“ALL ABOARD FOR CAPE TOWN!” Drop Cap I IN Bulawayo, which is in Matabeleland, stands one of the most significant and impressive statues in the world. From the middle of that dusty, sun-baked thoroughfare known as Main Street rises the bronze image of a bulky, thick-set, shabbily clad man, his hands clasped behind him, his feet planted firmly apart, as he stares in profound meditation northward over Africa. Cecil John Rhodes was the dreamer's name, and in his vision he saw twin lines of steel stretching from the Cape of Good Hope straight away to the shores of the Mediterranean; a railway, to use his own words, “cutting Africa through the centre and picking up trade all the way.” If ever a man was a strange blending of dreamer and materialist, of utopian and buccaneer, of Clive and Hastings with Hawkins and Drake, it was Cecil Rhodes. In other words, he dreamed great dreams and let no scruples stand in the way of their fulfilment. Having trekked over nearly the whole of that vast territory that stretches northward from the Orange and the Vaal to the shores of Lake Tanganyika, his imagination saw in this fertile, sparsely settled country virgin soil for the building up of a new and greater Britain. The predominance of the British in Egypt and in South Africa, It was a picturesque vision, said the men to whom he confided his dream, but impractical and impossible, for in those days the line from Alexandria to Assuan and another from Cape Town to Kimberley practically comprised the railway system of the continent, and five thousand miles of unmapped forest, desert, and jungle, filled with hostile natives, savage beasts, and deadly fevers, lay between. But the man who had added to the British Empire a territory greater than France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy combined; who had organised the corporation controlling the South African diamond fields; who had put down a formidable native uprising by going unarmed and unaccompanied into the rebel camp; and who was responsible, more than any other person, for the Boer War, was not of the stamp which is daunted by either pessimistic predictions or obvious obstacles. It was a slow and disheartening business at first, this building of a railway with a soul-inspiring name. The discovery of the diamond fields had already brought the line up to Kimberley; the finding of gold carried it northward again to the Rand; the opening up of Rhodesia led the iron highway on to Bulawayo, and there it stopped, apparently for good. But Rhodes was undiscouraged. He felt that to push the railway northward from Bulawayo to the southern shores of Lake Tanganyika was an obvious and necessary enterprise—the actual proof, as it were, of the British occupation. But the Boer War was scarcely over, the national purse was drained almost dry, and even the most optimistic financiers shrank from the enormous expense and problematical success of building a railway into the heart of a savage and unknown country. Finally Rhodes turned to the imperial government for assistance in this imperial enterprise, for the man who had added Zululand, Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, Barotseland, and Nyasaland to the empire felt that the empire owed him something in return. He first laid his scheme before Lord Salisbury, then prime minister, who said that nothing could be done until he had a closer estimate of the expense. Returning to Central Africa, Rhodes had a flying survey of the route made in double-quick time, and with the figures in his pocket hastened back to London. This time the premier sent him to see Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the chancellor of the exchequer. Hicks-Beach, who was notorious for his parsimony in the expenditure After dinner that night Rhodes strolled over to see a friend of Kimberley days, a Hebrew financier named Alfred Beit, in whom he found a sympathetic listener. As Rhodes took his hat to go, Beit casually remarked, “Look here, Rhodes, you'll want a start. Four and a half million pounds is a big sum to raise. We'll do half a million of it, Wernher [his partner] and I.” That By 1904 the road had progressed as far as the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi, where it crosses the river on a wonderful steel-arch bridge—the highest in the world—its span, looking for all the world like a frosted cobweb, rising four hundred and twenty feet above the angry waters. “I want the bridge to cross the river so close to the falls,” directed Rhodes, “that the travellers will have the spray in their faces.” “That is impossible,” objected the engineers. “What you ask cannot be done.” “Then I will find some one who can do it,” said Rhodes—and he did. The bridge was built where he wanted it, and as the Zambezi Express rolls out above the torrent the passengers have to close the windows to keep from being drenched with spray. By 1906 the rail-head had been pushed forward to Broken Hill, a mining centre in northern Rhodesia; three years later found it at Bwana M'kubwa, on the Congo border. Here the task of construction was taken up by the As you sit on the observation platform of your electric-lighted sleeping-car, anywhere along that section of the “Cape-to-Cairo” between Cape Town and the Zambezi, you rub your eyes incredulously as you watch the rolling, verdure-clad plains stretching away to the foot-hills of distant ranges, and note the entire absence of those dense forests and steaming jungles which have always been associated, in the minds of most of us, with Central Africa. The more you see of this open, homely, rather monotonous country the harder it becomes for you to convince yourself that you are really in the heart of that mysterious, storied Dark Continent and not back in America again. And the illusion is completed by the people, for the only natives you see are careless, happy, decently clad darkies who might have come straight from the levees of Vicksburg or New Orleans, while on every station platform are groups of fine, bronze-faced, up-standing fellows in corded riding-breeches and brown boots, their flannel shirts open at the neck, their broad-brimmed hats cocked rakishly—just such types, indeed, as were common beyond the Mississippi twenty years ago, before store clothes and the motor-car had spoiled the picturesqueness of our own frontier. North of the Zambezi it is a different story, however, for there it is frontier still, with many of a frontier's drawbacks, for the prices of necessities are exorbitant and of luxuries fantastic; skilled workmen can command almost any wages they may ask, and common labour is both scarce and poor. The miner, the scientifically trained farmer, and the skilled workman have rich opportunities in this quarter of Africa, however, for the mineral wealth is amazing, much of the soil is excellent, and civilisation is advancing over a great area with three-league boots. For excitement, variety, and picturesqueness I doubt if the journey through Barotseland and the Katanga district of the Congo can be equalled on any railway in the world. It is true that the Uganda Railway—which, by the way, does not touch Uganda at all—has been better advertised, but in quantity of game and facilities for hunting it the territory through which it runs is no whit superior to that traversed by the “Cape-to-Cairo.” Stroll a mile up or down the Zambezi from the railway bridge and you can see hippos as easily as you can at the Zoo in Central Park; in Northwest Rhodesia herds of bush-buck, zebras, and ostriches scamper away at sight of the train; and as you lie in your sleeping-berth at night, while the train halts on lonely sidings, you can hear the roar of lions and see the gleam of the camp-fires by means of which the railway employees keep them away. On one occasion, when our train was lying on a siding south of the Zambezi, the conductor of the dining-car suddenly 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 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 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 From Swakopmund, on the other side of the continent, 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, 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 |