Dream of Cecil Rhodes Almost Realized: From North to South in Four Weeks Only a few years ago Darkest Africa was one of the phrases most commonly in use in the newspapers, but now it is quite out of date.
Africa is still dark in places, but it was darkest 30 or 40 years ago, and before long it will be dificult to find an African town in which the light of knowledge has not shone in some degree, however faintly.
The great idea of Cecil Rhodes, for connecting Capetown and Cairo by rail and river is approaching completion. Out: of the journey of about 6,000 miles a traveller who recently made the journey in 53 days found that he had to walk or be carried only 289 miles; and this gap is now being filled by a railway.
The journey overland from the Cape of Good fiope to the mouth of the Nile, will soon be done in four weeks. Already it is possible to travel in comfort, on a train with sleeping and dining cars, from Capetown to Bukama in Belgian Congo, The stages of the journey map themselves out as follows: The first stage is to Kimberley, place with 17,000 people, in' the centre of the richest diamond bearing arca in the world.
Johannesburg, the end of the second stage, has 290,000 people, in the midst of the richest gold mines in the world.
the third city in size m Afvica, being exceeded only by Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt.
om Johannesburg tRe tine runs to Bulawayo, the capital of Rhodesia. The Rhodesian State has a population of about one and a quarter million people, nearly 40,000 of them being British.
From Rhodesia the railway passes into the rich and rapidly developing Belgian Free State, where the copper mines of the province of Katanga have led to the building of a capital, Elizabethville, which has nearly all the features of an up-to-date European town. The Belgian Congo has a population of more than eight and a half millions, of whom over 8,000 are Europeans. Elizabethville is 2,300 miles from Capetown. 7 The longest part of the journey, which is not by rail or water, but will soon be by 1, is 200 miles in Tanganyika After Victoria Nyanza has been reached there is comfortable steamer travel, except for a tramp past the rapids of the Upper Nile—
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.