always invisible. Consequently, we shall fly high, to avoid a “bumpy” passage, as our pilot calls it, and in landing must be careful lest we get caught in an air pocket.
From Khartum we start on the second, longest, and most dangerous leg of the journey. This covers a distance of twenty-six hundred miles, extending to Livingstone near Victoria Falls in northern Rhodesia. We shall follow, in a general way, the Blue Nile to Ehri, and then go almost due south to Uganda and Lake Victoria, the second largest lake of the world. We shall skirt the eastern edge of the Sudd, in which there is hardly a single safe landing place. Except in the main channels, masses of papyrus completely hide the water, and if we should come down in that treacherous region we could hardly hope to get out alive. We should be unable to walk, swim, or float in the dense tangle.