Greetings, readers! Now that Amazon has disabled its popular ebook lending feature, we're more committed than ever to helping you find the best ways to borrow FREE or save big on the Kindle books that you want to read. Kindle Unlimited and Amazon Prime Reading offer members free reading access to over 1 million titles, including Kindle books, magazines, and audiobooks. Beginning soon, each day in this space we will feature "Today's FREEbies and Top Deals for Our Favorite Readers" to share top 5-star titles that are available for KU and Prime members to read FREE, plus a link to a 30-day FREE trial for Kindle Unlimited!

Lendle

Lendle is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associates participant, we earn small amounts from qualifying purchases on the Amazon sites.

Kindle version of vintage magazine article originally published in 1899. Contains 28 Kindle pages with 13 illustrations.

Contains lots of great info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 110 years.

read excerpt -


The task of bridging the continent of Africa by a railway has been facilitated by the necessities of war. Hosea Biglow's familiar saying about "civilization getting a lift in the powder-cart " was seldom more appo¬sitely illustrated than by the recent war in the Soudan. When the Sirdar, General ¬now Lord - Kitchener began to work out the carefully calculated plan of campaign which he had matured for striking down the Dervishes of the Desert, he found himself confronted by this almost insuperable difficulty. The heart of the enemy was situated just 1,200 miles south of Cairo. To reach that heart and deal it a deadly blow, 1,200 miles (chiefly desert) had to be traversed by an army every mouthful of whose food, to say nothing of its powder and shot, its forage, and all its other impedimenta, must be dispatched from a base 1,200 miles to the rear of the fighting front. In the previous invasion of the Soudan, Lord Wolseley had endeavored to overcome this immense difficulty of transport by utilizing the Nile and dispatching an army in rowboats, past the cataracts, to Dongola. The experience of that expedition hardly justified the repetition of the experiment. If, therefore, the great blow was to be struck at the heart of Mahdism, the desert between Wady Halfa and Berber must be bridged by a railway. There was comparatively little engineering to do. The desert is level. Its drawback is not difficult gradients, but the scantiness of water. Between the starting-point at Wady Halfa and the terminus at the Atbara there are only two wells - one place per 175 miles where you can quench your thirst under an African sun cannot be considered an ideal allowance. The line was constructed for the most part by the natives, the Egyptian soldiers lending a hand under English supervision. When the Dervishes were beaten in the earlier campaign, their disbanded sol¬diers eagerly sought employment in making the line along which, a few months later, a force of 23,000 men was to be hurled against the capital of the Khalifa.

Further progress was stopped by the difficulty of bridging the Atbara. It was decided to throw a bridge across the river before the July floods. The time was short. Tenders were invited from British bridge-builders on a specification which was so elaborate that, when the tenders arrived, it was discovered that the building would take two years to erect, as it was not capable of being launched. Fresh tenders had to be invited in hot haste, and to the infinite dismay of the British public it was discovered that the Americans beat their rivals hollow both as to time and as to price. The order was not a very large one. The total cost of the bridge was only $32,500. But no incident in recent years has brought home to the British public the extent to which the British manufacturer has been beaten by his American rival more forcibly than this matter of the Atbara Bridge. No English firm could undertake to deliver the bridge either at the cost or in the time which it was supplied by the Americans. Within thirty-seven days of the receipt of the order, the seven spans of the Atbara Bridge left New York Harbor for their destination in Egypt.

The line south of the Atbara on to Khartum is already in course of construction. Thousands of the Dervishes who escaped unhurt from the slaughter of Omdurman are shoveling dirt at a beggarly pittance per day, and glad to get it. Openings for un-skilled labor are not too numerous in the Soudan.

Genres for this book