What! No Frontiers Left!

Manawatu Times, Volume 65, Issue 47, 23 February 1940, Page 6

What! No Frontiers Left!

A young man of our acquaintance recently was bemoaning what he believed to be the fact that all the world’s frontiers were gone—that there was no. place left where a man could adventure, discover and explore. “A man can’t go out and wrestle with Nature any more,” he said. “Everything has been done for him. The whole world has been conquered,”

A day or so later we came across a report telling of the feat of engineers in throwing the longest suspension bridge in Africa across the Zambesi River, below Victoria Falls; of the construction of a modem railway into the fabulously rich Altai Mountains of Mongolia; of the building of Norway’s picturesque Midnight Sun Highway, to take tourists to the Arctic Ocean; of the completion of a 260-mile pipeline from Colombia’s inland oil fields, over one of the ranges of the Andes, under the turbulent Magdalena River, and down to the blue Caribbean.

But the young man, as we have intimated, is still young. The world has just begun to build, to connect its far-flung uninhabited spots with civilisation—-and he may play a greater part in this pioneering than any who entered wilderness with rifle and axe, if he has a mind to tackle the job.