nabling the traveller to
forego any hiking on the long journey.

Mahagi is on the western side of Lake Albert and is destined to be the
lake terminus of the projected Congo-Nile Railway which will be an
extension of the Soudan Railways. Here you begin the journey that
enlists both railways and steamers and which gives practically a
straight ahead itinerary to Cairo. You journey on the Nile by way of
Rejaf, Kodok,--(the Fashoda that was)--to Kosti, where you reach the
southern rail-head of the Soudan Railways. Thence it is comparatively
easy, as most travellers know, to push on through Khartum, Berber, Wady
Halfa and Assuan to the Egyptian capital. The distance from Mahagi to
Cairo is something like 2,700 miles while the total mileage from
Capetown to Cairo, along the line that I have indicated, is 7,000 miles.

This, in brief, is the way you make the trip that Rhodes dreamed about,
but not the way he planned it. There are various suggestions for
alternate routes after you reach Bukama or, to be more exact, after you
start down the first stage of the journey on the Lualaba. At Kabalo,
where I stopped, a railroad runs eastward from the river to Albertville,
on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Rhodes wanted to use the 400-mile
waterway that this body of water provides to connect the railway that
came down from the North with the line that begins at the Cape. The idea
was to employ train ferries. King Leopold of Belgium granted Rhodes the
right to do this but Germany frustrated the scheme by refusing to
recognize the cession of the strip of Congo territory between Lake
Tanganyika and Lake Kivu, which was an essential link.

This incident is one evidence of the many attempts that the Germans made
to block the Cape-to-Cairo project. Germany knew that if Rhodes, and
through Rhodes the British Empire, could establish through communication
under the British flag, from one end of Africa to the other, it would
put a crimp into the Teutonic scheme to dominate the whole continent.
She went to every extreme to interfere with its advance.

This German opposition provided a reason why the consummation of the
project was so long delayed. Another was, that except for the explorer
and the big game hunter, there was no particular provocation for moving
about in certain portions of Central Africa until recently. But Germany
only afforded one obstacle. The British Government, after the fashion of
governments, turned a cold shoulder to the e