The military line from Wady Halfa is the one built by General Kitchener during the war with the Mahdi. Constructed in less than eighteen months by the British engineers and soldiers, it is one of the most remarkable examples of railroad building on record. A large part of it was laid in the hottest time of the year and at the rate of one and a quarter miles per day, and once, more than three miles were laid in one day. Yet the work was so well done that heavy trains could travel safely over it even when making twenty-five miles an hour. It was built through a waterless desert which had never been mapped until the railroad surveyors went over it. During its construction the survey camp was kept about six miles in advance of the rail head. The road was built through a hostile country where there was constant danger of attack by the Dervishes. To-day the cars move as smoothly over those tracks as they do over those of Egypt, and give that country regular connection with the Sudan. There is now a train de luxe connecting Khartum with Wady Halfa equipped with sleeping and dining cars. The sleepers are divided into compartments about seven feet square with two berths to each. There is an aisle along the side of the car from which the compartments are entered, and each of the latter is large enough to enable one to have a wicker chair in it in addition to the berths. Every little room has an electric fan and is lighted by electricity. The dining-car service is good and comparatively cheap. The meals consist of a cup of tea and some crackers brought in by a Nubian porter at daybreak; a breakfast in the dining car at eight o’clock; a table d’hôte luncheon at one, and a dinner in the evening. In riding over the Sudan military road we stopped for a time at Atbara, where the Black Nile from Abyssinia flows into the main stream. Here is the famous bridge built by Americans upon orders given by General Kitchener. The contract was first offered to the English, but they were not able to build the bridge in the time required, so the Americans took the job and finished it. Atbara is now an important division point where the road across the desert to the Red Sea branches off. As we stopped at the station our engine struck me as looking familiar. I walked to the front of the train and examined it. Sure enough, it was a Baldwin, with the name “Philadelphia” standing out in the full blaze of the Nubian sun. Later on, when I crossed the Black Nile over the steel bridge put up by our builders, I felt that I was not out of touch with home, after all. I was being hauled by an American engine over an American bridge, though I was in the heart of the Nubian Desert more than a thousand miles up the Nile. The thought makes one proud of our American enterprise and mechanical genius.