Two routes present themselves with various competing advantages by which the Victoria and Albert Railway may proceed. The first, the most obvious, most desirable and most expensive, is straight across the Highlands of Toro, through the best of the cotton country, from a point on the Victoria Lake in the neighbourhood of Entebbe, to where the Semliki river runs into the southern end of Lake Albert. The second would practically follow the footsteps recorded in these pages. It does not offer a direct line. It does not pass during the whole of its length through cultivated and inhabited country. It does not reach the Albert Lake at the most convenient end. But it is far cheaper than the other. It is only 135 miles long instead of nearly 250. It connects not only the two great lakes, but also Lake Chioga with all its channels and tributaries, in one system of unbroken steam communication.
Briefly this latter project would consist of two links of railway: the first about sixty miles long from Jinja (or Ripon Falls) to Kakindu, the first point where the Victoria Nile becomes navigable: the second about seventy-five miles long from the neighbourhood of Mruli to the Nile below the Murchison Falls and near its mouth on the Albert. By these two sections of railway, together only 135 miles in length, a wonderful extent of waterways would be commanded; to wit: 1. Thirty miles of the Victoria Nile navigable from Kakindu to Lake Chioga. 2. Lake Chioga itself, with its long arms and gulfs stretching deeply into the whole of the fertile regions to the south-west of Mount Elgon, and affording a perimeter of navigable coastline accessible by steamers, of certainly not less than 250 miles. 3. All that reach of the Victoria Nile navigable from Lake Chioga to Foweira when the rapids ending in the Murchison Falls begin again—70 miles. 4. Thirty miles from below the falls to the Albert Lake. 5. The whole of the Albert Lake shores—250 miles. 6. The Semliki river navigable (once a sandbar has been passed) for sixty miles. 7. The glorious open reach of the White Nile from the Albert Lake to Nimule—120 miles. Thus by the construction of only 135 miles of railroad, swift modern communication would be established over a total range of 800 miles: or for an addition of one-fifth to its length and one-eighth to its cost the effective radius of the Uganda railway would be more than doubled. Such railway propositions are few and far between.
I do not prejudge the choice of these two routes. Both are now being carefully surveyed. The advantages of the longer and more ambitious line across Toro are perhaps superior. But the cost is also nearly twice as great; and cost is a vital factor—not merely to the government called upon to find money, but still more to the commercial soundness of an enterprise which is permanently crippled, if its original capital charges are allowed notably to exceed what the estimated earnings would sustain. The question is one which will require severe and patient examination, the nicest balancings between competitive advantages, the smoothest compromises between the practical and the ideal.
But let us now look forward to a time—not, I trust, remote—when by one route or the other the distance between the Victoria and Albert Lakes has been spanned by a railway, and when the Mountains of the Moon are scarcely four days' journey from Mombasa. The British Government will then be possessed of the shortest route to the Eastern Congo. The Uganda railway will be able to offer rates for merchandise and railway material with which no other line that can ever be constructed will ever be able to compete. The whole of that already considerable, though as yet stifled trade, which feebly trickles back half across Africa by Boma to the Atlantic, which is looking desperately for an outlet to the northward, which percolates in driblets through Uganda to-day, will flow swiftly and abundantly to the benefit of all parties concerned down the Uganda trunk, raising that line with steady impulse from the status of a political railway towards the level of a sound commercial enterprise. In no other way will the British tax-payer recover his capital. The advantages are great and the expense moderate. Larger considerations may postpone, and the imperative need of the fullest surveys will in any case delay construction; but I cannot doubt that the Victoria and Albert railway is now the most important project awaiting action in the whole of that group of Protectorates which Sir Frederick Lugard used proudly to call "our East African Empire."
But let us proceed one step further in the development of the communications of north-east Africa. When an extension of the Uganda railway has reached the Albert Nyanza, only one link will be missing to connect the whole of the rail and waterway system of East Africa and Uganda with the enormous system of railways and riverways of Egypt and the Soudan, to connect the Uganda with the Desert railway, to join the navigation of the great lakes to the navigation of the Blue and White Niles. Only one link will be missing, and that a very short one; the distance of 110 miles from Nimule to Gondokoro, where the Nile is interrupted by cataracts. Of the commercial utility of such a link in itself I have nothing to say; but as a means of marrying two gigantic systems of steam communication, it will some day possess a high importance; and thereafter over the whole of the north-east quarter of the African continent under the influence or authority of the British Crown, comprising a total mileage by rail and river of perhaps 20,000 miles, uninterrupted steam communication will prevail.
The adventurous and the imaginative may peer out beyond these compact and practicable steps into a more remote and speculative region. Perhaps by the time that the junction between the Uganda and Soudan rail and water systems has been effected, the Rhodes Cape to Cairo railway will have reached the southern end of Lake Tanganyika: and then only one comparatively short hiatus will bar a complete transcontinental line, if not wholly of railroad, at least of steam traffic and of comfortable and speedy travel.
Then, perhaps it will be time to make another journey; but as the reader, who will no doubt take care to secure a first-class tourist ticket, will no longer require my services as guide, I shall take this opportunity of making him my bow.
FOOTNOTE
[1] "I am informed by the courtesy of Mr. Lydekker of the British Natural History Museum, that the true name of the white rhinoceros found in Uganda is Rhinoceros Simus Cottoni. 'Burchell's white rhinoceros' is the designation of the southern race; but I have preserved in the text the name commonly used in Uganda."
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