This second leg of our journey takes us into the heart of Africa. The country is wooded and mountainous. It is very hot, for we are nearing the Equator, which cuts across the upper edge of Lake Victoria. In fact, our pilot will not fly after nine in the morning nor earlier than four o’clock in the afternoon. The air is more “bumpy,” and often terrific thunderstorms seem to fill the sky with sheets of water. In dodging these storms, we must be careful not to fly so far off our course as to be forced to land in the wilds. The country here is a mile or more above sea level, and if we should fly too high in order to avoid the heat gusts, we may have trouble with our engines in the rarefied air. Below us are dense forests and rocky hillsides, and natural landing places hardly exist. As we go down the eastern shore of Lake Victoria we see new sights. These are the water-spouts, great spiral columns whirled up from the lake into the air by the eddying winds.
Swamps, huge anthills, scrub bush, outcroppings of rock; and stretches of tall, rank elephant grass combine to make natural landing places exceedingly rare on the second stage of the airplane journey, which is most difficult and dangerous.
The flight from Cairo to the Cape takes the aviator over clusters of native huts, dwarfed to the size of anthills, through which run the signs of civilization—ribbons of well-constructed road.
Fuad I, who became the first king when Egypt was declared a sovereign nation, came of the same family as the khedives of the last hundred years. He gave Egypt its flag, three white crescents and stars on a red field.
Our route from Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, is to the southwest, and we land at Mwanza, on the south shore. This is one of the outposts of the white man’s civilization in “darkest Africa,” From Mwanza we continue southwest across Tanganyika Territory to Abercorn at the lower end of Lake Tanganyika, and then fly on to Broken Hill in northern Rhodesia, where once more we see a railroad.
Preparing landing places in this part of Africa was a big job in itself. Not only were thousands of trees cut down to make clear spaces, but they were dug up by the roots to prevent them from sprouting again. Many of the native chieftains take great interest in keeping clear these airdromes, which would soon be gobbled up by the jungles if left to themselves. They have also broken up and carried away from these spaces the giant ant hills that cover the land of Central Africa like freckles on a boy’s face. These hills, which are often twenty-five or thirty feet high, and forty or fifty feet thick, are the home of the white ant. To make one airdrome in northern Rhodesia a force of seven hundred natives worked five months taking out twenty-five thousand tons of the heavy, rock-like clay with which the ants, grain by grain, had built their African apartment houses. Were our airplane to strike an ant hill in landing, it would surely be wrecked.
From northern Rhodesia down into Cape Colony our flight is not quite so difficult. The country is lower, and there are more open spaces. At Livingstone we begin the third stage of the journey, and there cross the Zambesi, looking down upon its wonderful falls, larger than Niagara. From Bulawayo, the next important stop, we bear to the east as we go south, passing over the Transvaal, with its diamonds and gold mines. We stop at Johannesburg and then fly to the westward on down to Bloemfontein. Our last flight takes us to Table Mountain, with Cape Town and the Atlantic Ocean at its foot. We are at the end of the continent, and have completed our fifty-two hundred miles through the air.