INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 5 (Supplement)

INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA.

— «<* Under the title of "My African Journey,*' Mr. Winston Churchill begins in the March number of the Strand Magazine a. most inj teresting account of his recent tour in the : Dark Continent. The first section, which is fully illustrated, deals with the Uganda railway, and the writer, besides giving a graphic description of the wide belt traversed, touches in his usual incisive manner on the genesis and history of this muchdiscussed project. At one time the pet adventure of a Liberal Government, and subsequently an anxiety to the Conservatives, who took it over as a half-finished concern, perhaps the most romantic line in the world i has alternately raised the wildest hopes of its friends and excited the greatest alarm in its critics by reason of its costliness. Today it is practically completed, and a small but constantly increasing margin of profit begins to justify its existence. Mr. Winston Churchill "entered Africa, on a now famous tour, at Mombasa, which he regards as the future gateway of the Continent, a port whereof no man can see the future commercial limitations. The line commences here, under the guns of British battleships, amid tropical vegetation, " moist, tumultuous, and varied." Kilindini (or Mombasa, as I may be permitted to call it) is the starting-point of one of the inoit romantic and most wonderful railways in the world. The two iron streaks of rail that wind away among the hills and foliage of Mombasa Island do not break their smooth monotony until, after piercing equatorial forests, stretching across immense prairies, and climbing almost to the level of the European snow-line, they pause— and that only for a time — the edges of the Great Lake. And thus is made a sure, swift road along which the white man and all that he brings with him, for good or ill, may penetrate into the heart of Africa a.s easily and safely as he may travel from London to Vienna. Beautiful birds and butterflies flit from flower to flower, deep gorges filled by white streams in flood shine out far below the iron bridges; through glades of palm and creepercovered trees. Here and there at intervals becoming shorter every year are plantations of rubber, fibre, and cotton, the beginnings of those inexhaustible supplies which will one day meet the vet unmeasured demand of Europe for those indispensable commodities. Every few miles are little trim stations, with their water-tanks, signals, ticket offices and flower-beds complete and all of a pattern, backed by impenetrable bush. In. short, one slender thread of scientific civilisation, of order, authority, and arrangement, drawn across the primeval chaos of the world. The writer found the whole line, from the coast far up into the one-time wilds of Central Africa, ii* first-class order, thanks to the ceaseless energy of those who have worked while ethers talked, and his journey upon it makes an extremely readable jfirst letter describißg. hia African journey* - (