ere to him merely means to an end.

When General "Chinese" Gordon, for example, told him that he had refused
a roomful of silver for his services in exterminating the Mongolian
bandits Rhodes looked at him in surprise and said: "Why didn't you take
it? What is the earthly use of having ideas if you haven't the money
with which to carry them out?" Here you have the keynote of the whole
Rhodes business policy. A project had to be carried through regardless
of expense. It applied to the Cape-to-Cairo dream just as it applied to
every other enterprise with which he was associated.

The all-rail route would cost billions upon billions, although now that
German prestige in Africa is ended it would not be a physical and
political impossibility. A modification of the original plan into a
combination rail and river scheme permits the consummation of the vision
of thirty years ago. The southern end is all-rail mainly because the
Union of South Africa and Rhodesia are civilized and prosperous
countries. I made the entire journey by train from Capetown to the
rail-head at Bukama in the Belgian Congo, a distance of 2,700 miles, the
longest continuous link in the whole scheme. This trip can be made, if
desirable, in a through car in about nine days.

I then continued northward, down the Lualaba River,--Livingstone thought
it was the Nile--then by rail, and again on the Lualaba through the
posts of Kongolo, Kindu and Ponthierville to Stanleyville on the Congo
River. This is the second stage of the Cape-to-Cairo Route and knocks
off an additional 890 miles and another twelve days. Here I left the
highway to Egypt and went down the Congo and my actual contact with the
famous line ended. I could have gone on, however, and reached Cairo,
with luck, in less than eight weeks.

From Stanleyville you go to Mahagi, which is on the border between the
Congo and Uganda. This is the only overland gap in the whole route. It
covers roughly,--and the name is no misnomer I am told,--680 miles
through the jungle and skirts the principal Congo gold fields. A road
has been built and motor cars are available. The railway route from
Stanleyville to Mahagi, which will link the Congo and the Nile, is
surveyed and would have been finished by this time but for the outbreak
of the Great War. The Belgian Minister of the Colonies, with whom I
travelled in the Congo assured me that his Government would commence the
construction within the next two years, thus e