From Atbara I took a later train to continue my journey on toward Khartum. About one hundred miles south of Atbara we stopped at Shendi, where the Queen of Sheba is said to have lived. This is a station on the east bank of the Nile five hours or more from Khartum. It is a considerable town with railroad shops. I saw great piles of steel ties such as Captain Midwinter mentioned. [Illustration: The mud towers outside some Egyptian huts are used by whole families as cool sleeping places out of reach of scorpions. Sometimes mothers leave their babies in them while they are working in the fields.] [Illustration: The child so contentedly sucking sugar cane is, like four out of every hundred children in Egypt, blind in one eye. This is due chiefly to the superstition and ignorance of their parents.] Shendi consists of an old and a new town. The latter has been laid out by the British and has a park in the centre watered by the Nile. In ancient times there was a great city here, for it was the capital of the country and the supposed residence of the Queen of Sheba, who went from here down the Nile and crossed to Palestine. There she had her famous flirtation with King Solomon. The Abyssinians say that she went back by the Red Sea and stopped in their country; and that while there she bore a son whose father was Solomon and who became the head of the line of kings which rule Abyssinia to-day. The Mohammedans, on the other hand, say that the Queen of Sheba did not live here at all. They claim that her residence was in Yemen, Arabia, and that Solomon went there to visit her. The queen’s name was Balkis. As witty as she was beautiful, she gave the wise Solomon many a riddle which he was puzzled to answer. CHAPTER XIX ACROSS AFRICA BY AIR AND RAIL The airplane has completed the conquest of the Dark Continent. A two-months’ journey from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope has been reduced to a possible fifty-two hours of flying, each hour representing one hundred miles through the skies. Cecil Rhodes died hoping that one day his countrymen would finish the greatest of his African projects, an all-British route traversing the continent. His dreams were based upon steam, and compassed a route of rail and water transport taking advantage of the Nile and the Great Lakes. Those dreams are becoming realities, and to-day only a few gaps remain unfilled on the long way from the north to the south. In the meantime, aircraft has sprung almost full fledged into the skies, and the gasoline engine and the airplane have beaten the steam locomotive and its steel track through the wilds.