BLAZING A 5000 MILE AIR TRAIL ACROSS AFRICA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3442, 2 March 1920, Page 59

BLAZING A 5000 MILE AIR TRAIL ACROSS AFRICA.

The Great Story of tb« Making of an Aeroplane Route Across the Whole Length of Africa: Aerodromes m the Jungles.

"The Air Ministry's report upon the opening up of the British air route from Cairo to the Cape is a record of efficiency of which we may well feel proud. - Twelve months have sufficed to translate a bold conception into terms of practical utility The has yet to be accomplished, but a 6000-mue trail across the continent of Africa has been blazed aerodromes have been levelled. The Observer. "We live in an age which has so many •miracles that we are in danger of despising one and all," says the Daily Telegraph. "That a man has done what has been impossible throughout the history of man no longer suffices to win him fame. —The Milk and Honey Express.— "All down the ages the desert between Asia and Africa has been one of the great barriers of the world, dividing civilisations and religions and races. Now you may climb into-the 'Milk and Honey Express in Cairo after tea and- lunch next day .in Jerusalem. "Columbus was lost in the ocean for many a month before he found that it had a Western shore. In sixteen hours Alcock flew from America to Europe But we doubt whether any application of the new power of movement promises greater results than the scheme'which has been drawn up by the Air Ministry for an aeroplane route across the whole length of Africa. "A railway from the Cape to Cairo was one of the dreams of Cecil Rhodes; the Continent is to be served first by a means of transport far swifter than the land locomotive. The whole distance from north to south, 'by existing methods ,of communication,' which are, for many hundreds of miles, mere flesh-and-blood legs, amounts to 6223 miles, and consumes from two months to two months and a-half. —Cape to Cairo. — "The 'flying distance' is estimated at 5200 miles, and, supposing the pilot to work an eight hours day, he should cover "it within a week. Thus the aeroplane changes the very structure of the world, alters the value and the meaning of natural conditions. While our men of science, following the philosophers, question the ultimate reality of time and space, the airmen aro striking the chains of space and time from our lives. "It is realised what a vast change the last century has made in the powers. and the outlook of the human race? The men in the age of Napoleon and Nelson still thought of distance as Charlemagne thought, or Ceesar or Nebuchadnezzar. For thousands of years, throughout human history, the highest speed at which a man could move was the speed at which a horse can gallop. That was the unalterable condition in all attempts at communication on land, an 4 in* all that depends upon communications —war, commerce, government, human intercourse. It is less than a hundred years since we made the first advance in mobility of which history has any record, and now we can travel at a 'fair average speed' of a hundred miles an hour. —Filling in Africa.— ' 'Within the lifetime of many who are still'in full vigour Africa was still an unknown land. Turn to a map of 1850 and you find that the interior of the Continent is blank paper. The great lakes on the head waters of the Nile are not shown; there is no Tanganyika, the course of the Congo is guessed by a short and erroneous line of dots. The darkness was impenetrable. The Victorians knew rather less of Africa than Herodotus, and what they believed was hardly more credible than the tales which he learnt from Egyptian priests: 1 'Geographers, in Afric maps, With savage pictures, filled their gaps And o'er unhabitable downs Placed elephants for want of towns.' "As the fifteenth century revealed America, and the eighteenth- Australia, to Europe, so the nineteenth, Africa. ' Just before the century was half spent, Livingstone, the great pioneer, crossed the Kalahari desert and went on to explore the valley of the Zambesi. Before 1860 Burton and Speke, first of Europeans, so far as we know, visited Tanganyika. A few years later . Speke solved the age-old mystery of the Nile. In 1866 Livingstone began his last and hardest journey into the heart of equatorial Africa, and for many a year was lost to sight. In 1871 Stanley found him at Ujiji, on Lake Tanganyika, one of the most picttiresque moments in ,the history of exploration. "We shall not understand the significance or the potentialities of the air route from the Cape to Cairo unless we have in mind how short a time has passed since Africa was an unknown land and how much was done in those thirty years from 1850 to 1880. —Aerodromes in the Jungle.—■

"Now. we hear that aerodromes are strung but on a chain across the five thousand miles of Africa's length, so that the pilot may find a safe landing-ground in every two hours' flying or less. Some of these havens had to be hewn but of dense jungle, and for them many thousands of trees had to ho felled and the stumps dug out of the ground. For some of them vast ant-hills had to he levelled, and your African ant-hill may be 25ft' high and 40ft across. In Northern Rhodesia 700 natives were at work from April to August, and 25,000 tons of earth were removed. "All this vast work has been done since

the conclusion of the Armistice. In Africa, at least, the first year of peace has not j : been idle. It was done in spite of tsetse

fly, which made |it Impossible to use beasts of burden, in spite of white_ ants and mosquitos, which made conditions almost intolerable for humanity. Let us not stint our admiration for the energy of the officers commanding the three survey parties and the men who worked under them. —Khama's Own Aerodrome.— -. "Even in the, matter-of-fact official record picturesque incident forces itself out. In Bechuanaland, we are told, 'Chief Khama laid out a ground at his own expense in order that his district should be linked up with the route.' An African chief anxious to connect his tribe by aeroplane communications with* the white man's world! And Livingstone has not yet been half a century in his grave. Who can imagine what the newspaper of fifty years hence will be reporting as the latest events in Africa? In .our own childhood the popular books of adventure used to thrill us by stories of African tribes subdued by the miracle of a white man's glass eye or a white man's false teeth. Now we have them building stations for the white man's aeroplanes, begging the winged white man to choose their tribal ground for his coming to earth. —The Work of Our Race.— "But if their education has been swift, no less swift has been the march of African history. .It is only a few years since our troops were fighting on the Atbara, since all the Soudan was devastated by a brutal tyranny. The stricken fields of the Atbara, of Omdurman, are stages on the aeroplane route. It swings eastward to the Uganda Railwav, it makes an aerodrome at Ujiji, the historic caravan depot where Livingstone and Stanley met, which was German till the other day. It passes by Bulwayo, over the granite -hills where Cecil Rhodes 'lies buried 'in' the land he won.' It comes by Maf eking and Kimberley to the Cape. "The very names are a chronicle of the work of our race. Not the least fruitful of that work for the peace, the welfare, and the comfort of mankind is this new air route."