SPIKING DOWN THE FAR PLACES.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 10628, 3 December 1910, Page 3 (Supplement)

SPIKING DOWN THE FAR PLACES.

(By Frederic Blount Warren.)

Abbas Hilini, Khedive of Egypt, summoned a retinue of soldiers the other day and betook himself to Mecca, for the annual Mohammedan pilgrimage. He was the first of his family since the great Mehemet Ali, early in the nineteenth century, to undertake the journey—and he was drawn the greater part of the way by American locomotives over rails that came from Pitts-

burg, and in coaches of approved American design. He recited the orisons while walking seven times around the kaaba, kissed the black stone from the sacred waters of Zerazem, made the requisite trips to Mount Ararat and paid his tribute to the tomb of the prophet at Medina, where the murmurings of pilgrims at their devotions were heard to the accompaniment of steel bumpers pounding together; to the sounds of whistling airbrakes and escaping steam.' It was not like that in the olden days at Mecca.

■ The pilgrim goes to Mecca now as easily as. the New Yorker goes to Coney Island; it 1 has become: an excursion trip with the danger of assnult.rand robbery reduced - tos a -minimumwith all the perils of death from -starvation and thirst removed. The railroad makes this possible. -The Hedjajz line, .from: Damascus to Mecca and thence by way, of Medina, to Jedda and the ArabianSea, was Jiuilt 'by a German engineer for the Turkish Government, largely with American equipment, and is but one of the current bits of world conquest being performed by the engineering pioneers 1 engaged in spiking down tlio, far places. , Just' a few weeks ago an English contracting firm .punched a hole through I the Andes from Argentine into Chile, i traversing a couple of miles of rock and I dirt, and creating for the Trans-Andine Railroad a South vAmerican Simplon. When the railroad' is completed, the journey from Bueifbs Aires,' on; the eastr ern side of' the "South American continent, to Yalparaiso7 on the Pacific : coast, may be-.undertaken in comfort all the year round. The mule-back.trip over the mountains from Las Cuevas

to Caracoles will be _ abandoned, 12 ! days'in time and £l3 in money saved. Fifteen hundred men, working in eighthour shifts with Ho stoppage for Sundays or holidays, have been employed for four years to make neighbors of nations almost' Strangers to each other because of the great mountain barrier that divides the continent lengthwise. The explorations of Livingstone and Stanley and the wonderful resources of the; Congo have not compelled man's in-

terest to the extent of the project of the railroad to connect the Cape of Good Hope with the city ■ of Cairo, at the .Mediterranean end of the mysterious Nile. Cecil Rhodes, dreamer and commercial genius, conceived the plan to link two places 5700 miles distant with a band of steel, and 4200 miles of track, age are completed. > Tile building of the remainder is as certain as was the ultimate construction of the roads joining the Atlantic arid Pacific seaboards of the United States.' ; Immediate comparison may be furnished between this project and that portion of .the Pan-American railroad limited to South America, which measures nearly the same distance between Panama and Buenos Aires; engineering features are about the same; the country through which each road passes is of similar character, and the development promised for the future of each continent is enormous. As main arteries for travel and freight, neither of these lines could hope, to yield a profit; the essential features for.the success of each lying in the construction of branch lines to bring to the main systems the traffic from which will be produced the eventual dividends. Only a little freight will be carried from end to end, and the short haul —exchange of commodities between near-by sections that are now virtually cut off from each other —must be looked to as the revenue-producing source to sustain the huge undertakings. Already such a "feeder" is being constructed in South America. Two previous failures to survey and get the rails laid through the jungle for the Madeira and. Mamore railroad have not deterred the Brazilian "Government from remaining loyal to an idea dating from 1868, when the first concession was granted to an American Engineer. Lowland fevers balked the second effort in 1878, and only the increased knowledge of sanitation and means of immunising workers against tropical maladies has made it possible for the 2500 workmen—Germans, Spaniards, and 150 picked Americans —to escape dangers that beset the original road-builders. The Madeira and Mamore will tap the. heart of the continent and bring into touch witli oversea commerce a region that cannot progress without it, and open to settlement regions in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, which otherwise would > remain unknown virgin wilderness: The area drained by the Madiera River and its affluents, the Mamore being the principal one, is equal to the size of Texas, and, besides this, _ there are thousands o'f miles of contiguous territory in Bolivia and Peru. Fortysix miles of rails have been laid and for a good part of this distance trains are running, justifying the prediction made in 1868 by Engineer George Earl Church that a railroad could penetrate the region,- and promising to fulfil his other forecast that such a road would vie.Jd profits. During the second attempt to construct it, the total working force never exceeded one thousand men at any one time and only for a, brief period approached that- maximum, many of the laborers being Bolivians, Indians, and men from the Brazilian province of Ceara. Then the; operating outfiiT'consisted of one locomotive with one plaitform car; to-day the equipment comprises five first-class American engines and six moire are on the way. The train equipment amounts to ' 160 flat cars, 36 box cars, -60 ballast cars, two first-class and-two second-class passenger coaches. Then 'the line cut and surveyed through .the forest had a length ."of 320 miles; now this distance is shortened to about 200 miles, almost' all of it graded arid ready for the track of one-metre gauge. . Construction of the road removes one. of the few remaining "frontiers" on the South American continent. Modern methods of combating disease- rob such undertakings of their heroic phases,, making it matter-of-fact for men to invade jungle fastnesses, daring "perils" that are no longer perilous, because of the acquired knowledge that makes it possible to nullify them. There is no .real difference between the tropical jungles to-day and those of three decades ago; "the' lieat, humidity, and rainfall are the same;: of jungle feyer remains the same. The progress lies in mankind's added stock of knowledge of. the newer theories of - infection. Thirty years; ago the mortality in the construction camp was 23 per cent., . while with a. greater force at work, only four .white men have died in two years, and the hospital list: compares favorably with that at Panama. 'Of equal-importance as. educators are the railroads themselves; - Where-they penetrate-.'there 'is a hasty banishment of mystery ;- an overturn'of-superstition, a- routing'of ignorance. They are civilisersy almost ruthless in,their abolition arid - centuries-old -preju--1 dices;-- In-Paotingfu Prtrace, China, for. i instance;, where-'the • rhost'active anti■foTeign- feeling-prevailed, in= the year of outbreaks, the railroad has brought-a sympathetic and friendly feeling for foreigners, and -the line that had; its ;tracks tdhi up by'hostile natives about; a decade ago .is hailed ,to-day -as., a benefit to the country; Thousands of natives'" crowd; andrjostle-. each other oil the station platforms of all the Chinese lines', : 'which;-have- a total trackage of four thousand miles; ; The have brought - an- end of famine.--condi-tions in regions where thousands-for-merly died of hunger. Acting,- as . distributors of food products, the -railroads have' kept down prices so well that there is far less outcry about the-cost of living than is heard on every • haiftl | among our extravagant fellow: countryI men.

A well-known American traveller returned the otlier day from Cliangsba, the scene of the most- recent rioting. Chancshn has 110 railroad connection, hut is a city of the old style dependent upon the archaic methods of transportation —the river, tiie junk, the cart, and the Chinese wheel. "Build a railroad into the provinces where there are anti-foreign outbreaks, said the traveller, "'and there will be no more trouble. The natives vriu Deconie too husy to harbor hatred against the race that is making them prosperous. Recently I went into the immense silk

and cotton factories at Wuchang. The six hundred looms of these establishments are operated by children, some of them less than twelve years old, some barely able to reach their ma-

chines, but who operate skilfully these foreign contrivances and receive for their labor fifteen cash (one and a-lialf cents) a day. ■ "At Tangyang' I saw the- steel:.and\ iron plants, great mills covering one and a-half square mile in area, with.five blast furnaces and employing twenty thousand Chinese, the establishment being conducted under the supenhtendency of Chinese civil engineers. : When I congratulated the director of the works, Mr Yen, a . graduate -of an American university, lie-said: . ' • "'We have just sent a, shipload of pigiron to San Francisco and rpold it at a profit. - We will soon be in a position to supply: your .country!' and the rest of the world with steel rails, but just at present, all we can make are needed at home.'"

At one of.the Chinese military-schools the American saw two hundred young men go-through the manual of arms with the precision of West Pointers. During the manoeuvres lie was attracted by a. familiar bugle-note.- Knowing the peculiarity, of Chinese music, he asked: tlie commanding officer whether they had'foreign music. The reply to this was the wisest sort of a grin:

L "We have a fine military band. Would you like to hear some of the music?" | The first selection was "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night:'.' The second was "El Capitan." See what "civilisation" is doing in this particular one of the far places'! A moving-picture, man made a. trip through Nankow Pass with his picture : machine'fixed on, the front end of the first car. When he went to ask the superintendent of the line to put the engine at the rear instead Of the front of tile train; to facilitate his work,, the photographer met T. S. Chen, a graduate of Lehigh University. He and Clien had '"been classmates, graduating the same year..

The importance of tlie Hedjajz Railroad,. which has invaded the holy' places of Islam, is mainly religious, for it is intended only to aid Mohammedans in their pilgrimages to Mectia. Trade, as it is generally understood, will not ho catered to on the line, which was begun and industriously pushed under the regime of the banished Abdul Hamid. (3iice~eompleted, it will "rivet the grasp; of the Turk on the sacred cities and will .replace Derb-el-Haj, the famous footpath of countless "throngs of pilgrims that have made the journey to Mecca. From Damaspus, the chiefnortherly point, a line extends northward to Hamah and westward 1 to Bei-' rut, but the most famous of all is the new road that drops south to Maan, near' the great ruins of Petra, then bends to the south-east to pass the small oasjs of Tebuk, 145 miles south of Maan. Farther south it reaches Median Saleli and El Alia.

The first station of any importance from Damascus is Darna. There a large village is in view. The" station consists of several buildings, one of which is a large repair-shop, where many disabled locomotives may be seen awaiting repairs. There is a post office and an international telegraph office where messages may he sent in any European language, as well as in Arabic and Turkish. From Darna a branch, road runs westward through the wild and picturesque Yarmuk Valley, touching the Sea of Galilee at Memakh, crossing the Jordan and traversing the Plain of Esdraeloii to Haifa, on the seaboard. On the plain two stations beyond Haifa is Semakli, at the south end of the Sea of Galilee, or Lake of Tiberias. The road then proceeds up the wild gorge of Yarmuk. On emerging from this valley the road rejoins the main liiie;

Modern life is impressing, itself so rapidly upon these centres of the oldworld faith that electricity is now being used to light the tomb of Mohammed at Medina, and preparations are being made to utilise it in several instances at Mecca, in connection with religious exercises. But all this awaits the coming of the iron path 'that will/make more accessible the one spot of the world, for which the Turk will fight to the last. In .1908 when Abdul Hamid found it impossible to obtain infidel money for the railway project, on which he had set his heart, he turned the work over to the Turkish soldiers and, to the army's credit, the work has been well and rapidly done. Officers and 'men alike entered into the task with wonderful zeal. The country is not. difficult, from an engineering point of view, and progress, therefore, was faster than would have been the 'case had great bridges or lieavy cuts been necessary. Everywhere along Derb-el-Haj the advent of the road was the occasion for great rejoicing. Abdul Hamid gave generously from the civil list and the'people made free offerings as evidence of their goodwill toward the project, which will cost £5,000,000. The rolling-stock has been purchased abroad, with the exception of the "praj'ingear." which was built in Constantinciplc. Externally it resembles all the other passenger coaches, except that it .carries a minaret a little more than six .feet high. The interior is luxuriously fitted, the floor is covered with the richest Persian carpets, while around the walls are verses from the Koran, appropriate to the pilgrimage, done in letters of gold. A chart at one end indicates'-the direction of Mecca, and at the other end are four vessels for water to 1 be used for the. ritual ablutions. _ ,